Don’t hate yourself into working (do this instead)
I see this again and again: as exams draw near and the urgency of the task finally overbears our tendency to procrastinate (hey, we’re all human), you whip yourself into a revision frenzy and start spending every available moment revising - and, when you’re too tired to revise, chastising yourself for it.
It is easy to understand where this impulse is coming from. First, there’s the realisation that judgment day is near and that, over the past year or two, you haven’t necessarily given your studies your best effort, so you are keen to make up for lost time. The connection between action and result suddenly crystallises in your mind and becomes eerily real: getting into your first-choice university or graduating with a first-class degree will depend on the next few weeks.
But there is also a toxic undercurrent: consciously or not, you try to punish yourself for the laziness of the months past. With the benefit of hindsight, you recall all the evenings you chose to vegetate with Netflix or play Fortnite when you could have been covering your bases with organic chemistry instead. So you push yourself ever harder, seeing suffering as a positive sign: if doing nothing felt so good, then working hard should feel like torture, right?
Wrong. While it’s true that you could have done more earlier, self-flagellation will eventually make you feel depressed and can seriously knock your self-confidence, which is not a good idea when you soon you have to prove yourself in the exam room. Crucially, it also makes you less efficient: in the short run, you may feel like hating yourself into a gruelling ten-hour revision marathon yields results, but it only takes a few days of this sort of thing to burn out and cause your body and mind to revolt. You either end up sleeping for eighteen hours straight or throw all caution to the wind and go out on a mid-week rampage, losing yet more time to a horrifying hangover.
Here’s what to do instead of trying to revise non-stop:
study in short bursts (no more than 90 minutes at a time) and take short breaks that involve getting up from your seat and, ideally, socialising: call a friend, or chat to the librarian. Their sympathy will make you feel much less lonely.
every day, do at least one thing that has nothing to do with exam prep: don’t stop painting, cycling, or doing whatever it is you do for fun - just reduce the time you spend on it. This will keep you sane.
show yourself some appreciation: while you may not have dedicated all of the past year to international trade, you’ve spent three hours on it now, so you deserve that brownie in the library café. The positivity boost from proportionate rewards has a snowballing effect that will help you to stay motivated.