How to Bring Self-control into Study Behavior: According to Psychology

Ms. Z is a very enthusiastic student who wants to achieve the best in academics and to be a good teacher in her career. However, recently, she began using social media often. She can’t even get 15 minutes away from her phone to focus on her studies. The continuous notification tone always creates a sense of urgency to check it. She made a study timetable but could not consistently follow it.

Even with much potential, her academic performance is getting low. Now, she is very tense about her career and confused about how to bring back focus to her studies. Many of you may face issues similar to those of Ms Z. Some of you may be stuck with social media, some lack planning or others may have impulsivity issues. Whatever the reason, bringing self-control to education is significant for your academic success and career. This article lets you delve into the concept of self-control and its importance in developing effective study behaviour. 

Read More: 5 Game-Changing Mindset Shifts for Success

Self-Control: Being Your Own Master 

Suppose you have to choose between two goals. One gives you instant gratification but has only low value. The other is an enduringly valued goal but needs patience and consistent effort. Which one will you choose? If you chose the second, can you be consistent throughout the journey? This is where you need self-control- the self-initiated regulation of one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions to choose the enduringly valued goal over the momentarily gratifying less valued one. In the case of Ms. Z, scrolling through social media is instantly gratifying whereas studying is not gratifying in the moment but has more value in the long term. In such conditions, you need self-control to choose the academic congruent responses over the academic incongruent responses. 

According to Psychologist Madhumanti Majumdar, Taking ownership of one’s behaviour is a crucial aspect of growing up as a student, as it empowers them to make better choices. Self-monitoring plays a vital role in fostering self-regulation and controlling impulses. By practising self-monitoring consistently through various strategies, students can build self-awareness, enhance focus and attention, and develop positive habits. Over time, this practice also enables students to identify the triggers behind their impulsive behaviour.

One effective self-monitoring strategy is maintaining reflection journals. Encourage students to write brief daily entries about what went well, what didn’t, and how they can improve. Another approach is creating a behaviour contract, where students collaboratively set goals (e.g., waiting their turn) and monitor their progress, with rewards to reinforce improvement. Constructive feedback from peers, teachers, and parents also plays a significant role in fostering behavioural changes.

Additionally, regular weekly check-ins with a teacher or counsellor can be highly effective. These sessions allow students to set specific behaviour goals and reflect on their progress, providing opportunities for consistent growth and accountability.

Read More: The Psychology Behind Self-control

The Process Model of Self-control 

Most people know the importance of self-control but don’t know how to practice it. The process model of self-control (Duckworth et al., 2014) shows how impulses are generated and can be regulated. The model involves a cycle of 4 stages — situation, attention, appraisal, and response.

• Situation: Situations are often objective and what differs is the way each person responds to it. Moreover, the same situation can elicit different responses in the same individual at different times. 
• Attention: You may have heard about selective attention. Even though there are so many things to attend to both internally and externally, we often attend to only a limited amount of features in the objective situation while ignoring others. 
• Appraisal: Appraisal is the subjective interpretation of what we perceive, and categorise them as either good or bad for us. 
• Response: The appraisal determines our response. Positive appraisal leads to approach response whereas negative appraisal leads to avoidance response. Then, the cycle repeats. 

Imagine the situation in which Ms. Z is going to study for her exam. The books are on the table, and her phone is also nearby. She begins to study, and suddenly a notification pops up on her phone. She stops for a second and looks at the book (attention).  

Then, she thinks about her dream of becoming a teacher (inward attention), and the necessity of being good in academics to reach there (appraisal). So, she set aside the phone and took her book and pencil to continue studying (response). Now, the situation has changed and she is closer to her studies. The cycle then continues in an academically congruent way.

Read More: Why Do We Self-Sabotage? The Psychology Behind Holding Ourselves Back

Strategies to Regulate Impulses Based on the Process Model 

The four stages of the process model offer four categories of strategies you can follow and a fifth category of shortcut strategies. 

1. Situational Strategies 

Several studies suggest students who sit in front of the classroom can engage more in academics than those who sit farther away. Some students prefer studying alone while some prefer combined studies. Research shows that studying with friends may be more enjoyable but studying alone involves greater concentration and effort. 

• Out of sight, out of mind: You can alter the situation in a way that motivates you to study and avoid distractions. The first thing you can do is to keep distracting things (eg. smartphone or television) out of sight while studying. You can turn off the notifications, use digital well-being facilities in your phone to regulate digital usage, you can set timers for apps, pause apps daily for a certain time, etc to control the interference of digital temptations when studying. 
• Create a deadline: make a contract to strengthen academic congruent responses. Creating deadlines for each academic work will help you to be consistent and put more effort into completing it.

Also, plan some rewards for yourself after the successful completion of a certain target of study. For example, watching your favourite movie after the completion of a module. Just like rewards, plan some costs for failing to follow the plan. When planning, make sure to choose rewards or punishments of medium intensity. 

Read More: Corporal Punishment: Is Hitting Children the Correct Way of Discipline?

2. Attentional Strategies 

After altering the situation effectively, you can focus on what you attend to. We often see what we look for. So you need to direct your attention to features that strengthen your study behaviour than academic incongruent ones. Diverting your attention from temptations enables you to resist them. This intentional selective attention helps you work towards your valued goals. Direct your attention to your behaviour. This lets you monitor your behaviour and understand deviations from valued goals. Self-monitoring helps you to be more self-aware and focus more on where you need to work. Mindfulness is an effective strategy to keep you on track and regulate mind wandering. 

3. Appraisal Strategies 

If you can’t avoid distractions, then you can work on the way you interpret them. Try to interpret the situation in an academic congruent way. Think about the relevance of education in your life and career, your identity, and how it enables you to help others. Expectancies of success can influence your performance. If students believe intelligence can be enhanced, they work hard to improve themselves. Moreover, to reduce the complexity of tasks you can break them down into smaller ones. This will help you focus better and improve your self-efficacy rather than getting stuck with complex ones. 

4. Response Strategies 

Here, you need to directly force yourself to respond in an academically congruent way and intentionally resist incongruent ones. This will be more difficult than the previous ones and more chance of not being effective. Fatigue and negative effects may also accompany this. 

Read More: How to Avoid the Trap of “Success Fatigue” and Stay Energised

Shortcut Strategies 

This involves three strategies — plan, personal rules, and habits, considering three stages by surpassing the appraisal stage. 

1. Planning 

Planning helps you link situational cues directly to responses. Create an effective study plan by setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. Be specific about your goals. Break them down into small steps and appreciate yourself for each success. Make the goals measurable – how will you know when you have reached them? Then, think about whether it is achievable for you. Your goals must be realistic.

Don’t go for unrealistic superficial goals. Think about the relevance of your goals. Goals need to be achieved within a certain time. So fix an approximate time to reach your goal. Sometimes you will be confused with so many tasks. In such situations, use the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize your tasks effectively. Some of you may not be familiar with it. The Eisenhower matrix involves four quadrants. 

• Quadrant 1: Quadrant on the top left corner. Note the tasks that are urgent and important. Give them the most priority. 
• Quadrant 2: This is on the top right corner, allotted for tasks that are important but not urgent. You can schedule these tasks based on your free time. 
• Quadrant 3: Place urgent but unimportant tasks in this bottom left quadrant. Don’t hesitate to delegate tasks to others. 
• Quadrant 4: Include unimportant and non-urgent tasks in this bottom right quadrant. Just let go of such tasks and save your time. 

You can create this matrix manually or make use of digital sources. 

2. Personal Rules

Turn your plans into personal rules. This helps you to avoid excuses and to be consistent about your plans. 

3. Habit

Developing healthy study habits is often important to achieve better in academics. Choose a study area and try to stick with it rather than shifting frequently. Place there only materials needed to study and avoid other activities in this area. Along with this, try to plan a fixed time for study. This will strengthen the link of this situation to study behaviour and avoid distractions. Continuously practising this will eventually become a habit, which is automatic and needs less conscious effort. Like this, you can convert your different plans into habits. 

Read More: What is the Importance of Studying Behaviourism?

According to Counseling Psychologist Anjali Seth, 3 simple mindfulness activities that can be used to maintain focus while studying can be

1) Grounding exercise- this exercise works in 5 simple steps. Focus on-

• 5 things you can see
• 4 things you can touch
• 3 sounds you can hear
• 2 things you can smell
• 1 thing you can touch

This activity works by activating 5 sense modalities.

2) Body scan- Regaining focus by doing full body Scan (head to toes). For example Position of their legs, back, hands, shoulder, neck and head. This activity will disconnect students from their automatic thought process and help them in focusing their study again.

3) Breathing exercise- Actively observing their breathing process by focusing on breathing experience (inhale and exhale). Experience the breath as it moves in the body through the nose to the chest to the stomach then stomach to the chest to the nose.

The SQ3R Method to Improve Study Efficiency 

Now you can focus on improving the efficiency of your study. The SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review) method is a popular way for this. This involves: 

• Survey: Firstly, you need to clearly understand what are the topics you want to study. Survey the material to be covered by going through headings, subheadings, summaries and conclusions. You will get a clear outline through this. 
• Question: After surveying, go to the first heading and convert it into a question.
• Read: Now, read the material to answer the question.
• Recite: After reading, engage in reciting the answer to the question. 
• Review: Lastly, review the material. 

You can practice this on each topic and can develop a better understanding of them. This enables you to think widely and enhance your memory of the content studied. 

Read More: Selective or Sustained Attention – What is Best?

Taking Notes 

Taking notes is an effective strategy for studying. Focusing too much on them while listening to lectures results in missing some key points. So it is better to take points or outline the lecture than write everything down. Revise these outlines on the same day which enables you to understand and remember them better. 

Conclusion 

Bringing self-control to study behaviour is important in every student’s life for their better academic performance and career. In this digital era, especially after the covid pandemic and lockdown, many students get addicted to social media. Continuous scrolling affects their sustained attention — the ability to continuously attend to a task for a certain time. They easily get distracted and these are affecting their academic performance even if they have greater potential. 

If you face similar issues, try to follow these. Firstly, you need to practice sitting behaviour. Begin small – allocating 10-20 minutes for continuous studying without any distractions. Take a break after that, and repeat this pattern. Once you master studying without distraction in this pattern, gradually increase the study time. Try to follow this, and increase your sitting behaviour as much as you can. 

Keep in mind the strategies discussed in this article and try to follow them in your own way. It’s okay to have setbacks, you may not instantly accomplish them. Consistency and perseverance are the key. Be confident in your own ability and continue your journey to your enduringly valued goal. 

FAQs 

1. Why is self-control important in studying?

Self-control helps maintain focus, resist distractions, and manage time effectively. It ensures consistency, which is crucial for long-term learning and achieving academic goals. 

2. How can I reduce procrastination while studying? 

• Break tasks into smaller, manageable chunks. 
• Use the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes of focus, 5-minute break).
• Set clear goals for each study session. 
• Remove distractions like social media by using productivity apps or aeroplane mode. 

3. How do I stay motivated to study regularly? 

• Link your studies to long-term goals (e.g., career aspirations). 
• Reward yourself for completing tasks (small treats or breaks). 
• Study with a buddy or join a group for accountability. 
• Keep a daily checklist to track progress and feel accomplished. 

4. How can I manage distractions while studying? 

• Create a dedicated study space free from noise and clutter. 
• Use noise-cancelling headphones or focus-enhancing music. 
• Schedule specific times to check your phone or social media. 
• Inform family or roommates about your study schedule to avoid interruptions. 

5. What can I do to build a consistent study routine? 

• Study at the same time daily to build a habit. 
• Use a planner to block specific time slots for studying. 
• Start with easier tasks to gain momentum, then tackle challenging ones.
• Ensure regular breaks to avoid burnout. 

6. How do I deal with mental fatigue while studying? 

• Take short breaks every hour to recharge. 
• Stay hydrated and maintain a balanced diet. 
• Include physical exercise in your daily routine. 
• Ensure you get 7–9 hours of quality sleep each night. 

7. What strategies can help me stay focused for long periods? 

• Set a timer and work in focused intervals (e.g., 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off).
• Prioritize your tasks using methods like the Eisenhower Matrix.
• Practice mindfulness or meditation to improve attention span. 
• Avoid multitasking—focus on one topic at a time. 

8. How do I avoid burnout from studying too much? 

• Set realistic daily goals and avoid overloading yourself. 
• Incorporate hobbies, exercise, and social time into your schedule. 
• Listen to your body—if you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a break or adjust your pace.