How to Combat Stress and Procrastination Using the Yerkes-Dodson Law
Have you ever left a major assignment until the last minute and found that instead of productively using that remaining time to adequately complete it, you find yourself unable to focus and end up not being able to get the work done? On the flip side, when that assignment was first assigned, do you normally put it off for as long as you can until you feel it is time to address it? Well, in either situation, your actions would be normal and adhering to the Yerkes-Dodson law in psychology. But what is this law?
It is actually a pretty famous law and something which I encountered in my sophomore year in college when I took a psychology course on memory and stress. An illustration of the law has performance on the y-axis and arousal on the x-axis, and the plotted curve is a bell curve or what would be considered a normal distribution. Basically, what the graph shows is that performance increases with an increase in arousal up to a point (the midpoint), and after that point, performance decreases. To make things easier to understand, we can substitute the word “arousal” on the graph for “stress levels.” The takeaway from this influential and insightful law is that stress is both motivating and debilitating. In the right amounts it is good, but too much of it is certainly bad.
By being conscious of our stress levels, we can potentially affect our performance in positive ways. For example, knowing that our performance is low when our stress is low informs what we can do to combat procrastination. This situation is akin to when we first are given an assignment or hear about a deadline for a future exam or paper. Since the deadline is far away, our stress is low, performance is low, and overall our motivation is low. So what can we do to actually start working instead of leaving it until it is too late? Well, that would be to motivate yourself enough to start the assignment. This could be in subtle ways, like reminding yourself how important this assignment is or imagining how much better it would be to start it now rather than later or even attending something like office hours to get a better sense of what you need to do. The main thing is that you stress yourself (i.e. motivate yourself) enough to start, and you will hopefully be able to avoid procrastinating later because of this. Remember, moderate levels of stress are actually healthy!
Another key example of using this law effectively can be in situations where your stress is extremely high and it is negatively affecting your performance. This could be a situation in which you put off studying for a major exam until the night before. Since you know from the law that performance is low when stress is extremely high, your solution could be to find ways to lower your stress enough to where you can perform at your best. For example, a lot of people find that listening to music while studying helps them to relax enough to where they can actually begin studying. Other strategies to reduce stress could be taking a study or exercise break, studying with friends, or even getting extra help from your teachers and professors so that the material is less daunting. The point is, when you feel like you just cannot get yourself to work under pressure, you should try as much as you can to relieve some of that pressure so that the barrier to working and working well is more manageable.
While these tips and strategies are probably something already intuitive to you, conscious knowledge of this law and the ways it can help frame your stress levels and their impact on performance can greatly help you in your future endeavors.
– Mentor Joshua
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