The academic junkie’s guide to micro-dosing success

After aeons of procrastination, that academic comeback you've been dreaming of all year starts to feel increasingly hopeless and impossible. The sheer depth of the exam dawns on you. If you're anything like me, this experience should sound all too familiar. It's only natural to want to avoid maintaining a rigorous work ethic year-round. However, to avoid despairing over a task that's become monumental through neglect, here's a hack that'll get you addicted to working.

First, abandon the mindset that you'll cover entire syllabuses in mere weeks' time. The more you delay and the nearer the deadline draws, the more intimidating your long-term goals will feel to you. With each passing day, you're making your task harder.

How to fix this? Start micro-dosing.

Most of us aren't in the habit of studying. Consistency can't be built overnight when motivation suddenly hits you at 3 AM, with everything reverting back to your usual tardy routine the next morning. The key is to build up to that level of academic commitment. 

Start by merely flicking through the syllabus of a subject on the first day. The next day, you may read a paragraph or two covering a subtopic. Continue this for a few weeks to a month. Such tiny amounts of progress may seem inconsequential, but the small increments eventually build up to a productive lifestyle.

As you slowly increase the amount of work you do, your attention span recovers at a steady rate. You'll begin to devote more and more time to studying and not feel drained. Every time you get used to a certain level of work, increasing it a little bit won't feel overwhelming and make you want to switch tabs to YouTube or pick up your phone. In no time, reading two paragraphs per session turns into consuming and digesting entire chapters in a day.

As you enjoy studying at a comfortable pace, you'll naturally want to increase the workload as you get used to the previous one. Unlike short bursts of stressful preparation a week away from the exam, this approach gives you a constant feeling of progress, making it more sustainable. 

Even if it's the tiniest amount of work, it's more work than you did the previous day. This feeling of advancing can be quite addictive, propelling you to work harder over time because you're chasing that dopamine hit. Setting small goals, like doing well on an upcoming mock or finishing a subtopic a week (as opposed to "I'll speed-run organic chemistry on the day of the exam"), and actually achieving them, is infinitely more rewarding than setting highly impossible goals and making zero progress because you're terrified of failure.

Et Voila! You've created a positive feedback loop of productivity, essentially becoming obsessed with studying. The process, however, won't happen overnight. It happens across several months of tricking your brain into thinking you're a nerd, until you legitimately become one. And there's no point waiting to start at a certain time. Thoughts like "I'll work at exactly 4 PM today" or "I swear I'll start at the beginning of February" are just different manifestations of procrastination that we don't recognise. The sooner you start, the sooner you can salvage those shattered dreams of becoming an academic weapon.

Aranyo Rishi Chowdhury is a student at S. F. X. Greenherald International School.