Self-study
So I was all ready to leave for my European vacation when I receive an email from the system telling me I have a private message on 7Sage. Hmm, what is this? Oh, it’s @nicole.hopkins suggesting an article topic? Grumble grumble. Whoa, it’s really been like a month since I’ve written one? Grumble grumble. FINE, I guess I’ll put something together. Don’t say I never did anything for you, Hopkins. Better watch your back.
OK, so. BURNOUT is the word of the day.
Cutting right to the chase - I recommend Burnout: Paradise. It’s a really sweet open-world driving game that’s held up surprisingly well over the years and…oh, not that kind of burnout? Darn.
How to tell you’re burning out:
The ideal learning attitude is for you to come into the whole thing expecting to make all kinds of awful, terrible mistakes that you have to spend hours upon hours cleaning up. When you just get started with a new task, that’s the high that accompanies it. “I’m going to get this”, you tell yourself. And for a time, you’re willing to roll with the punches and (assuming that you’ve put your ego aside, as we’ve discussed a few times previously) learn what needs to be learned without it affecting your mood too much. Frustrating as it may be, you work through your mistakes because you can feel yourself learning.
But like all ideal things, this cannot last forever, no matter how much you consciously try to maintain it. Usually, it starts when something doesn’t click right away or when you otherwise plateau, however temporarily. Don’t worry – nothing’s wrong with you. That just means you’re human (or a highly-realistic cyborg clone). It’s normal to get irritated sometimes when you feel like you’re not progressing (or even if you’re not progressing as fast as you feel like you should be, though that again has to do with the ego thing we talked about before). But that’s where it usually starts. Because here’s the thing – have you ever heard of someone burning out when they’re on a constant upward trajectory? Yeah, right. You show me a student who goes +1 scaled point every test, and I’ll show you a student who will never burn out.
Assuming you hit snags on your path like a normal person, you will eventually reach a low point where you dread studying because you’re sick of making mistakes and always having to struggle to find the right way to fix them, only to make what seems like negligible progress. Instead of properly analyzing the latest error you made, you just throw your hands up in frustration and complain about how ‘nobody writes like that’ (and since that’s one of my biggest pet peeves, I’ll state for the record – yes, they do. All the time, in fact, so you'd better get used to it). Mistakes make you increasingly more irritable, as you lament the fact that you made a sufficiency/necessity mistake, AGAIN. I mean, can they really just stop that? This test is so dumb sometimes.
Many times, this increased irritability and loathing results in avoiding studying, sort of like one avoids doing the laundry in favor of lounging on the couch catching up on back episodes of Pokemon (no? just me?). Go downstairs to put my laundry in the dryer? Maybe later, Ash is about to finally gain the trust of his Charmander! That scene always hits me right in the feels. Who cares about the laundry, anyway? Maybe I’m just not cut out for laundering.
That’s a state of burnout in a nutshell – the apathy, the excuse-making, the frustration finally boiling over. Which, if you’re a particularly nervous type, can even result in you panicking about not studying while simultaneously making excuses not to study. A pretty odd spot to be in, frankly, but it happens more than you might think.
Addressing the issue:
There are degrees of burnout. Small instances of burnout happen all the time, and usually just necessitate a bubble tea run to clear your head, or perhaps a quick trip to these discussion forums to bask in the schadenfreude of your similarly-suffering peers, or maybe just yelling a swear word at the top of your lungs and scaring the dog. Larger instances of burnout happen over a period of months, as your dedication continues to wane on a macro level. But the micro instances of burnout are instructive, because they suggest the solution for larger instances. Which is rather simple, in my opinion.
When you’re burned out, you need to take a break. Yes, you. Listen up:
Take.
A.
Break.
There’s no way around it. You are no longer in the mindset required to learn, and you need to get it back. Studying more isn’t going to help, because remember – you’re already no longer in the mindset required to learn. Which begs the question – if you’re not going to get anything out of it, why would studying more ever be the right call? It’s not. You have to take a break and recharge your batteries.
Q: But what if I don’t have time to take a break?
A: Yes, because you’re accomplishing so much more by forcing yourself to study when you clearly aren’t learning anything from the time spent.
Q: But the test is just two months away!
A: And?
Q: So I need to be studying all the time, right?
A: That’s not how it works.
Look, here’s the deal. If you aren’t getting anything out of studying, you might as well be banging your head against a brick wall. In the process your mood will continue to worsen, leading to further frustration, panic, or both. (Frus-panic? Pan-stration?) Whatever you call it, it’s bad. And, not only are you literally wasting your time studying with that kind of mental state, it can be actively detrimental to you because this is precisely the time where you are most vulnerable both to lapsing back into old (bad) habits and also creating brand new (bad) habits in your attempt to make things make sense again.
Never confuse the steps you take to get to a goal with the goal itself. Having a consistent schedule is important, but it is not the end goal – learning is. Studying consistently is merely a means to that end. When the circumstances change, you need to adapt. You would not go to the gym and try to do leg presses if you broke your ankle. Why are you trying to ‘go to the gym’ (study for the LSAT) with a ‘broken’ brain (a mindset that will not allow you to do what you need to be doing)?
The hardest part is actually giving yourself permission to take a break without feeling guilty. My suggestion – write yourself a contract. You are going to take 48, or 96, or 144 hours away from the test. During that time, you are expressly prohibited from opening an LSAT book, looking at an LSAT question, visiting 7Sage, or anything else. Use this time to remember what life was like before you put the weight of the world on your own shoulders all those months ago. Read a book, sit by the pool, go out with your friends. Give yourself permission to punch anyone who asks you about the test in the face, too. In exchange, when you come back, you promise to do 30 minutes of (X), where (X) is some combination of fundamental tasks like question stem drills or conditional translation exercises. Just 30 minutes, to get back on your feet. And then take it from there, one step at a time.
If your mental game is in shambles, no amount of LSAT mechanics will save you.The test will be there when you get back; you just need to be ready to tackle it. Do what you need to in order to preserve your state of mind.
Just like I'm going to do, right freakin' now. No LSAT for 10 days for me! Catch you suckers later!
