The Study Game 👾

 I actually do believe poetry can have a sort of healing power for people. Similar to art, it is a form of self-expression where the poet creates based on his thoughts and feelings. One thing I noticed is that with any type of art form there can be a profound decrease in stress. Some people even create poetry as a hobby or as a form of escape from the real world. When we were asked to create haikus recently for this class, I did feel a sense of stress due to time constraints, but besides that I actually enjoyed the activity because it allowed me to talk about how I feel about a topic specifically one that was making me fatigued at the time. Expressing my thoughts towards the IT exam through poetry made me add a sense of comic relief to a very serious subject which I think is invaluable. Based on this experience, I do believe that poetry can also be used as a way to vent out feelings of anger, fatigue, or frustration. Poetry is like a different language where we speak with a differe...

 Not everyone is gifted with photographic memory or logs through the rest of their day running on multiple shots of coffee. Therefore, I stand on a different area of the learning spectrum. I learned that it is difficult for me to care about a topic if it is forced on me on an assigned schedule as with all regular school classes. My interest and desire to learn more about a topic happens on my own time as I go through class material. I find areas that I would say, "hurt my brain" because I had never been exposed to the word or never grasped the concept. This is where knowing your learning style comes in handy because those moments that "hurt my brain" allowed my mind and subconscious to slowly ruminate on the topic and come up with its own solutions otherwise it would stimulate my body to go full gear into an actual google search. I learn better with questions being thrown at me on a topic that's why I personally rely on flashcards specifically Anki. Although, it...

 Many may see meditation as sort of a waste of time or complain that they're too busy but the reality is that it's much more simpler than it sounds. When I started meditating I was very skeptical and gave up multiple times, however, I finally decided to make a change after joining a meditation group on the Vibely app. Youtuber Lavendaire was doing a meditation challenge and many people especially females were taking part in the challenge and monitoring their progress. I wanted to give it a try by doing her guided meditation. I never expected that this was the push I needed to build a much needed habit of meditation. The app required you to log your progress publicly which added more incentive and with its interface I'm not surprised why this was extremely important to building the habit because we received likes on our post from others who were also trying to learn how to build a habit of meditating. It is one thing to try meditation and it is another to build a habit of do...

 One of my biggest challenges lately has been focusing for a long period of time. An interesting aspect I've been learning about myself lately is that my endurance and tolerance for discomfort tends to increase when I'm listening to music. I wanted to try and optimize for this characteristic by thinking about how I can use music to improve my exam performance. Today, I found myself listening to music as I was going over flashcards to study for a therapeutics exam that I have coming up next week. I found myself getting very tired in the late afternoon, but after throwing on my noise cancelling headphones and my favorite study music, the work felt like a breeze or at least I felt like I could go on for hours regardless of how much work I would need to put in. I'm even experimenting with music as I type out this blogpost. Hopefully you enjoy the rest of it! Mid-week Update:  I made a bit more progress as I spent time creating flashcards for my exam while listening to music and...

 It definitely is a lot different during these times of many online classes but that hasn't stopped medical/health related exams from being in person for me. In fact, they have actually offered a new challenge for me to try to be more efficient during my study time to get as much done as possible in such a short period of time. During these times for graduate students, I would definitely say that the level of independence and the high amount of stress placed on finding the sweet spot for focus, discipline, and adaptability has become of the utmost importance. As weeks have gone by since school started, I decided to run experiments to find how I truly study and memorize or at least optimize for studying better when I'm on my own. It can sometimes feel difficult to write out so much information by hand or create so many flashcards but I've found these challenging moments to honestly be of the most value. When I study, I do it with the intent of learning more about myself and ...

 As I have been working towards preserving my mental and physical energy, I soon realized just how difficult this can be especially when the school year and monotonous job duties seem to be slowly piling up. A lot of these mental challenges can be caused by the opinions of others. Believe it or not just about everyone has struggled with the fear of what others opinions are of them at some point. It is part of what makes us human and has also played a critical role in our survival. When you recognize that you're having a negative thought, you have essentially flipped a switch in your brain. A switch of realizing that you haven't been present with yourself and you've been essentially present somewhere else in a time and place that is non-existent. It is a place that contains all your fears and worries, you've been stuck in your own head for too long. Staying in that giant crainum all day can easily lead to not always the most positive but more often than not the most nega...

 An experiment I've been working on lately is nightly meditation before bed to reduce anxiety and allow for calm and relaxing dream states. I noticed that over the past few days I was finding myself waking up in the middle of the night due to anxieties and fear. I wanted to think of a way to mitigate these unhealthy moments because the number of hours we spend asleep are extremely valuable in order to optimize for morning productivity. I've found my level of workflow at night not as efficient as it is in the morning so getting better sleep is definitely a key towards success in order to truly have enough mind space for more worth while work. An important aspect of this method I noticed is already having a set morning routine that you find productive already in order to further increase your chances of success. If you need more information on that, please check one of my previous blog posts on morning routines. Meditation is extremely valuable. It is used by some of the top perf...

 An interesting twist definitely. I remember when I was a kid we use to do these things called "Elocutions" for poetry where we would act them out and I can recall one of my performances involved acting out how humans always wear masks. These ideas of humans being someone else at different times of the day or around different people and scenarios show just how adaptable humans truly are. Fast forward to the year 2020. We find humans now wearing masks as part of their daily attire. Never in my childhood would I have been ever able to fathom a time like this. Imagine someone teleporting to the future to find out that they had to wear a mask when going out and that social distancing was required everywhere that is public and gatherings are discouraged. They would probably want to leave asap. However, imagine how did the human race grow through that time. Imagine what will be written in history books of our people in overcoming these challenges. Not many people may want to believ...