This blog comes a bit early, but it’s actually part of my plan to accomplish my goal of studying for classes. It has been about eight weeks since I picked three goals to pursue here at college. As the semester starts to wind to a close, I feel as though the quest to accomplish one of my goals is coming to an end as well. The other two goals could be classified as longer-term goals, so chances are that I will never fully accomplish them.
This blog becomes part of one of my goals because when I thought about how I could study for my classes in a new way, I realized that I should just do my work ahead-of-time. It seems like I’ve already done just about everything to better study for my classes, so I thought I should just do my work and study ahead of time, which in turn should make me more relaxed when it comes to be time for the actual class. If I have work to do, it is very hard for me to feel relaxed because I’ll always have the thought of the work in the back of my mind. Even though I’ve always thought like this, I was a chronic procrastinator all throughout middle school and high school just because I couldn’t get motivated to start doing my work. Now I have been trying to get my work done ahead-of-time, which has actually allowed my to relax and made college life all that much easier. I’ve realized how much added pressure comes with procrastinating and how it isn’t worth it.
This week instead of talking to someone new, I actually talked to somebody that I met a while ago at an open house here at Paul Smith’s named Mark. It just so happens that Mark lives about thirty minutes away from my house, even though that’s about a six-hour drive from Paul Smith’s. It’s always good to talk to people who are from nearby towns especially when you’re as far away from home as I am. It was nice because we could talk about all of the unique Western New York things such as saying, “pop” instead of soda, Tim Hortons coffee/donut shops, and sports teams like the Buffalo Bills and Sabres. It’s just nice to know that my two lives (college life and home life) aren’t so separate after all; that they can actually be intertwined. Talking to Mark made me feel more comfortable and willing to open up, because it’s just more comfortable talking to somebody that you can relate to.
When it comes to my goal of clearing my mind and focusing on positive things, I have made an interesting discovery. It just so happens that sleeping is a great way to clear your mind. We all know that disoriented feeling you feel for the first couple of minutes after waking up from sleep. That feeling is almost like an eraser, and the mind a chalkboard. The “eraser” wipes the mind clean of any negative thoughts and thus makes the mind into a clean slate. I discovered this while doing homework, because I tend to lie down on my bed when I do homework. Sleepy college student plus a comfortable position on a bed, equals a very high chance of sleep. I find that I usually fall asleep when I have hit a mental wall, or when I just can’t think clearly. I’ve found that after I wake up, I develop several ideas that I could never get myself to think of before. This is a risky tactic to use when doing homework, but if you have enough time to try it, I highly recommend it.
I researched sleep and if it can actually help to clear your mind, and little did I know that there was actually a scientific term for the concept. The homeostatic theory of sleep describes how your brain’s resources are actually balanced during sleep, which makes sense of the fact that you can get new ideas for an old topic after sleeping. The article that describes this in more detail can be found here (https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/sitnflash_wp/2011/08/issue100/). Now if only college students could somehow convince their teachers that there were only trying to comes up with new ideas by sleeping in class…
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