how do we bounce back?
For what might have been a gruelling semester for many of us, the holidays are a welcome break and a time to reflect and reset before the school year continues in January. It can be difficult to look back on a challenging period, such as exam season, and extract takeaways from what seems like it was nothing but repetitive studying and a consistent commitment to inadequate rest. However, despite the treacherous daily routine of exam season, or the countless hours spent studying this semester in the hopes that our marks would reflect our hard work, this time is important to evaluate how successful we were and why that may be. It is imperative to recognize that success is not a simple quantifiable measure, gauged by the letter grades sitting next to our courses on our school’s mark portal, but rather the sum of our successes in all aspects of our lives. >how much did we see our friends? >how well did we prioritize adequate rest? (I am guilty of letting this one slip pretty consistently) >did we go out of our way to try something new (intramurals, extracurriculars, etc) >did we exercise or dismiss our health as exams rolled around?
These measures of success and well-roundedness are often neglected by most and pushed behind the single quantifiable, objective measure we are told is an indicator of our success; grades. Grades are important. Especially if you need a certain grade to get into a school you want, maintain a scholarship or achieve a personal goal. However, they are not the only thing that matters in your university career. In nearly every interview I have listened to where extremely accomplished individuals or high-achievers are asked what advice they would give to their college selves, they say something along the lines of: “Relax a little, it will all work out. Don’t take everything so seriously.” I know we have all heard this kind of thing before, but it is crucial to internalize, because it’s such a fundamentally important concept to grasp before our university years slip away and we look back and think about all the incredible experiences we might have passed up on to put an extra hour or two of work into a test worth 5% of our mark in first semester of second year. Will it make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. That is not to say we should not prioritize academics, in fact what I am trying to say is the opposite. I think we need to learn to use our time more effectively to make room for it all. We should not have to choose between studying and getting sleep, exercise, social interaction, proper nutrition, etc. It is not a one or the other situation, nor should it be. We become so zeroed in on our academic goals that we often neglect everything else and in the end, that choice is often way more counterproductive than we are even aware of. I recently read an article entitled Darwin was a Slacker and You Should be Too. The premise of the article was that despite Charles Darwin being one of the most influential and accomplished scientists in history, he only sat down to work on his scientific works for three 1.5 hour periods a day. That’s it! The rest of the time he went on walks, ate with his family, responded to letters, spent time thinking, napped and enjoyed the outdoors (his life sounds pretty sweet, I know). Darwin’s scientific discoveries were illustrated in the 25 scientific works he published, including The Origin of Species in 1859, one of the most impactful and widely studied scientific works to date. All of this was accomplished with him working for no more than 4.5 hours per day on average! His choice to revolve his life around his work, but not his days is a model which should be considered the next time we default to thinking that the only way to get more done is 12 hours of non-stop work in isolation. Another interesting finding from this article was derived from a study aiming to draw connections between the amount of time spent working and productivity by plotting the hours scientists spent in the workplace against the number of articles they published. The result of the study was an M-shaped curve, with productivity peaking between 10-20 hours, and then steadily decreasing, illustrating that scientists who spent 25 hours in the workplace were equally as productive as those who spent five hours working. Even more shocking; scientists who worked 35 hours weekly were half as productive as those who worked 20 hours per week! Let us just take a moment to internalize this. 35 hours of work yielding half as much output as 20 hours of work?? Is this confusing to anyone else? As soon as I read this I started thinking about my most productive days and tried to extract trends or common threads between them. What I realized was that my most productive days were not the ones where I felt beyond burned out by the end, with my eyes closing in front of my computer, forcing myself to stay awake to study one more chapter. They were the days where I had an early start, a clear head, did not overwork myself, and kept up solid momentum once I got into the hum of good work, without dragging on that productive period until I could not muster the energy to continue. In a way it seems obvious that by keeping our energy levels steady our work would be better, but sometimes we just feel this need to overwork ourselves. It is strange. Why do we feel this pressure to burn ourselves out? I think a symptom of our generation is that there is almost a competitive nature about who is working the hardest, who is doing the most, who is the busiest. But what we forget to pay attention to is who is working the best. Who is taking care of themselves at times when everyone else is neglecting anything that doesn’t fall under their course syllabus? Our society has trained us to value hard work, but what about good work? When we go to the library for 10 hours, how much of that is actually spent being productive? 20%? 30%? 50%? What if we were to take calculated and careful breaks to reset our productivity cycle and actually give our mind the space it needs to internalize what we are studying instead of attempting to shove more and more information in which is slipping out of our brains as soon as we progress to the next topic. Speaking from personal experience, it is easy to get caught up in working hard, and not taking the time to step back and think about which kind of work is actually contributing to my success, and THAT is often the biggest mistake we make. We are so scared to try something different because we do not know what results a new approach will yield. But if we remain stagnant, and refuse to adapt and improve, how are we expected to study more effectively and change our outcomes?
Trying out new things can be intimidating when it feels like a lot is riding on the change, but continuing something that is not giving us the results we want and making no effort to alter our approach is way riskier than trying to improve.
All of that being said, it is imperative to view all of our previous experiences as a medium for a lesson. Once we begin to view challenges, difficult times and failures as a necessary means to learn something we can apply to future endeavours, it becomes much easier to live with these occurrences and understand their value. As defeating as it is to feel like you did not perform your best or could have done more, it is only a stepping stone which can be used to elevate you to a new level in the next opportunity you have to redeem yourself. We must use challenges and shortcomings as fuel to improve our performance and adapt our approach for next time. Studying in new ways and remastering our schedules is a positive step towards better outcomes and a more balanced life, and should not be feared for a lack of certainty of the results it will produce. Creating a balanced atmosphere for ourselves during some of the more challenging weeks of our year can be extremely beneficial for our mindset and our productivity. Do not underestimate the power of healthy breaks, exercise, good friends and random acts of kindness to make your day and studying infinitely better. Our minds need time and space to internalize what we are learning, otherwise we end up with jumbled pieces of information bleeding into one another, and never obtain a solidified understanding of the concepts we worked so hard to understand. Let 2018 be the year of prioritizing good work over hard work, and taking the breaks we need to maintain productive work periods and a more balanced life! Cheers to a new year, a new approach and an incredible opportunity to bounce back.