How can I stop procrastinating?

The only way that you will stop being afraid of these subjects is to sit down and take a good look at them

Our sixth form head teacher always used to say this terrible phrase "How do you eat an elephant…in small chunks!" (I mean I don't eat elephants at all but it's a figure of speech so any who )

That's a great phrase! I find the only way I get around it is to not put so much pressure on, just pick up a book with the intention of reading for 1-2 mins. If that's all you do, it's more than you would have done. If you occasionally do a bit more by accident, that's cool too.

Ah,alright!Thank you!So I should read my books for a minute or two and if I do this frequently,I'd surely get the hang of reading them.

Yeah, it's psychological. If you think about having to sit down for hours and learn everything, it's too much. But if you just read a page at a time, you get started, learn a little something. It just makes it that bit more palatable, and the chances are, once you've started you'll end up doing more anyway.

Don't fight it, go with it. If you fight it, it'll always be an uphill struggle. I always struggled with it, until I reframed the problem - I wasn't procrastinating enough. Take it to the next level: Procrastinate from procrastinating.

(Also techniques like the pomodoro method are great!)

Wait what!Procrastinate from procrastinating?I always try to fight it but after a couple of days,it just kills me!

Of course it kills you! It's your urge to procrastinate. You're fighting your nature, trying to re-wire your brain. Fixing something like that takes years.

Let me guess a few things about your current situation. Firstly, you expect studying to feel naff - then unsurprisingly it is naff. Secondly, you're constantly considering whether to stop or how long you have left - this saps your will power, which is a finite resource. Thirdly, you have solidly framed your choices as being between studying (not-procrastinating) and relaxing (procrastinating). These things are all holding you back.

There are some things we can do for hours and hours - things that ought to feel naff, but we get by seemingly without a problem. Somehow I manage to sit in a chair at work 8 hours a day. I've done this so much that I'm just used to it - conceptually I know it's naff, but I don't feel it so much. The more studying you do, the more you'll feel the same way about it. But it is at root all about mindset.

Being able to do the things you want to do is really all about framing the choices you make. Everyone has a competition of things they want to do - in your case it's relax versus study. When you're not studying in order to relax, it's called procrastinating. But what if you're putting off relaxing in order to study?

If you can just frame studying to be procrastinating from relaxing, this will give you a greater freedom in choosing which activity you're going to do. If you can find some way to convince your mind that studying is the easier, more attractive option, you will be able to do it without problem.

Maybe that's very hard. I honestly don't know how practicable this advice is to other people - I spend a lot of time trying to understand myself and finding ways to trick myself into being more successful. Stuff like this is how I like to think about things. Meta-procrastination's almost a joke, but if you can see both options as procrastinating, you can feel more free to choose the one over the other.