Minor Burnout

I fucked up a bit on Friday and Saturday... I had planned to finish up session 12 (last equity session), and hopefully do 13 too (which is a small one). I thought I'd be able to finish those two, and even have some time left to review. I'm going to sound like a whiny little bitch right now, but all the hours of study got to me, and I was burned out. I did study about an hour Friday night when I got home from work, but I was so tired that I just couldn't focus on the reading, and I was in a rough mood too. I was lethargic from lack of physical activity, and so many hours of work, study, sleep, and repeat. I collapsed in my bed at about 7:45 pm and woke up around 10:30 pm.
The plan was to keep going, but when I sat down and looked at the bland black and blue text in my Stalla book, I had a mental failure and just said fuck it. 'Fuck it' became a phrase that was kind of my theme for that night, and well into the following morning.

I played some piece of shit computer game that I had, and just rolled with it until about 9 am Saturday morning. That's like 11 hours of video games. It was a single player RPG, so it wasn't intense like the fucking crazy high school kids play online, but still... I was a damn zombie. At so many points I'd tilt my head away from the screen and catch a glimpse of my shitty sony alarm clock and its annoying green glow. It would flash X, Y, or Z o'clock in the morning. Each time I checked it, I'd stare at it for a little while. I'd groan a bit, and think about all the time I was wasting. I'd weigh that wasted time out against the prospect of continuing the ungodly collapse of will power that had suddenly come over me, and arrive unquestionably at what seemed like the most reasonable conclusion at the time: Fuck it.

What happened on Saturday is kind of a haze for me. I don't really remember what time I woke up, but I do remember that my coffee was orgasmic, even if my egg cheese and ham sandwiches were sub-par at best. I went to clean myself up cuz I felt like dog shit. I looked in the mirror, and I looked pretty rough; like an extra in a low budget vampire flick. Then it was study time. I managed to finish up study session 12 in about an hour and a half. I was mostly done it, so there's not much there for me to pat myself on the back about, but whatever, it was done. My room mate had some buddies over, so we played some X-box 360 until about 3:30 am, and then I went to bed.

Today's Sunday, and I feel refreshed. I went to the gym, ate good healthy food, and studied like an Asian from a poor family on a scholarship. I didn't start on SS13, I just reviewed older materials, and it went okay, nothing stands out as having given me problems.

To summarize all this, I learned a good lesson this weekend; study hours are not all equal; they have diminishing returns after a certain number of them in a week, and they also get worse in an unhealthy lifestyle. Coming into my burnout, I was finding it harder and harder to concentrate, and that was a function of having no balance at all in my life. The fact that I'd been eating not-too well, neglecting the gym, and ignoring all kinds of basic human needs/comforts to squeeze another couple of hours in was not helping me. That being said, I have some new policies on time budgeting; I need to hit the gym 3 times weekly for at least an hour each time so that I can keep feeling confident and alert. I need food ready to eat, sitting in tupperware so that I can just eat when I'm hungry, or have something to take to work and not worry about it. So far, the trend has been that if I have no food, I order a pizza/burger/deep fried bullshit. If my fridge is empty, I shouldn't go upstairs to study, I should go deal with that problem, and study after.

I'm on track to officially finish my first run through all study sessions by May 8th, as long as no more major burnouts happen. 54 days to go until the CFA exam.