In the 2015 PISA assessment, the most predictive mindset is the ability to identify what motivation looks like in day-to-day life (including doing more than expected and working on tasks until everything is perfect).

– Drivers of Student Performance: Insights from Europe, McKinsey Insights

Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there”, or being in the present but wanting to be in the future.

– The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle

In the months preceding the battle which saw him become Shogun, Yoshi Toranaga, uncharacteristically sequestered in his castle, engaged less and less in daily affairs going absolutely silent for long bouts, even as his nemesis Ishido advanced more and more against him. Toranaga was awaiting to be indicted for treason and was expected to accept punishment, meted out by the Council of Five Elders voluntarily or to face capture by forces Ishido had gathered.

For a time, it appeared to everyone that the great and indomitable Toranaga had finally accepted limits or had lost his mind in being as passive as he was at a juncture where conventional wisdom would dictate nothing short of frenetic activity. He was like a slow loris when he needed to be like the falcons he so loved.

There was a reason for his reticence, a method to his madness. He was procrastinating strategically, a concept explained by Professor Adam Grant of Originals who suggests, deliberately putting off taking action, allows for creative solutions borne out of divergent thinking. For example, putting off composition homework might be conducive to idea generation. Procrastination also allows for what psychologists recognize as subconscious information processing, for example, leaving aside a question, when an answer does not readily present itself during an exam, to somehow realise the answer later on.

As exam season draws near, students might also feel tempted to procrastinate, however, not to access answers from deep within or to await the tide to turn, but because, quite simply, studying feels like a drag.

A very recent study, which captured momentary data of student emotion through hourly entries in e-diaries, found “students were in a good mood before leisure time and a bad mood before learning-oriented activities”. This led researchers to conclude, “students look forward to leisure time but approach studying uneasily” (Hamila et al., 2019). This finding related to periods of exam preparation.

Motivation is generally defined as what initiates, drives and sustains goal-oriented behaviours. At precisely the moment when motivation should peak, it seems to fizzle out instead because of negative affect associated with staying on task. Students begin to prefer work avoidance because they may feel like the need to stay on task is “driven by forces that are experienced as external or alien to the self” instead of being autonomously self-endorsed ((Levesque & Brown, 2007).

Another reason for work avoidance is the fear of failure because of limiting self-concept (how a student views his ability to successfully accomplish a learning task) and the attendant expectation of perceived disrepute – easier on the self to say “I’m lazy so I am not going to try” than “I tried very hard and found myself wanting”.

Also, skill mastery, entails formation of superhighways between neurons in the brain. However, as students learn to perform a skill initially, what exists in the brain is but a dirt path with weak signals between neurons and this among other things, makes learning a struggle requiring massive attentional resources (Sriram, 2020) which students on balance may decide is not worth the candle.

As a 2017 McKinsey report on student performance documents, even “self-identified motivation (wanting to be the best and wanting to get top grades)” may not be sufficient ballast against the creeping feelings of inadequacy in relation to task requirement or perceived loss of autonomy. The same report states, students who could sustain motivation in the humdrum day to day, were the ones who achieved the highest scores. Indeed, this was found to be the greatest predictor of success especially for disadvantaged students – “students from the lowest socioeconomic quartile who are well calibrated perform better than those from the highest socioeconomic quartile who are poorly calibrated”. Calibration in this report, refers to practising adaptive daily habits of highly motivated students.

Adaptive behaviour pertains to actions which lead to desirable outcomes such as sustained motivation and goal attainment. It is contrasted with maladaptive behaviour which incurs damage and is akin to self-sabotage. The somewhat nascent field of mindfulness and the tenets therein, promise effective aid to deal with stress inducing responsibilities.

Mindfulness is contrasted with other types of thought processes such as reflection and private self-consciousness (Levesque & Brown, 2007) and is put forth as ‘non-thought’ or ‘no mind’. To be mindful in this sense is to become an impartial and dispassionate observer of feelings and thoughts which arise in the course of task engagement. The key is to be inert to thoughts and feelings flowing therefrom. The secret known to Zen masters of old and which is now gaining mainstream recognition is that, problems and maladaptive behaviour ensue only when we latch on to debilitating thoughts and feelings. This diverts resources from productive activities to unproductive ones and intensifies experience of negative emotions.

When negative thoughts are not latched onto, they simply pass through the consciousness without overstaying their welcome. This, is the secret. Practising mindfulness then, allows total presence, sparing no room for worry, fear and any other counterproductive force. It allows the devotion of sufficient attentional resources to the task at hand.

A student who worries about not performing or deems himself not up to a task could practise mindfulness by not reacting to such thoughts. When it is time to revise, he might feel like running away because, he expects little progress to be made from committing time to practice. Being mindful here would mean he decouples focus on progress from practice and instead engages in the task for itself.

He might feel like he is being forced to study. Though studying is a responsibility and commitment to struggle, mindfulness would help him overcome this mental barrier by teaching him that something is only painful to the extent that he resists it. By choosing not to latch on to thoughts of leisure, he would be able to focus more wholeheartedly.

Stress is closely related to perceptions of the availability of time – less time, more stress. Mindfulness permits students to slow down and stretch out conceptions of time such that progress can be made in a way which to their mind appears leisurely.

It teaches, in the words of Toda Mariko, how to “watch the rocks growing” or to notice the “different sounds of the rain”.

The Brain Dojo