My Study buddy

[research life]

i get asks about my approach to productivity, grades, and study routines every so often so i'm planning to start organizing some of my thoughts and tips into their own posts. please send in anything you're curious about <3

at the root of productivity is motivation. getting stuff done is hardest when you're sitting there wondering "wait, why am i even doing this?".

my big, macro-level motivation is my career. i know exactly what i want to do after i finish my PhD, and everything i do is a step in that direction. at the same time, i try to nurture more achievable goals to get me through the day-to-day, especially for weeks when everything feels overwhelming. some things i've used as motivation in the past:

this class is difficult, and i might get a bad grade, but i want to be able to say i did my best

i'm annoyed by this silly mistake i made on an assignment, i want to make sure i don't do the exact same thing a second time

i have plans with friends this evening, i want to get some homework out of the way so i won't be stressed later

i want to show this professor that i'm working really hard in this course because maybe they'll write me a letter of recommendation one day

this topic is related to something i'm interested in, i want to understand it better so i can see that connection

This is a guide for people who have exams coming up. It consists of what to do if you want 100% on your upcoming exams, study tips, and more!

Study tips:

Check this masterlist by @merakinotes and also this post+ masterlist by @areistotle it has everything you’ll ever need.

Bank of questions / past papers study method: you can create your own questions on Quizlet or any online quiz maker or use past papers/ revision resources.

Study everyday. If your exam is even a month away, that’s good because it means you don’t have to study hours everyday, but you can at least keep a goal to study 30 mins a day or to learn/ understand/ memorise a new thing part of that topic every day.

Feynman technique. Basically pretend as if you’re the teacher and teach the topic to someone/ something (ex a stuffed animal)

Record yourself talking. When you’re revising, record yourself talking about some of the stuff so you can listen to it later when you’re unable to study.

Visual learning!! Personally, I love this one. If you’re studying something like science, history, etc, then draw pictures! Draw pictures to better help you understand a word/ concept. (Example: in science I couldn’t remember the whole definition of combustion so I just drew a stickman image of the atom and the oxygen and then those 2 chemically combined)

During the exam:

Never turn the exam in early!! Are you finished? Then re read the exam and re take the exam. Double check, triple check etc your answers. Keep looking through your answers again and again, step by step. Only give the test in at the very end.

Watch the clock! Don’t spend lots of time on one question trying to figure it out. Look at the time and make sure you still have enough to complete all the questions and maybe also recheck them.

If you don’t completely understand a question/ it’s more complicated: skip it and go to the next question. Come back to that harder question later.

Manifesting:

Remember: the 100/100 grade is already yours. You just need to claim it!

Affirmations: you can create your own set of customised affirmations or you can use THIS affirmation list that I made for high grades

Subliminal: I’ve made a playlist on YouTube with all my favourite academic subliminals. You can also search up 100/100 grades or full marks in tests subliminals.

More resources:

(These are just to further help you if these tips do not help. Remember that watching videos or reading about studying/ study tips is not studying. It’s procrastinating. Consume these in moderation.)

Studying tips for a straight A student by @universalitgirlsblog2

How to study like: 👙Elle Woods👙 | 📔Paris Geller📔 | 📖Hermione Granger📖

Study to success on YouTube

Jun Yuh oh YouTube

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Millions of people continue to suffer from exhaustion, cognitive problems and other long-lasting symptoms after a coronavirus infection. The exact causes of the illness, known as long Covid, are not known. But new research offers clues, describing the toll the illness takes on the body and why it can be so debilitating.

Diagnosing Long Covid

Patients with severe Covid may wind up in hospitals or on ventilators until their symptoms resolve. Damage to the body from severe Covid — pneumonia, low oxygen, inflammation — typically shows up on traditional diagnostic tests.

Long Covid is different: A chronic illness with a wide variety of symptoms, many of which are not explainable using conventional lab tests. Difficulties in detecting the illness have led some doctors to dismiss patients, or to misdiagnose their symptoms as psychosomatic. But researchers looking more deeply at long Covid patients have found visible dysfunction throughout the body.

Studies estimate that perhaps 10 to 30 percent of people infected with the coronavirus may develop long-term symptoms. It’s unclear why some people develop long Covid and others don’t, but four factors appear to increase the risk: high levels of viral RNA early during an infection, the presence of certain autoantibodies, the reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus and having Type 2 diabetes.

The Immune System

“Dang, why am I always so sick?”— Messiah Rodriguez, 17

Long Covid patients appear to have disrupted immune systems compared to post-Covid patients who fully recover. Many researchers believe chronic immune dysfunction after a coronavirus infection may set off a chain of symptoms throughout the body.

One possibility is that the body is still fighting remnants of the coronavirus. Researchers found that the virus spreads widely during an initial infection, and that viral genetic material can remain embedded in tissues — in the intestines, lymph nodes and elsewhere — for many months.

Figure: Coronavirus RNA is visible in different body tissues at 500x magnification. Daniel Chertow et al., preprint via Research Square

Ongoing studies are trying to determine if these viral reservoirs cause inflammation in surrounding tissues, which could lead to brain fog, gastrointestinal problems and other symptoms.

Figure: Coronavirus components persist in one patient’s small intestine, 92 days after the start of their Covid symptoms. Christian Gaebler et al., Nature

Researchers have also found evidence that Covid may trigger a lasting and damaging autoimmune response. Studies have found surprisingly high levels of autoantibodies, which mistakenly attack a patient’s own tissues, many months after an initial infection.

A third possibility is that the initial viral infection triggers chronic inflammation, possibly by reactivating other viruses in the patient’s body that are normally dormant. The reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus, which infects most people when they are young, might help predict whether a person will develop long Covid, one study found.

Inside the intricate world of the immune system, these explanations may coexist. And just as different long Covid patients may have different symptoms, they may also have different immune problems, too. Identifying the problems that are central to each patient’s illness will be critical for guiding treatment, said Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale.

For instance, a patient with autoantibodies might benefit from immunosuppressive medication, while a patient with remnants of the Covid virus should receive antivirals, Dr. Iwasaki said. “Depending on what each person has, the treatment would be quite different.”

The Circulatory System

“Something as simple as climbing on a ladder all of a sudden became a mountain.”— Eddie Palacios, 50

Many long Covid patients struggle with physical activity long after their initial infection, and experience a relapse of symptoms if they exercise. Initial studies suggest that dysfunction in the circulatory system might impair the flow of oxygen to muscles and other tissues, limiting aerobic capacity and causing severe fatigue.

In one study, patients with long-lasting Covid symptoms had unexpected responses to riding a bike. Despite having apparently normal hearts and lungs, their muscles were only able to extract a portion of the normal amount of oxygen from small blood vessels as they pedaled, markedly reducing their exercise capacity.

One possible culprit: Chronic inflammation may damage nerve fibers that help control circulation, a condition called small fiber neuropathy. The damaged fibers, seen in skin biopsies, are associated with dysautonomia, a malfunction of automatic functions like heart rate, breathing and digestion that is very common in long Covid patients.

Figure: Chronic inflammation in long Covid patients may damage small nerve fibers. Peter Novak et al., Annals of Neurology

These findings demonstrate that people with long Covid are suffering systemic physical problems, rather than just being anxious or out of shape, said Dr. David M. Systrom, an exercise physiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who helped conduct the bike study.

“You can’t make up small fiber neuropathy by skin biopsy. That isn’t in somebody’s head,” Dr. Systrom said. “You can’t make up poor oxygen extraction to this degree. All of these are objective measures of disease.”

South African researchers found another circulation problem: Microscopic blood clots. Tiny clots that form during an initial Covid infection will typically break down naturally, but might persist in long Covid patients. These clots could block the tiny capillaries that carry oxygen to tissues throughout the body.

Figure: Platelets in the blood can become hyperactivated in Covid and long Covid patients, contributing to microclots. Etheresia Pretorius et al., Cardiovascular Diabetology

Inflammatory substances called cytokines, which are often elevated in long Covid patients, may injure the mitochondria that power the body’s cells, making them less able to use oxygen. Walls of blood vessels may also become inflamed, limiting the uptake of oxygen.

Whatever the cause, low oxygen levels may contribute to long Covid’s most common symptom, severe fatigue. Some long Covid patients meet the criteria for ME/CFS (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome), which often starts after a viral infection. Researchers have found that ME/CFS patients also suffer from a lack of oxygen triggered by circulatory problems. That puts enormous strain on the body’s metabolism and makes simple activities feel like strenuous exercise.

The Brain

“I approach a red light, my brain knows that it’s red, but it’s not reacting to the rest of my body to put my foot on the brake. Do you understand how terrifying that is?”— Samantha Lewis, 34

Even people with mild cases of Covid can experience sustained cognitive impairments, including reduced attention, memory and word-finding. Possible long-term neurological problems from Covid constitute “a major public health crisis,” according to Dr. Avindra Nath, the clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Researchers found a wide range of dysfunction in the brains of long Covid patients. Although it is unclear how often the virus directly penetrates the brain, even mild infections appear to cause significant brain inflammation, according to the researchers, who included Dr. Nath, Dr. Iwasaki and Dr. Michelle Monje, a neurologist at Stanford.

Infections may trigger the over-activation of immune cells called microglia in a way that appears similar to the process that can contribute to cognitive problems in aging and some neurodegenerative diseases.

Figure: Microglia are activated in the brain of a Covid patient, contributing to brain inflammation. Anthony Fernández-Castañeda et al., preprint via bioRxiv. Photos: Myoung-Hwa Lee

Another research group found that long Covid may significantly reduce the amount of blood that reaches the brain, a finding that has was also seen in patients with a related chronic condition, ME/CFS, before the pandemic.

The Lungs

“I couldn’t breathe. It literally felt like someone was sitting on my chest.”— Angelica Baez, 23

Shortness of breath is a frequent symptom of long Covid. But common lung tests — including chest X-rays, CT scans and functional tests — often come back normal.

Using specialized M.R.I. scans, a team of British researchers found preliminary evidence of lung damage in a small group of long Covid patients who had never been hospitalized. Detailed scans of their lung function indicated that most of the patients took up oxygen less efficiently than healthy people did, even if the structure of their lungs appeared to be normal.

The researchers cautioned that a larger group of patients will be needed to confirm the findings. If the results hold up, possible explanations for the observed shortness of breath include microclots in lung tissues or a thickening of the blood-air barrier that regulates the uptake of oxygen in the lungs.

Living With Long Covid

“It’s really not something you can push through.”— Dr. Abigail Bosk

Many hospitals now offer post-Covid clinics or recovery programs, which bring together doctors with experience treating long Covid patients. Given the number of patients, some doctors and programs have long waits for appointments. It can help to plan ahead and try multiple options.

— Survivor Corps keeps a directory of post-Covid clinics.

— Dysautonomia International offers a list of doctors with experience treating autonomic disorders commonly seen in long Covid.

— Body Politic hosts a Covid support group where thousands of long haulers share information and advice on Slack.

— The Long Covid Support Group hosts a community on Facebook.

— The Royal College of Occupational Therapists offers advice for managing post-Covid fatigue.

— An essay from Maria Farrell offers advice on how to get well, and the importance of making time to rest.

— ME Action, a group supporting people with ME/CFS, offers advice to long Covid patients on how to manage symptoms.

— Americans with long Covid may qualify for disability benefits, although without conclusive medical results, many people face roadblocks.

— Three leading researchers into long Covid often share information about the latest findings on Twitter: Dr. Amy Proal, a microbiologist at PolyBio Research Institute; Dr. David Putrino, the director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System; and Dr. Iwasaki, the Yale immunologist.

— Health Rising covers the latest research into long Covid, ME/CFS and other chronic illnesses in detail.

— Gez Medinger, a video producer, interviews some prominent researchers into long Covid on YouTube.

— A video interview with Dr. Svetlana Blitshteyn, a neurologist and the director of the Dysautonomia Clinic, offers advice for treatment and an overview of current research into autonomic disorders.

— A detailed guide to understanding, treating and living with orthostatic intolerance is available from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

Want to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes (or Less)? Steal This Proven Military Sleep Secret

“The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

What Is the Military Sleep Technique

The quick sleep formula has 3 important parts:

Muscle Relaxation

Focussed Breathing

Visualization (Optional But Highly Recommended)

Here Are the Steps Involved:

Free yourself from all the chores and sit on your bed’s edge. Ensure that your bedside light is off and your phone is on DND mode.

Now relax your face. If you haven’t done it before, here’s an easy way — first, tighten your face through a wince, and then let your facial muscles relax naturally. Also, let your tongue drop down in any manner in your mouth.

After relaxing your facial muscles, let gravity pull down your shoulders as if it has no energy of its own. Let your arms hang sideways.

Now, inhale and exhale slowly, focusing on the “swishing” sound of your breath.

You can follow the 4–7–8 breathing method: Count to 4 while taking a deep leisurely inhalation, 7 counts of holding your breath, and exhale through 8 counts.

Allow gravity to soften your thighs and lower legs with each breath.

As your entire body feels energy-less, repeat the phrase “Don’t think, don’t think” as a chant. You can also substitute this chant with any positive affirmation.

Optional but highly recommended: If you’re not good at silencing your mind, visualize yourself sitting at a tranquil place like mountains, beaches, boats, a rocking chair, etc.

Within a few seconds, you’ll drift off to sleep.

Caveat: The effectiveness of this method depends on practice and how well you can silence your mind from the “restless” thoughts of daily activities.

Should You Try Out the Military Sleep Method?

The answer is yes!

If you’re struggling to fall asleep or wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep, this method might be for you. It has a 96% success ratio after six weeks of practice.

There are many reasons why you should try out the military sleep method. Here’s why:

I. You’ll Fall Asleep Faster

One of the biggest benefits of the military sleep method is that you’ll fall asleep faster. This is because you’ll be learning how to relax and clear your mind before bed.

II. You’ll Wake Up Feeling More Refreshed

The reason you wake up without zeal and energy is not having a sound sleep.

Since the military sleep method focuses on silencing the mind and relaxing the body, you’ll wake up refreshed in addition to sleeping faster and better.

III. You’ll Be Less Tired During the Day

Tiredness is one of the main reasons why people don’t get enough sleep.

When you use the military sleep method, you’ll be less tired because you will sleep whenever you want during the day. It also means you’ll be more productive and have more energy to do things you enjoy.

IV. You’ll Have Fewer Nightmares

Nightmares are a common problem for people who don’t get enough sleep. When you use the military sleep method, you’ll have a more restful night’s sleep causing fewer nightmares.

V. You’ll Be Less Stressed

Stress is cyclic.

Stress = Sleep Problems = Poor Productivity = Stress

When you use the military sleep method, you’ll be less stressed because it teaches you to relax and fall asleep faster.

No matter what your reason is, learning how to sleep faster can be a huge help when you have less sleep time during exams, project deadlines, business audits, layover flights, social functions, etc.

So, if you’re looking for a way to get more restful sleep, wake up feeling more refreshed, and be less tired during the day, then you should definitely try out the military sleep method.

It’s an easy way to get the sleep you need so that you can feel your best! The best way to determine if this military sleep technique is worth it is to give it a go and experience.

And who knows — maybe you’ll be able to fall asleep in two minutes or less!

“Happiness consists of getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.” — Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

I ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS GET THE SAME FEEDBACK WHEN THEY GET BACK IN TOUCH WITH ME

Neither of my supervisors had never gotten it before either. They had to think for a while, and then it turned into them telling me how great I am and what they love about me.

This stuff is real. I would also say: none of it is lying. This is taking experience that you normally downplay and write off, and putting it in accurate words they’ll understand.

It’s hacking the capitalist system. Why ISN’T helping a kid with homework “tutoring”, when the only thing missing is a paycheck?

It’s especially important for anyone who isn’t a cis white man, because many of us are so thoroughly trained to feel like we are not good enough.

Privilege tells people they can fake it, and that they’re good enough just as people and can learn the skills on the job. Abuse and oppression tell people they aren’t good enough as people and that even their high skills are probably below average, and that unless they had the specific job title or were using certain skills officially, nobody will think it counts.

We also gotta take into account cost to patient and healthcare system, potential harms, co-morbidities, side effects, drug interactions, and availability of a drug or therapy among other things.