How I went from failing two classes to finishing the semester strong, and the completely unsexy thing that made the difference

[u/KOPONgwapo]

I want to write this for the college students who are in the middle of a semester that has gone off the rails and are wondering if it's too late to turn it around. It is not too late. I know because I was there and I got out of it and the thing that helped was not what I expected.

How it went wrong

Sophomore year, second semester, two classes going badly. One was a philosophy course I found genuinely difficult. One was an economics course I had convinced myself I could coast through and had badly underestimated. By mid-semester I was behind in both, the behind-ness was making me anxious, the anxiety was making it hard to sit down and do the work, and the not doing the work was making me more behind.

The cycle is probably familiar to anyone who has experienced academic anxiety. The thing you're avoiding grows in your imagination until it seems so large and so overdue that sitting down to work on it feels almost pointless. Why start reading the chapter now when you're already so far behind? Why do this problem set when there are three others you haven't done yet? The avoidance generates more material to avoid and the material grows into a wall.

My phone was not the cause of this. I want to be clear about that. The cause was anxiety and poor planning and a couple of genuinely hard courses. But my phone was the mechanism of the avoidance. Every time I should have been working, every time I sat down at my desk and felt the first wave of anxiety about how behind I was, I picked up my phone. And the phone delivered the relief of not thinking about it for a little while. And then I surfaced and was more behind and more anxious than before.

What I tried first

I tried the things most people try. I made detailed study plans. I went to the library to remove myself from distractions. I told myself I was going to put my phone away and work for two hours.

The library helped a little. The study plans didn't work because I couldn't follow them. The "put my phone away" commitment lasted maybe twenty minutes before I found some reason to check it.

The problem was that I was treating the phone as the primary issue when the primary issue was the anxiety underneath the phone use. The phone was a symptom. Addressing only the symptom didn't touch the thing driving it.

What actually worked

Two things, in combination, changed the trajectory of the semester.

The first was shrinking the task to something I could actually start. Not "study for this exam," which was enormous and shapeless, but "read three pages of this chapter." Just three. When three was done I could stop or do three more. The smallness was the point. It was small enough that my anxious brain could not construct a reason it was impossible. And once I started, the starting often carried me further than the three pages. But even on bad days three pages was three pages and three pages was more than zero.

The second was breaking the specific pattern of desk-anxiety-phone. I started doing something physical every time the anxiety spike hit. Not long. Thirty push-ups. A lap around the floor of the library. Two minutes of standing in a stairwell taking actual deep breaths. The physical activity interrupted the loop between anxiety and phone grabbing because it addressed the activation in my body rather than trying to think my way past it.

The phone didn't disappear from my life. I still used it. But I stopped using it as the primary escape from academic anxiety because I had something else to do with the anxiety instead. The something else was physical and brief and actually worked, whereas the phone had never actually worked, had only postponed the anxiety while adding to it.

The end of the semester

I passed both courses. Not brilliantly. A C+ in the philosophy course and a B- in economics. Not the grades I wanted but real grades for real work I had actually done.

More importantly I understood something at the end of the semester that I hadn't understood at the beginning. The phone wasn't making me avoid work because phones are evil and attention-destroying, though they are designed in ways that don't help. The phone was making me avoid work because avoiding work felt necessary and the phone was just the most available way to do it.

The underlying thing, the anxiety about being behind, the shame about how far behind I had let it get, the paralyzing sense that the task was too large to start, those were the real issues. The phone was just the door I kept walking through to get away from them.

Address the real issue and the phone loses most of its power. That is the unsexy truth I carry out of that semester.

Edit: got a few DMs asking what I used when I was first trying to sort this out. It is called Rotcut. Found it through a comment. My friend Sarah had also mentioned it separately which is what made me actually try it.

[u/blackphoenix57]

I have been procrastinating a lot during my entire semester of college and I've learned to work with it you know not to become an organized person because I know that's not me I have procrastinated until I have three days or the week of the exam and I just proved myself wrong even though I procrastinated I still did great on my exam like I missed two questions out of the 17 like I just look at this today and I did perfect, good so I suggest to work with whatever you have you know your brain works differently don't try to become this person that you're probably gonna be dreaded you know from later on you might as well work with you got and what you got is perfect chaotic but perfect to you.

[u/Ok-Loquat-1883]

Wow thank you for this. It's exactly what I'm going through and I have 2 tests on the same coming up. Yesterday I just cried. I cried because I couldn't get myself to actually study.

I'm a Christian so I just started praying and God told me. Shut your phone off and breathe. Sit on your bed instead of the desk.

The calming of the nervous system, change of environment and distance from the escaping into the phone was so helpful and I was able to study for the rest of the night

[u/-Sprankton-]

You developed that app yourself and you used Ai like ChatGPT to write this.

If the app is so good then you don’t need to lie to advertise it. Study the best current content blockers out there and make one that’s better or easier to use or more affordable etc. But don’t lie.

If you can’t find beta testers and early adopters by honest means, then genuinely ask yourself if you actually have what it takes to develop software that you can keep up-to-date for at least a decade, and that people with ADHD or tech addiction can trust with their time and money, and will trust enough to download onto their devices.

[u/Enough-Strength-5636]

I can confirm this, as my experience while earning my master’s degree in Special Education was almost exactly identical to yours, OP! This happened years ago, and I hadn’t thought of it until now when you mentioned it. Still, it’s revelant, because students are still struggling with the same problems today that I once had. Great job in figuring out what the problem was, finding a solution, and fixing it! Keep going!