Lisa DelaTorre from Thurgood Marshall School of Law volunteered to write a post this week about her experiences with summer bar prep students. I think her experience is something all our students need.
-Definition
Misery Olympics- where hard-working, driven people get sucked into competing to see if they can do more than those around them, resulting in every participant being tired, overwhelmed, and miserable. This phenomenon can spread like a virus during periods when intense academic focus is required. See also “doing the most,” “overwhelmed Olympics,” and “no-sleep Olympics.”
-Illustration
Let’s say you hear from a classmate that he is studying several hours more than you every day, and sleeping several hours less. Now, because bar study can be so intense, this conversation makes you afraid you are not doing enough. And so, acting on that fear, you pile on more study hours daily, even doing more each day than your classmate, to catch up to all the hours he was doing each day before you had the conversation. This additional workload makes you miserable, cutting into your sleep, family commitments, and downtime.
A few days after you have started this more intense routine, once the misery is thickly swirling around you, you speak to another classmate. In your effort to feel better about your dismal situation you talk it up proudly. You wear your lack of sleep like a badge of honor. Now she starts to worry and feels compelled to add more hours of study to her day, thinking, “If I’m having dinner with my partner every day, and sleeping seven straight hours each night, I must not be doing enough!”
-How to protect yourself from being an inadvertent competitor in the Misery Olympics
Avoid judging your schedule against what a classmate is doing. Put another way, although you should have a healthy respect for the bar exam, and maybe even a little fear, your planning and preparation should be based on your confident self-reflection, not fear. (An aside: Have you seen the Disney movie Frozen? One of the truest lines ever written into a Disney movie is in the song “Fixer-Upper” where the trolls sing, “People make bad choices when they’re mad or scared or stressed!” Don’t recreate your study schedule based on fear.)
-What can you do instead?
First, have confidence. Remember that you have been through periods of intense study before, and by now you know what has worked for you in the past. You can do this. YOU CAN DO THIS.
Second, remember to be good to yourself. You need sleep, plenty of water, and a healthy, varied diet to fuel your brain and feel your best.
Third, be a force for good for others. If you see your classmate spiraling into misery, check in. “How are you doing? I heard you say you’ve scheduled yourself for 18 hour days for the next six weeks; are you still finding time to take care of yourself? I am thinking of making an appointment with Academic Success to have them look over my study schedule, to see if it needs any tweaks. Why don’t you come with me? We can do a practice essay together after.” If you have family locally and have the benefit of a healthy home-cooked meal, check in with the cook and see if you can bring a classmate to Sunday dinner with you. That simple act of caring might be the re-charge your classmate needs to power through the next few weeks.
-What if you need help?
If you look at your study schedule and you genuinely wonder whether you are doing enough—whether you have scheduled too much down time or not enough, or whether it really is ok to take all day every Sunday off from studying—it is OK if you’re not sure you have a good schedule! Bar exam study is different in some ways than any other academic pursuit you have experienced so far. If you want a second set of experienced eyes to take a look at your schedule, make an appointment with Academic Success and we would be happy to sit down with you and talk through it. If travel to the school is a hurdle, we can also speak by email and/or phone. We will help with every resource available to us.
An important component of living a good life, personally and professionally, is learning to distinguish between problems you need to resolve on your own, and those that can be resolved far more efficiently when you take advantage of the resources available to you. There’s a very good chance that studying more might make you miserable, but studying better will make you successful. If you think there is room for you to learn how to study better, come talk to us. And bring a friend!
(Lisa DelaTorre)
