Dear Crystal:

Congratulations! You have successfully completed the Finals Week from Hell (FWH) program. Along with several of your accomplished peers, you have fulfilled the basic requirements to be considered an FWH scholar; over three days, you have endured two final exams and one research paper, relying on only eight hours of sleep total. You should feel especially proud of your accomplishment, as we accepted only the most diligent procrastinators into our program. Additionally, I am pleased to inform you that your exceptional performance qualifies you for the FWH honors program. Our faculty have recommended you based on your extraordinary motivation to sacrifice sleep two nights in a row. We fully believe that you demonstrate the highest virtues of a FWH scholar: unrestrained procrastination coupled with disciplined and high threhold for self-torture. As an FWH honors scholar, you will commit to upholding the virtues of FWH throughout your academic career and other aspects of life. You will also educate and spread FWH values to the next generation of promising scholars. We hope that you will appreciate and take full advantage of your exclusive membership to the FWH honors community.

Wishing you the best of luck in everything that you hope to accomplish (you will need it),

The Finals Week from Hell Committee

We are currently accepting nominations for the FWH scholars program. If you would like to nominate yourself or a friend, please leave a comment with:

Name:

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Reason for nomination:

Sunday morning during brunch, two Starbucks employees lugging a cooler came to Stern Dining and passed out free Starbucks Doubleshots. I quickly gulped down my cinnamon drink – it tasted not dissimilar from those starbucks mocha drinks in the glass bottles. That Sunday was the most productive day of my college life. With very few distractions, the energy and focus I experienced allowed me to finish my entire eleven page Chinese Lit paper in one day. By the time I finished, I was dead tired (from having woken up at 7am that day), and decided to go to bed. Only, I could still taste  the doubleshot in my mouth and feel its satiety in my stomach. Determined not to waste any more time with insomnia, I grabbed my book and started on my research project, reading until 4am. The next morning, I woke up naturally at 7am and still felt the caffeinated effects ( I didn’t even fall asleep in physics). Finally, I crashed at about 11am and slept through lunch.

Man, that doubleshot stuff really works, or maybe I’m just a sucker for Starbucks’ promotion (O! poor victim of commercialism!) I bought a pack at 12 at Costco that evening and right now am at the library with my reading to my right and a can of doubleshot to my left. It really does give you a huge immediate boost of energy, but please only use it in emergency situations. I’m no expert, but I doubt that much caffeine can be good for your health.

They should pay me to be a Starbucks spokesperson or something…

M/PT/ST: 2/5/2

Two maxims you’re probably tired of hearing:

Days are just so much better when you start them with breakfast.

Days are also so much better when you start them with a smile.

Well then, days are better squared when you start them with both! Introducing Happy Breakfast, the most pleasant way to get those facial muscles working. One of my goals for this quarter has been to eat more breakfast, particularly before my morning classes from 9 to 11. I was pretty good about it for the first few weeks, I would drink a hot cup of high caffeine tea (sometimes when the juice machine wasn’t gross and completely watered down, I would have OJ), and make myself a toasted sesame bagel with scrambled eggs and tomato. Our dining hall provides free New York Times, so if I was feeling anti-social I would grab a copy and let myself feel educated. Sometimes if I was bad, I would be doing my reading for Chinese lit class. No matter what, eating breakfast nice and slowly instantly increased my alertness and mood, which transferred the smile from those disgusting red dining hall plates and onto my face for the rest of the day.

However, for the past few weeks my sleep deprivation has usually resulted in me skipping my 9 am class and then falling asleep in my 10am class. Either that, or my growling stomach keeps my eyes fixated on the clock and completely prevents me from learning anything. At this rate, I might as well not have gone to class at all.

Although it is 3am right now, I promise myself that I will wake up in time to eat breakfast and make it to my 9 am class. And if I don’t keep my promise, then I promise an embarassing story to share next time.

Mood: 3 have been in a very bad mood recently, easily incited and quick to snap at others. I advise to stay out of my path,

Physical tiredness: 3 even though slept 11 hours last night and took a short nap today, oversleeping makes me feel groggy

Spiritual tiredness: 3 again, PT overspilling into ST so much so that I can’t distinguish the two

I played a lot of video games as a kid. Whenever I lost all my lives, a screen would display, “YOU FAILED” accompanied by a strong voice announcing the same phrase. If my life were a video game, I would imagine that screen displaying right now.

You’ll notice that for the past week I have been a little negligent about writing. That’s because I have completely and utterly failed  every single goal I had set. Let me just list them in order:

Academics: I had said that I would be more diligent about learning over memorizing, yet due to my procrastination, cramming is all I can ever manage in order to get by. Friday morning I had a midterm for human physiology, which I chose to not start studying for until 2 days before. The result: spending every spare moment, and including some not spare ones (try biking while looking at notes), forcing tidbits of information into short term memory, and counting on a system restart once the test was over. I am interested in medicine; human physiology should be the most interesting and relevant subject to me. If I can’t even motivate myself to learn this, how can I ever learn anything? This week, I have to do the same for a physics midterm. Which brings me to my next goal…

Sleep: This week I have been running on consecutive days of minimal sleep. I’m one of those above average people who need more than 8 hours of sleep a night, yet I’ve only averaged 5 this week. Now, my sleep is so messed up that I am sitting in my bathrobe in the dorm lounge at 4:27 AM writing this blog, because despite my extreme tiredness, I still can’t fall asleep. Looks like my insomnia is kicking back in, most likely stress-related…

Exercise: Last weekend I pulled a leg muscle while playing squash, and for two days it hurt to walk. I used that as an excuse at first to doge my exercise routine, promising myself that as soon as I felt better I would work out again. Later, when I had too much work to do, I skipped again. The sleep deprivation gave me more excuses. However, I can already feel the consequences: my mood is worse than usual, I feel more tired, and am less productive and unable to focus. This weekend I should make up for it by re-starting my routine.

Vegetarianism: No, I have not broken it. I have friends placing bets on how long I will last (shoutouts to those who placed 100$ on me staying this way forever!). I must say, some friends have already lost. However, I don’t feel like I am getting what I am supposed to from this diet. As mentioned earlier, I feel extra-hungry, and rely on unhealthy, albeit meat-less, meals. I keep meaning to visit the nutritionist but never find the time.

From now on in my posts, I will keep a tracker of three things: Overall Mood, physical tiredness (short-term fluctuations), and spiritual tiredness (more long-term). For sake of clarity, I will spend a moment to detail what each reading means. 10 means best (better mood, less tired, etc.), 0 means worst.

Mood:

0 – suicidal

1 – severely depressed

2 – slightly depressed

5 – neither happy nor sad

7 – quite happy

10 – best day of my life

Physical tiredness:

0 – I’m going to collapse

3- lethargic

5 – not too tired, but not too energetic

7 – quite bubbly

10 – I just overdosed on caffeine

Spiritual Tiredness:

0 -I want to shut myself up in a Buddhist temple and take a break from life

3 – I need a vacation

5 – no feelings

7 – I have energy to move forward with life

10 – I have no idea what this state would look like, must be heaven.

I am so tired of being tired.

Mood: 6 These few weeks are the weeks from hell: exams or large papers due every week, and they just keep on coming. The only reason this score is positive right now is because I just came back from Viennese Ball and got to wear my new 300$ dress. Also, I’m going ice skating tomorrow!

Physical Tiredness: 1 Too little sleep + 5 hours of waltzing + insomnia

Spiritual Tiredness: 3 School + Med School apps + being unsure about life

It is 6:25 AM. I think now is an appropriate time for me to write about sleep and procrastination. Forgive me if my writing becomes incomprehensible..

College students never have good sleeping habits, but mine are the worst. Generally I have a hard time falling asleep, but during times of stress I become an insomniac. Lying in bed, unable to fall asleep, one’s thoughts tend to run the gamut of possibilities: memories good and bad, dreams and worries for the future, plans for the next day, crazy ideas, sex fantasies, but the one that I tend to turn most to is the failure of my life. I guess I am like an electron who’s natural energy state is that of negative thoughts. During the day I am pretty good at forcing myself to think positively, but when night casts her spell, my natural pessimism takes over. I kick myself for not having taken a sleeping pill earlier, but decide it’s too late to do so now. Every so often, I take a look at the clock, calculate how many more hours I have to sleep if I were to fall asleep then and there, think about how early I have to wake up the next day for class, and then get super stressed out, exacerbating the problem. Then the panic attack kicks in; I start to notice my heart beating faster, my neck muscles tensing up. Suddenly, I feel like a fist is clenching my fish and every muscle in my body is constricted. I start taking quick, shallow breaths. I look at the clock again, and kick myself harder for not taking the sleeping pill the first time I kicked myself. Later, I will kick myself again for this instance. And eventually I fall asleep after wasting six hours lying in bed, don’t wake up in time for class, and the cycle starts over again the next day.

Two weeks ago, I fixed my sleeping schedule by taking sleeping pills around midnight and forcing myself to wake up at 8 no matter what happened. After a week, I could get to sleep by myself around midnight without any aid, and wake up on time too! However, it’s hard as a college student to have a “normal” sleep schedule. You miss out on parties, social activities, and late night bonding with your dorm-mates. A week later, I slipped up and allowed myself to play card games with friends from midnight to six am, something I hadn’t done since my freshman year. I can’t blame myself and I don’t regret it, because it was a lot of fun, but now I am suffering the consequences: sleeping late and waking up early for class, followed by sleeping early and waking up late to make up for it.

So from now on I am going to improve my sleep schedule and maintain it. And if I don’t, I will post it on this blog and everyone can leave comments about how horrible I am.

Some rules/strategies I am going to follow:

Develop a calming evening routine to calm down and allow time to reflect over the day; (yay, this will allow me to simultaneously work towards my goal of flossing more!)
*At first, if I don’t feel tired around 11, take a sleeping pill, which will have me asleep by midnight. Try to get off of these as soon as possible because they leave me a bit drowsy in the morning.
*Wake up at 8 no matter what, even if I slept at 6am the night before. No matter what, do not nap during the day. One crappy day will be made up for by a week of good sleep.
*Reward myself for waking up early with a nice breakfast.
*NO CAFFEINE after lunch. No sugary drinks after dinner. I am super sensitive to both of these, but find them incredibly hard to resist.
*Listen to my lecture on my ipod if I can’t fall asleep (it’s boring so it will put me to sleep, and if I don’t fall asleep then I won’t feel bad about wasting time!)

Now let me explain why I am awake at 6:40 am and where procrastination fits in. I have just spent the past 8 hours straight churning out an essay about Classical Chinese Rituals. The first four hours were spent deciphering ancient Chinese philosophical cannons, and the rest were spent exercising the BS section of my brain. Word count and expresso have been my best friends tonight.

Everyone procrastinates. I thought that as I gained more college experience, I would learn to study better, but I only learned to play harder and procrastinate better. I learned how to turn out A grade papers during an all-nighter, and how to put off studying for exams until the night before. The problem is that this type of learning only allows for short term gain and not long-term retention. In the end, who would you rather have for a doctor: someone with a 4.0 undergraduate GPA, or someone who actually remembers their stuff? I long ago realized that grades didn’t matter as much as substance, which is why I justified neglecting my school work for so long in favor of socializing. But I have yet to master the skill of actual learning rather than grade-snagging.

What am I going to do about it? For now, I’m not going to worry about this because having too many goals at once is way too overwhelming and I think my sleep is more important. More to come about procrastination later.

(PS. I hope some of you will learn from my example and not leave your essays to write for the last night!)