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According to an old proverb, Haste makes waste. Applied to the modern World, this would mean that, the more stressed out you are, the more susceptible to a host of bad things you will be..

Grab a newspaper or read a blog and you will come across at least one person that is having to cope with the results of an insanely busy life. Students, according to recent studies generally sleep between five to six hours a night, a lot less than the recommended eight hours and of course, voice their opinions about this. Teachers, too, are experiencing increased stress; colleges want more money, which means more students and more tutoring for teachers.

And then, of course, there is the self-inflicted stress. Most of us have been there, the place where you are faced with a decision: deadline or sleep and from my own experience, I know that I always go for deadline. At college, we occasionally joke about this, after all, you can sleep all you want once you are dead… We also joked about the fact that, approximately six years after we all graduated, at least one third would be suffering from burn out.

Funny as it may sound at first, this is becoming a huge problem. Yes, there are those among us that can easily cope with little to no sleep and still function normally, but there are even more among us that can not cope with even one hour less sleep, much less three to four hours less. Yet, many people of these two groups are subject to the same amount of stress and once it turns sour for them, it often ends in a burn a burn out.

Classified as a psychological condition, burn outs are, in fact, very capable of inflicting harm to a person’s physique. Studies generally state that EMTs and Air Traffic Controllers are very prone to this condition, because, after all, stress comes with the territory in those jobs, but more and more statistics are facing that suggest that even the most mundane job can lead to a burn out.

How that happens, in many cases, is not totally clear, but I suspect that it has to do with the way we are conditioned to live our lives. No helpful advice from me this time, just something I was discussing with a friend some time ago.

An old proverb says that the bow needs to be unsprung once in a while or it loses its spring. What this means is basically that the more stress you subject your body (and mind) to, the more often you will need to give yourself some time to relax. If you do not occasionally “reset” yourself, your bow ( = mind) will not serve you as well as it did in the past.

Keep in mind that this is not only limited to your professional life but also embraces your social life. Sometimes, stress makes you perform better, but too much of it will ruin your abilities and appetite and will make you lose interest in many things you enjoyed before, simply because you are incapable of handling anything because you are too exhausted.

So, keep in mind that you need to blow off some steam every now and then, because all the action you see is worthless if you end up not being able to enjoy it because you are too exhausted to leave your bed for more than a couple of hours at a time.

So, it’s been ten days again since I last blogged and while I do have a few things I want to discuss, I thought I’d get this one out:

It’s once again the last week of a term, midterms are coming up (well, one anyway) and our current project is due to be presented in a few days, too. We’ll see how that goes … I’m hoping good, but I’m prepared for bad too.

So, currently when you switch on the TV or read any newspaper, you’re guaranteed to come across someone talking about how little time we have and how precious it is and all …

If you ask me, we don’t have little time, we just choose to spend it the wrong way. As a student, I know that I “waste” loads of sparetime during the last week of a project because I choose to procrastinate quite a long time; granted, it works out every single time, but I’m certain that I’d have more free time and less stress if I’d start finishing stuff earlier.

Then again, it seems that when I create stuff last-minute, I always come up with stuff I’m happy with. I’ve talked to other students and I know they feel the same way. My guess is that this is just the way creative people choose to work and to be honest, this way of working has advantages too.

If you prepare stuff weeks up front, you’ll not be able to incorporate up-to-the-minute information into your article, presentation, discussion, simply because you don’t know up front what’s gonna happen.

Moreover, if you start out too early, your creation might lack “depth”. I’d like to take an essay I wrote a year ago as an example. The task was to discuss a media landscape, I choose the SciFi Channel, finished my text three (!) weeks up front and ended up rewriting the whole piece from scratch the night before it was due, turns out the text I wrote during the second pass was something I’m really proud of, while the text I wrote up front was sub-par.

So, while in general it might seem like a bad idea, it seems to be a very acceptable (and already accepted) way for creative people to create stuff. Granted, you sacrifice loads of sparetime in the last days prior to the deadline, but then again, you already used that sparetime up front anyway.

[UPDATE]:

Jack seems to be experiencing a similar problem, having too little time to do stuff he likes.