Today's thoughts: how to short circuit my vicious cycle of unproductivity

Today, I was absent in class. I was feeling unwell the night prior. Probably because yesterday I walked while raining and the weather was colder than usual. I walked in 2degC weather and it was cloudy and drizzling. 

So I stayed at home today. I didn't come out of my room. Most of the time, I'd like to be holed up in my room. All I do is cook, read books, watch Netflix, surf the internet, browse through IG for BTS reels, chat with friends in WhatsApp, play with my rats, do my skincare and haircare routines, clean the kitchen and bathroom, do laundry. Clearly, these are all activities that I do to procrastinate. Notice that there's not one thing related to academic work? Hahaha!

Here's the thing though. Whenever I don't get any work done, I feel so unproductive and guilty. Then I'll feel stressed because work is piling up. And when I feel stressed my fight-or-flight response is to freeze. I fall into this catatonic state and I refuse to do anything, which in turn fuels unproductivity and guilt, which then leads to stress, then I'll freeze, then the loop starts over. Using my rudimentary illustrating skills, here's my loop:

Edz's vicious cycle (let anxious be an addition to stressed)

Somewhere in this cycle, there needs to be an intervention. I must be able to short circuit this vicious cycle so it wouldn't go on a loop. If I flip this vicious cycle and turn it into a virtuous cycle, it would look something like this:

Edz's virtuous cycle

So where should we put the intervention... and what would it be... Hmm... Should I intervene as early as Stage 1 (able or not able to do work)? Or can I intervene any part of the vicious cycle and turn it into the virtuous cycle?

If I intervene in Stage 1, then that really fixes everything; immediate change from vicious to virtuous. I don't think I can do anything to intervene Stage 2. But if I were to intervene in  Stage 3, how do I reduce feeling stressed and anxious? Well, when one is stressed and anxious, cortisol, catecholamines, and vasopressin levels increase. Therefore, I need to manage these hormones so I could flip the stress and anxiety, and turn it into inspiration and motivation. Hence, I need to get happy. I need to flood myself with oxytocin, dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin. How do we do this? Here are some that I've been doing for some time now, but I just tend to forget or become inconsistent with it:

1. Exercise. It doesn't necessarily mean that I should only be in the gym to consider myself exercising. I have one dumbbell here in the apartment. I can also use bodyweight to exercise.

2. Mindfulness meditation. I've been doing the guided imagery meditation from Stanford. I just have to continue and be consistent with this one. 

3. Stretch. This is tantamount to moving/exercising, but not needing a large area to do movements. So this is one that I can also do in the apartment. Sometimes I go out on the balcony and do some yoga poses. But recently it's been cold. Stretching on the balcony would be a challenge.

4. Dance. Stand up, put on some good music, and just dance. Don't forget to put on the timer, say 20mins.

5. Cook. This is an activity I enjoy, actually. Cook what I want and eat what I want. And while enjoying, at least I get to be productive too. So yeah, cook tteokbokki, or ramyeon, or IndoMie, or jajamyeon, or japchae, or whatever's inside my freezer. I know all of those are happy food items. 

So yeah, every time I'm stuck in a rut, feeling unproductive and guilty and stressed, I should go back to this post and read what are the ways I can get my happy hormone levels up. :)

Things that happened in the first week of Spring 2023

It's Saturday and it's only now I'm writing in my blog for this week. Apparently, I have already broken my 2-3x per week blogging rule. I have to force myself to write, otherwise all these memories will just be forgotten. I was cognizant enough to write down in Supernote the things I'd like to post in my blog this week.

Going into class prepared made me comprehend the topic more. I know this is the natural order of things and it's common sense that if you study before coming to class, you'll likely to end up learning more. 

I came to class well-read and did the assignment in advance. When the instructor was explaining about longitudinal data, I can easily grasp the concepts he was explaining. I felt like my neurons were synapsing quickly and making all these connections between what he was discussing and what I read and understood in the book. Also, examples came easily into my mind. All that felt great. Now, I'm trying my best to read beforehand. I know I should've done this since I stepped into the PhD program but, well, excuses. 

However, I wasn't prepared for the R practice we did in class. I noticed that if I'm not understanding what's being discussed, I quickly lose interest and my mind wanders off. This causes me to become detached and not learn anything. So what I need to do to compensate for this is to immediately redo the practice assignments for R, which I did. I'm done with the Chapter 2 R exercises but yet to finish Chapter 3. 

Coding in R is easy once you get familiar with the functions. But you need to practice it and you need to create your own examples. R is understood through learning-by-doing. Another note: I'm having difficulty with R Studio and enjoy working with base R more. This shouldn't be the case though, but I just find R Studio to be too crowded for my liking and there's too much happening on the screen. I know R Studio should be better when it come to the UX/UI, but I guess it's not for me... Yet.

As for my discovery-based paper class, I'm actually scared for this one. My adviser resigned and he's not really a technical landslide person per se, and there's NO ONE ELSE in the department who can understand what I'm doing with my paper. I'm sort of flying alone on this one. My game plan for this is to contact a collaborator who would want to join me launch this paper. And that/those person/s may be authors of the papers I've read. But before I proceed on doing this, I should tell my ex-adviser first. Sigh. This is going to be hard but I know I'll pull through. By the grace of God, I would. 

Update on my applications: none. No updates whatsoever. Though I've started thinking of ideas for my NZ application. It's just a matter of writing it down and making it more concrete.

I still have tomorrow to hit the 2x per week blog. The topic I'll write about will be the Part 3 thing. Let's see if I can do that.

p.s. I've broken my 3-4x per week exercise routine. So far I've managed to do only one this week. Well, my excuses include I had my birthday yesterday, Friday, and Thursday was the second day of my period; I felt lethargic. Haha! Oh well excuses. But I'm glad Duolingo is on track. I'm on my seventh day streak now!

For 2023, I am really looking forward to… Part 2

 Part 1 of this post I listed some goals under two headings, trivial hobbies on a personal level and PhD career goals. Both are only for 2023. Let's make these goals more achievable and realistic by enumerating the different steps how to achieve this. First:

1. Trivial hobbies on a personal level

a. Exercise 3-4x per week. So far, since 2 January, I've exercise six times. That makes it to the quota of 3x per week. To make this more solid, here are some ways that made me stick to the routine:

a1. Sleep early, wake up early. I noticed I have more energy in the day if I were able to sleep at least seven hours. Lately, I've been sleeping eight hours, which is super duper great. 

a2. Let it be the first thing I do in the morning. And do it on an empty stomach. I feel motivated to workout right after I wake up. It's the first thing I do in the morning prior to eating. However, if it's already 11AM and I haven't gone to the gym, I will already feel hungry and I need to eat. When I eat, that zaps my motivation to go to the gym. However, if this happens, I notice I start to regain my motivation to work out around 2 or 3PM. So it's either I exercise before 9AM or after 2PM.

a3. Crossing off "exercise" on my to-do list motivates me. I'm the type of person who needs to list all the things I need to do, even something as simple as "shower". And the more tasks I see crossed off the list, the better I'll feel throughout the day. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. But, I make sure that each quadrant in my Eisenhower matrix does not exceed eight tasks.

a4. Marking my progress on a monthly calendar. I have a monthly calendar printed and displayed on my fridge. Each day I'm able to exercise, I'll highlight the box with a pink marker. On rest days, I highlight it with orange. The feeling associated is similar to a3. But the difference is that I get to see my progress printed out and on a monthly basis. It's an "at-a-glance" means of monitoring my weekly and monthly progress. The more pink highlights I see, the better I'll feel.

a5. Progressing with my reps, sets, and weights. Because I'm using the Volt training app, my workout progress gets recorded on the app, and the AI automatically adjusts the weight and type of equipment that I need to use for my workouts. An improvement for me really is doing 20lbs dumbbell bench presses. I started with 10lbs. Progressed to 15lbs. Now, doing 20lbs dumbbell presses at 10 reps, 4 sets, is very doable. Soon, I think I'm going to progress to 25lbs dumbbell bench presses. 

b. Write in blog 2-3x per week. So I learned 'reflective journaling' (RJ) in the PhD Life Raft podcast yesterday. RJ is a tool used by many, in this case, PhD students, to record events, feelings, progress, failures, basically reflections about your experiments, experiences, and day-to-day activities as a PhD student. As I Googled more about this RJ, I came across the term metacognitive awareness. Its definition is being aware of how you think; being mindful of how you think, and being aware of the strategies that you use while thinking. This allows for an individual to monitor and evaluate his approach towards thinking. And we usually think while solving problems or learning or doing things. And Anyway, I am not going to give an in-depth discussion about this. I found this article and this article by A Happy PhD to be very helpful in starting one's journaling journey. So here are some ways that I think would allow journaling 2-3x per week stick to me:

b1. Setting a time and day to journal. I read in the article above that he writes every day for his daily journaling, and every Sunday for his what-happened-this-week assessment. Perhaps for me, instead of the Sunday weekly journal schedule, what would work is a weekly journaling on a Saturday. And those in between can be Wednesday (hump day), and the other one can be 'whenever I feel like', so it's fluid. So solids would be Sunday and Wednesday, and one fluid 'whenever I feel like it'. As for the time, it would most likely be at night, or in the late afternoon after school. It should only be at most an hour, like an hour break from studying

b2.  Thinking throughout the day what topic would be interesting to write in the blog. This can be facilitated by my S-pen. Whenever a nice blog topic comes to mind, or if I want to record what happened in the day, I'll write it down in my phone and use that as kodigo as I write my post. 

b3. Thinking and projecting the emotion I'd feel after I finish writing. Then reading what I wrote a few days, weeks, or even years later would help me reminisce that memory. I was age seven or eight when I started writing in a diary. I still remember what the diary looks like in my mind's eye. It has an acrylic cover and a lock on the side. The cover image was cartoon bunnies and birds communing. Inside were ruled, light pink pages, with a GSM that I estimate to be ~75-80. I would write about my crushes and what happened to me during those days I feel like writing. It was a nice experience. I wish I can dig up those old diaries and read all that I've written since 1993. It wasn't a consistent recording, as I've shifted to an online platform 13 years later. But man, to read those memories... I wonder how my writing style was then...

b4. Each entry serves as a memory, just like when Dumbledore would extract a memory and put it in the Pensieve.  This idea would help motivate me to write more and record my memories in writing. I consider my life to be an adventurous one, with a lot of ups and downs. I should have recorded most of them. It would have been fun to relive those memories of the past. 

c. Continue learning French and Spanish in Duolingo. My main motivation for this is not to actually be conversational, although that would be great. It's to exercise my brain and improve cognitive performance. Learning a language has many benefits for brain health, particularly focus, mental alertness, and attention. I noticed that English translations of languages most likely lose the true meaning of what the speaker wanted to say. There's a lot of nuance to language and if one really wants to fully comprehend what a person is saying in their own language, that language must be learned. For example, "Grabe sobrang hirap nung exam, nangamote ako!". In English, "The exam was very difficult/challenging/hard! There were many items I was unable to answer!" Nangamote clearly is not, "there were many items I was unable to answer". So anyway, how do we keep ourselves motivated with Duolingo:

c1. I should always keep in mind that Duolingo is only AT LEAST 15mins per day. That could easily be done. If I can scroll through Instagram from an hour without budging, what's 15mins of learning in Duolingo, right? I've done a 100day streak before, it shouldn't be difficult to replicate that. Only reason why I broke streak was because I went back home to Manila and my routine was completely disarrayed.

c2. Identify a time in the day where productivity starts to wane and do Duolingo in that time window. I noticed I get hardly anything done in the afternoon, between 2-5PM. I'm productive in the morning, and after dinner, around 7PM. So Duolingo should be somewhere in between this time frame. Or maybe i can do it in between my 15min Pomodoro breaks. That'll be a nice break from studying. 

I'd like to think this is a good strategy of fulfilling these personal hobbies. I'll give myself three months to be consistent. And if I am, let's add a few more personal goals. Top of head is learning guitar and voice an hour a day, 2-3x per week. Let's see.

Next post would be Part 3 of what I look forward to in 2023. But it'll discuss my PhD career goals for this year. 

i remain, edz

For 2023, I am really looking forward to…

Well hello there, blog. It's been a while. There are so many things I'd like to write down but when I'm staring at my blank screen, my mind goes blank as well. Anyway, let's see what we can write under this topic of what I'm looking forward to in 2023. 

My 2023 officially started on 2 January as I landed at the DFW Airport from Dubai. I came from a two-week vacation with the whole in the UAE. I had a four-hour layover at Frankfurt and I killed time by reading the book, Grit, by Angela Duckworth. It's a good book, well-written, and packed with primary evidence on hailing grit as a consistent indicator of an individual's success in life. I reminisced all the hardships I endured and the challenges I overcame to be where I am now. But I'm still uncertain if I'm really gritty or not. Aside from reading, I also walked around the airport (not really a good one) and did some stretches prior to boarding.

I had a lot of time to think in the whole 20+ hours of flying and waiting in airports from Dubai to Texas. One of the many thoughts I had was resolutions for 2023. In previous years, I feel a surge of excitement weeks prior the first day of the year, and this will be a sustained feeling until mid-January. It is during this time that I draw up plans and think of things that I look forward to within the year. For 2023 however, this excitement didn't well up in me. To quote my journal entry in my Supernote:

What is in store for 2023? I actually don't know. 

I'm not sure if I'm excited...

it's because every day is an opportunity for me to improve, to fight. 

New year need not happen to start something.

Am I excited for 2023?

So to answer the title of this post, what am I really looking forward to for 2023?

Well, I did write down some trivial hobbies on a personal level: 1) Continue learning French and Spanish in Duolingo; 2) Exercise 3-4x per week; and 3) Write in blog 2-3x per week. So far, 11 days in January, I've managed to exercise five times already. I just need to exercise seven times more to hit that minimum of three times a week. As for the blog thing, well, this is the first entry for this week. And for Duolingo, this should be a daily activity for at least 15mins a day. I am yet to do this last one. 

So what else am I really looking forward to this 2023? As far as my PhD career goes, let's see...

1. Publish at least one paper this year. Honestly, this looks weak. I wish I can publish AT LEAST TWO, but let's first try at least one;

2. Finish data collection for TRACE Alaska and TRACE multi-country surveys. This could extend to start the analysis for these two potential papers;

3. Get at least one A in any subject for Spring 2023; 

4. Get accepted into another PhD program elsewhere (this one merits a whole new blog post. But I don't want to write anything yet until results come out by March);

5. Present in at least one conference this year; and

6. Actively participate in drafting a funding proposal with the Arctic T-SLIP group and submit proposal.

CONSISTENCY, FOCUS, DISCIPLINE are key ingredients for the TENACITY and PERSISTENCE needed to accomplish all these six PhD goals for 2023. I only listed six because these are doable. Writing down too many to-dos will look like they are tasks rather than goals. Also, more goals might overwhelm my senses, leading to a flight-or-fight response. When I’m overwhelmed, I usually freeze. I stop doing whatever it is I need to do and just refuse to do anything until the last minute. This usually results in a sleepless night and low or failing grade in an exam or project. It’s that bad.

Now that I’ve listed down my goals, I think it would be effective if I write the different steps I need to do to achieve each goal. Yeah, I think that’ll be a good topic for my next blog post! Woohoo!

Let’s go 2023!!!