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Tired From?

By Kevin

There's a very weird relationship between actions and emotions. Most of the time we allow emotions to cause actions although the opposite case is supposedly possible - smiling for no reason do indeed make you feel happier and frowning without a purpose cause you to feel a little sadder than if you were to maintain a neutral face. The fact that actions can cause you to feel differently is an impressive tool you can use to trick your mind into many different things.

What we are going to describe in this article relates to the above piece of fact a little but we want you to bear that fact in mind so you might find it useful to smile or laugh away your fears and worries sometimes. The idea is that certain physical actions or sensations are associated with certain emotional state inherently and they can trigger off each other whichever is in place. We all know that we normally trigger off sleepiness, fatigue with boredom, disinterest in something that is going on. And that is what happens to you when you attend a lecture from that boring lecturer of yours go goes on and on about the principles behind matrices, how it relates to 'Arrays' in programming and how the direction of the arrows in the coding affects whether you meant to make it an input field or that the code would print something on the screen.

But wait a minute, are you sure that you're dozing off because your lecturer is boring? Your classmate seems to be listening intently, and sometimes in your dreams you do really wonder what 'Arrays' have got to do with Matrices that you know so much about in Mathematics, you just didn't bother to find out because you believe you didn't like programming. You tell yourself, 'Hey, programming is really just a heap of gibberish that only machines understands and it suck' and console yourself that you haven't missed out much in life after all and get back to sleep. Fact is that last night you've been playing Counter Strike Source until 2am with your friends and this dreaded Programming lecture happens to be the first lecture of the day in the morning. You sure is tired, but from the gaming, not because of the lecture.

I am not sure how many students managed to convince themselves of their lack of interest in a subject they might have enjoyed so thoroughly if they had just paid attention to the lectures and been a little more serious about their education. I dare to go to the extent of claiming that some students mislead themselves into disinterest in a particular subject just because they were so tired from activities on the first lecture they attended and decided it wasn't something for them. Too many people are too fast to judge things and blame others for it and rarely would they think about and consider their role in a particular mistake or fault, or crisis they encounter.

You just have to realise that it takes lots of energy to learn things and to actively listen or absorb things; therefore if you're tired it's obvious that you will benefit little from any activity intended to introduce new things to you. No point attributing your fatigue from a night of clubbing to the lack of interest in a subject. Identifying the source of your tiredness requires a huge load of self-awareness and correcting the problem would need another strong dose of discipline but it doesn't mean we can't achieve that.

Give yourself and every subject, module, discipline, field and programme you expose yourself to, a chance to interest you and motivate you; discover your strengths in areas you never know.