College doesn't have to be a choice between your sanity and your GPA. For too many students, academic success comes at the cost of sleepless nights, overwhelming anxiety, and dwindling mental health. But what if there's a better way? What if you could actually enjoy the learning process, retain more information, and still have time for a balanced life? Through simple mindset shifts and creative learning approaches, you'll discover how to work with your brain instead of against it. The result? Better grades with less stress, more confidence with less burnout, and a college experience you'll remember for what you learned—not for how much you suffered learning it. Our goal is to help students make learning a daily habit in a simple and fun way that reduces stress related to learning, and develop faith in their learning abilities.
Future You Letter
If you would like to encourage goal setting and time-management, the future letter exercise is for you! So how does it work? You will write a letter to your future self at the beginning of the semester, with your present academic goals and motivation. It could even include any goals relating to personal growth. For example, writing to your future self something you want to improve on throughout the semester, like time management or staying organized, but try to include something measurable like GPA. You should remind yourself to read the letter around the halfpoint of the semester, to give yourself a refresher and to keep working towards your goals. Episodic memory is a memory system that allows people to remember past, personal experiences in space and time (Tulving 1993).
So why would this activity be beneficial to a college student? This can help students by having an academic plan throughout the semester. When you have a plan, it gives you that security of knowing what to do; not having to constantly worry about what you have to do next, because the path is already laid out. It can also help you use your time more wisely by having you prioritize tasks that matter most. For example, studying for an exam instead of mindlessly scrolling or setting aside time for self-care. When you follow a plan, you can see how far you’ve come. Checking off tasks or reaching milestones boosts confidence and gives you a sense of accomplishment, which motivates you to keep going.
Five Minute Rule
Procrastination in this age of distraction is easier than ever. Many students struggle with getting started or progressing on projects or assignments when they have the time available to do so. Oftentimes, the dedication of time towards a larger task is perceived as overwhelming in the moments before starting. This sense of overwhelm causes a psychological roadblock, leading people to switch tasks, avoiding the overwhelming feeling of the necessary task. The Five Minute rule aims to help people push through their sense of overwhelm and to get started on their tasks earlier, reducing long-term stress of project/task “overhead.” All this rule involves is despite feeling overwhelmed, dedicating just 5 minutes to the work that would otherwise be avoided.
This prescription helps people deal with their large tasks on multiple levels. Firstly, by limiting the time at the beginning of the task, it reduces the overwhelming sense of the task. If you only need to work for 5 minutes, that’s more mentally manageable than dealing with the whole task. By reducing the perceived cognitive load, you can at least get started and not push the task off until later. Once this psychological barrier is removed and the work has begun, oftentimes we gather momentum, pushing past the 5 minute mark without even realizing it. By carrying the momentum of the working state, you can continue working until the momentum is lost.
Even if you stop at the 5 minute mark, that’s also okay! Because you’ve started the task, you’ve started working on the neural connections that are required to complete the task. When exposed to information and then left, the information can “incubate” in the mind, then when you return to the project, there may be new ideas, thoughts or methods for continuing the work (Grant, 2016).
By repeatedly accomplishing your goal of working for 5 minutes (instead of procrastinating), you also begin to change your habits and your self-concept. When you continually add experiences to your memory of accomplishing the work you set out to do, your self-concept begins to shift away from how you may view yourself as a procrastinator. This shift in self-concept acts as a sort of wise intervention (Walton, 2014) making it recursively easier to work on projects in the present and future.
Hype Journal
Self-concept and self-identity are very closely linked. Self-concept is essentially how you view yourself in the past tense, what do you tend to do? Self-identity is essentially how you view yourself in the future, what do you envision yourself doing? When there is a large separation between who you have been and what you would like to become, it can become extremely difficult to have a sense of coherence between the past, present and future you. Coherence is extremely important for well-being (Vanaken, 2022), but coherence and correspondence are two sides of the same coin. One problem that can occur in this system is that we humans have a strong negativity bias (otherwise called persistence in Ditta, 2018). This negativity bias can affect our self-concept which then affects our sense of coherence as well as our sense of autonomy and competence (Self Determination Theory) for making self-identity into reality.
The purpose of the Hype Journal is to highlight the constructive things we have done throughout the day, no matter how big or small. This way, we have a correspondent record that battles our negativity bias. By continually adding entries to your hype journal, you can celebrate the good work you’ve done in closing the gap between your self-concept and your self-identity.
The Study Buddy Activity: Leveled up
If you’re a social person and like to be with others rather than yourself, the Study Buddy activity is great for you! The Study Buddy activity is the task in which a student finds a study partner to check in with regularly, in order to keep each other accountable. We incorporated 7 different challenges throughout the week that students repeat for 30 days to create more interaction between the students and to increase studying abilities. Studying with a partner can make studying both social and fun, which can make the process feel less like a chore and more like a collaborative effort, while at the same time increasing your creative thinking and accountability. When you commit to studying with another individual, you are less likely to slack off and not do your work, because you have another person holding you accountable. It creates almost a sense of obligation to study because of your partner. Beyond accountability, working with a partner can enhance your creativity. Talking out ideas and seeing different perspectives can help you understand the material better, and come up with different solutions to solve a problem or answer a question.
Creative cognition is characterized by goal-directedness and is supported by directed attention (Benedek & Fink 2018). Working with another student facilitates goal-directed behavior by working together on an assignment. To expand, working with another student can encourage directed attention by holding each other accountable and more importantly, having a shared focus. When you and your partner are solving a problem or studying together, you’re both focused on the same material which would help keep your mind on track. One mode of increasing creativity and problem solving is by working with others. Steven Johnson in a Ted Talk emphasizes the importance of collaborating with others in order to facilitate the generation of new ideas (Johnson 2010). The Study Buddy challenge allows students to collaborate with another student in order to come up with more creative ideas to help problem solve.
Study Habit Tracker
Study Habit Tracker
The reason why this Study Habit Tracker really works is that it's grounded in how our brains really learn and retain. When we build daily routines like intensive study blocks, note review, and problem practice, we're constructing the brain's information storage and retrieval capacities. Research suggests that being consistent and present allow our minds to better code memories (i.e., such as Benedek & Fink talk about) and connecting what we learn in the present moment to what we already know leads to it being remembered longer (Van Kesteren & Meeter). Even doing something as simple as taking time at the end of the week to look back uses our autobiographical memory—so we're not just remembering what we've learned, but how and why it mattered to us (Conway, Tulving).
What's also powerful about this tracker is the extent to which it makes us take a step back and think about our own learning. That reflection component on a weekly basis is not a nicety exercise—it actually creates motivation and awareness, which are the foundations of sustainable success (Walton, 2014). And by alternating the kind of work we conduct throughout the week—reading, problem-solving, review—we're developing a comprehensive knowledge base which supports creative thought as well (Kenett, 2024). So, though it may seem like such a simple device, this tracker is packed full of learning more smartly and remembering more stuff.
Student Survival Playbook: All activities into one book
Click the Link Below to Access!
About The Authors!
Ryley Chang
My name is Ryley Chang and I am a Junior majoring in psychology. I am also a student-athlete, playing for the tennis team here at Pacific. Being in this class has bettered my understanding of memory and how it works. Working on this project has helped me create better study habits throughout the semester. I can see how easy it is to fall to procrastination as a college student, having a lot of responsibilities. This project helped me break the bad study habits that I had, in a more light-hearted and interactive way, rather than something like an intense study schedule. By trying out these study tactics, I made studying less of a chore and more fun.
Tori Nemoto-Oshita
My name is Tori Nemoto-Oshita, and I am a Junior majoring in psychology. This class has helped me learn more about how we engage, learn, remember, etc., which has helped me work on this project. Being in college can be difficult to balance our time management, making it hard for us to study sometimes. This project has helped me find creative ways to make studying fun and simpler. This project also allowed me to work with new people and see different perspectives on these topics, which was very insightful.
Barry Sherrill
My name is Barry Sherrill and I am senior majoring in kinesiology at Pacific University. This class is important to me and my future career options as our psychology is closely tied to what we say and do. In the movement domain, psychology is still extremely important.
Teegan Skjonsby
My name is Teegan Skjonsby and I am a Sophomore at Pacific University. I am also a student-athlete on the Volleyball team here at Pacific. This project has helped me gain so much insight and knowledge about my peers and myself as a student while helping me balance my social, athletic, and academic lives. I believe this project can also help students balance their live while developing positive learning habits to build lasting confidence and essential life skills. By transforming learning into enjoyable daily routines, we can help students replace procrastination and self-doubt with genuine progress.
Benedek, M., & Fink, A. (2019). Toward a neurocognitive framework of creative cognition: The role of memory, attention, and cognitive control. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 27, 116-122.
Conway, M. A., Singer, J. A., & Tagini, A. (2004). The self and autobiographical
memory: Correspondence and coherence. Social cognition, 22(5: Special issue), 491-529.
Kenett, Y. N. (2024). The role of knowledge in creative thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 1-8
Rubin, D. C. (2005). A basic-systems approach to autobiographical memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(2), 79-83.
Tulving, E. (1993). What is episodic memory?. Current directions in psychological science, 2(3), 67-70.
Van Kesteren, M. T. R., & Meeter, M. (2020). How to optimize knowledge construction in the brain. npj Science of Learning, 5(1), 5.
Walton, G. M. (2014). The new science of wise psychological interventions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23 (1) 73-82. doi: 10.1177/0963721413512856
Steven Johnson (2010) Ted Talk “Where good ideas come from”