Rituals

Today I was thinking about rituals.

It's a known fact that people put themselves in a specific mindset before they start doing their thing.
Kai Greene does a 12 minute warm-up in which he connect his mind with his muscles before training.
I also do a warmup in where I row and try to feel all my muscles working before I start lifting.

Study wise I know I've had different rituals throughout the years but I now think I've found the best one for me. I go to a quiet special place. Before I enter the doors i turn my phone off, as soon as I sit down I block Facebook and turn Skype off. This place is sacred and under no circumstances is any connection like that allowed in here. If I need to I have to exit the room. I can get very deep into my studies here and I use my time very efficiently.

As a student you have this low-level guilt feeling that you should be studying all the time but as I said in my previous post that time to recover is equally important. I know think that if you treat yourself as a company and that you have a designated study time and designated off time then you're fine. You don't have to feel this low level guilt.

Then off course when you've been in study mode for many hours you got to be able to get back into "normal mode".

Sleep deprivation

Another rant about 4th year (which is soon over).

I've tried to cut down on sleep, going on 5-6 hours because I thought I had the capacity to do so.
And I could...but with a price.

That price is:

* Becoming very tired during mid day and not being able to focus on what the teacher says (way to tired to do notes)
* Low motivation to study and get good grades
* Low level irritation

It sucks and if there's anything I could redo it would be to get adequate sleep in. But there's no way of re-doing things so for the 5th and final year I'll make sure to prioritise sleep.

We've been going for 10 months straight with only one 2 week break in the beginning, exams are up in a month from now.
It has been very intense. Intense to the point that 8 people's relationships in our class has broken down.
Although I consider myself very lucky to have the opportunity to go through this hardship now and leaner so much from it. Also lucky to be able to live in such a great part of the world and be able to work towards my dream every day. So much has happened during this year, it has changed my life in many ways.

After exams I'm off to India, two weeks of work and after that I'm going to recuperate in Thailand for two weeks before coming back to wrap the final year up. I'm looking forward with a big smile on my lips!