Aesthetic Studies Renewed Edition 1 | Renewing Motivation

Welcome back to Aesthetic Studies!

This is our official Studying Amino newsletter - it gets published once a month thanks to the hard work of our newsletter team.

written by Goldie

leadership changes

Starting us off with a small announcement - there's been a new leader in SA for the last few months! Goldie has ed our dedicated team of leaders to help moderate the community while others are busy.

new team

You may have noticed a small revival in two of our teams over the past few months… in an attempt to bring activity back to SA, we’ve reactivated some of our old teams: the Welcoming Committee and, of course, the Newsletter Team! Here are the newest of the newsletter team:

Helios

And the leaders of our new newsletter team:

Simon

Check out our newest welcomers here!

grateful challenge

Our curator Max has brought back the Grateful Challenge for this November! Want to enter? All you have to do is write a post stating what you’re grateful for, and why! Your choice doesn’t have to relate to studying - it can be anything you want.

pronoun titles

Ever wanted a title with your pronouns? With SA’s newest feature, you can get just that! No cost or other requirements involved - the titles simply allow other of our community to see your pronouns.

Hihi, Orion here! It's that time of the year where a lottt of people have exams and assignments (I have 3 I haven't finished lmao). But a common problem for students, especially in today's environment, is gaining the motivation to study. Today I'll be talking a little about how ,,I,, motivate myself.

1-urgency

I make sure to assert urgency such as "this task is due in a week" or "this task is 15% of my grade". By doing this it becomes consolidated and I know that it is important.

2-time

I put aside a time to do the task, and STICK TO It. Whether I do this by physically telling myself I can't have treats or games until I've done my quota, or by just going somewhere out the house to work on it, either works for me. Which leads me on nicely to my next point.

3-place

WHERE I work on the project has a huge impact. I usually go to a cafe with some earphones and work as I can get drinks while I work, and it's out of the house without the usual "life" distractions such as games, housemates, etc. I also don't take my phone charger which encourages me not to use my phone.

4-motivation

The actual method I use to motivate myself is the carrot and stick method. For those who don't know, this is a method where you reward yourself (ie for me I let myself play Pokémon or Fire Emblem) if you do good, or punish yourself (no chocolate cri) if you don't. The key to this is to make the punishment severe enough that you get upset by it, but not so severe that it impacts your daily life or stresses you.

Hihi, Orion back again for the reviews. Today I'll be reviewing… Google assistant :eyes:

Yep, that's right, that annoying thing you always accidentally open and say weird nonsense to. I'm not sure if siri does this too, but I know for sure on most android phones Google assistant can do this amazing thing: remind you when you stop your alarm!

This might sound silly but trust the process. My Google assistant (albeit not in English so the translations are a little weird) tells me every morning "I know you were playing on your phone until late last night but make sure you go to class". It also tells me the weather, my schedule for the day, and any custom reminders I set, as well as turning off DND mode so I can be bombarded by :sparkles: amino notifications :sparkles: (as if the calling out didn't get me up already).

The best part about this is, there's no need for extra apps. Just open your assistant and say "set a reminder" to tell it your schedule, and set your alarm routine from your alarms app in "assistant routine". I use this function to help me pack for work, to help me get up, to remind me to work on assignments and to remind me to sleep!

Hey hey! Wish here for the quote! I chose this quote because I believe it relates to the theme really well.

“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.”

—J. Pierpont Morgan

Hey, everybody! Goldie here to look over a few member posts I’ve seen lately covering motivation.

I usually have an interest in coping mechanisms for neurodivergents, as well as seeing how their brains work compared to neurotypical brains, so I’m going to focus on posts either using techniques that can apply for neurodivergents or that were aimed as motivational strategies for neurodivergents.

So, let’s get into it!

:cloud:

Gamification as a Mode of Motivation | BabyFrog

Firstly, a short but sweet post covering the topic of gamification - a motivational strategy that I am very interested in! This motivational strategy sounds incredible, designed to help those who struggle with, well… motivation and focus. The idea behind the strategy is to turn your tasks into little games - make your day seem like a video game quest. Why do this? The answer is simple - video games. For some, video games have the engagement that their brains need to stay motivated and focused. This strategy tries to bring the engagement from video games into real life, so that motivation for school work can be increased.

This post covers a few more ways to use gamification in your life - specifically, some apps that may help turn everyday tasks into games.

:cloud:

Neurodiversity and Motivation | The Shadow System

If you’ve ever wanted to see what motivation for a neurodivergent is like, I found this post gave a pretty interesting analogy, questioning motivation when you know you can’t focus to begin with, when you fear moving without controlling your movement, or even when you know you could blink and not be seen for months. The post also touches on some methods to help this lack of motivation - methods that help the Shadow System themselves, as a collection of neurodivergents, the key points mentioned being pressure and hyperfixiations.

While my own research interests don’t often lead me to find research helping DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) systems, I found this post extremely interesting, offering an insight to motivation that I hadn’t seen before.

Stay aesthetic and keep studying!

edits by wish