Lack of Revision

Hello again!

It seems I’m not having much success with revision today, so I decided to take the time I was going to waste and put it to good/better use, so I hope you’ll forgive me if this post seems to not really have a purpose except to give other procrastinators something to waste time on.

Have you ever had times when you just crave human contact? Affection? For lack of a more generic term, Love?
If you have the fortune of having someone next to you who you can rely on, then I am truly happy for you. Unfortunately I’m not in that boat at the moment. Regular readers and friends of mine will know that I’m in a long distance relationship and, for those who don’t know what it’s like, it REALLY isn’t easy. It’s an emotional roller-coaster ride that will send you in a spin like a corkscrew, revolving around another corkscrew, around another corkscrew, again and again and again…until You are well and truly…well…screwed!
The worst part of it all in my opinion aren’t the arguments and the feeling that everything goes pear-shaped  for even minor things, but rather that impossibility of finding comfort and a break from the stresses of the world. If your true friends are few and far between (literally in my case) you end up seeing yourself as a social outcast with ever fewer people you can trust.

I’ve never seen myself as the heart and soul of my group of friends, far from it actually! I count myself lucky to have the friends I do.

So here I am, failing at revision, freely writing about my emotional afflictions on a blog. My only company a cup of tea or coffee and some music.
A rather alternative music at the minute too: Brainwave Entrainment, Binaural Beats and Isochronic Tones. That’s my generic set of search parameters on YouTube. You could search for what they mean, but I’ll try briefly explaining what I have understood them to be.

Brainwave Entrainment is the general term for these sounds, tones, “waves” that are designed to influence your brain-pattern  and allow you to potentially form new neural connections. Some frequencies wake you up more, others allow you to sleep better or revise more successfully or help with hearing problems.
Binaural Beats involves mixing (usually two) frequencies that are fairly close to each other so that when heard through stereo headphones your brain is forced to imagine hearing a third, fictitious frequency to make sense of the original ones. This is down to the fact that frequencies this close to each other don’t occur in nature, so your brain doesn’t really understand them and is trained to hear them. Each person hears this third sound in a slightly different way apparently.
Isochronic Tones are single frequency tones that again are supposed to allow you to concentrate or wake up or relax depending on the frequency. 40Hz is apparently like caffeine to your brain.
They don’t even have to be tones, they can just be “noise”: white, pink, brown…to the untrained ear it may sound just like static or like half a second of rolling ocean waves put on loop.
(DISCLAIMER: you shouldn’t listen to them if you are pregnant or have medical issues. Also, there is no guarantee that they will work for you like they do for me. There is also a certain amount – quite a lot actually – of self-convincing that has to go on. It won’t allow you to pass an exam unless you actually get down and revise properly!)

They’ve helped me with meditation, relaxation, and revision these last few weeks. My productivity is on a PB since this time last year! But finally tiredness and stress has caught up with me again and not even the music is working. A whiteboard, a few isochronic tones, a crap-load of notes and weeks of stress later – I’m essentially back to where I didn’t want to be. A hole. And a bloody big one too.