a soft guide to lock-in (pt.2)

| whimsy break, comfort zone and observations on my lil hypothesis

Well, well, well you know me, am back with another profound epiphany ahaha. So if you’ve read this article that I published last week, you probably know that I had been experimenting & testing out this lil hypothesis of mine, that by starting small and telling yourself to do the barest minimum for a task is way better than overwhelming yourself by taking on the whole task & trying to do it all at once. And I think I can actually conclude that it works! I genuinely dread doing my clg research projects, but this trick made the tasks look sm easier, instead of doing all the horrid research & data compilation in one go, I just told myself to read one market research paper, one article and just mark off one thing on my to-do list. To my surprise, I actually started enjoying the process, and went on to work for hours, I’ve also attached my last week’s study progress hehe.

app used: YPT

Next, I also realised that giving yourself that little “whimsy break” where you just recharge yourself before locking in, like for example, I love doing my lil silly dance to Lover Girl by Laufey, I also love watching some study vlogs, scrolling on studytok, reading a book, watching my fav youtubers, talking to my friends via voice msgs, before actually locking in and studying. It has genuinely helped my focus span so much because the moment you stop fighting your mind and instead start working with it, is when you enter a state of harmony.

Because when we deny ourselves of all the fun dopamine that our brain craves and just shut it down to focus on a less-dopamine inducing task, your brain is highly likely to get distracted and you start to procrastinate, and as the brain craves comfort, it would literally negotiate you out of doing that task. I love how our brain decides that watching a 3hr long movie about Schizophrenia is more comfortable than studying for 1hr, lmao.

ANOTHER epiphany (pls stay with me yall, am almost done 🥹), is that maybe, just maybe to-do lists are fun, like despite of the monotonous routines and predictability that most whimsical people like me hate, these things do make life a tad-bit less complicated, so yes I have made a to-do list for today and will continue to do so for a week to make conclusions. One of the tasks was to write an article here and well we did it 💪🏻

Anyways, thank you sm for reading sweetheart, just remember that your worth is never defined by your productivity, you’re an amazing soul no matter how many tasks you get done or how many hours you think you “wasted”. Sometimes, its okay to rest and allow yourself that rest without constantly being at war with yourself.

Remember you’re loved <33

xoxo

Shreya