A little over a year ago, I wrote a post I called “The Longest Winter,” about how the challenge of keeping yourself motivated during the long, cold winter months was made extra difficult due to the disruptions of pandemic life. I focused on how the uncertainty with which you had been living might have made it difficult for you to believe that spring would even come, let alone that it would bring with it the signs of new life, hope, and normality that you were craving. This year, I decided to wait until spring was much closer at hand to write about keeping yourself motivated through a long period without a break, in hopes that this spring will turn out to be better than either of the two that preceded it, and that doing your best to remain focused now will lead you to be able to balance your studies with all that you are anticipating as the year goes on.
Waiting until closer to spring to write this post makes it a more positive one than last year’s for several reasons. Though it is possible that winter is not quite done with us and more cold weather and storms may yet occur, the increase in the amount of sunlight we experience each day now helps to combat winter’s lingering effects. Daylight Saving Time is just over a week away, and as hard as it might be for you to lose the extra hour of sleep when it first occurs, I’m sure most of you will eventually be glad for the extra hour of evening sunlight that results from it. Even though the loss of sunlight in the winter affects some people more than others, it affects everyone to a certain extent, and no matter the extent to which it affects you, it can have a negative impact on your ability to focus on your schoolwork. No matter how motivated you have been by the increase of natural sunlight in the spring before, take the opportunity this year to notice the positive effect it can have on you. Many of you have completed more of your work outdoors during the school day these past two years as a way to decrease the chance that COVID could spread among you. While that may not happen as much, or even at all, this spring because COVID cases have significantly decreased from where they once were, you could certainly consider reaping the benefits of sunlight to your mood and motivation by choosing to do some of your homework and/or assigned reading outdoors. If you would rather not read or study outdoors, you can get the same benefit by taking your study breaks outdoors, and if you use those breaks to walk or do any other physical activity, so much the better.
Another way in which waiting until closer to spring to write it makes this year’s post more positive than last year’s is that this year, you should feel much more able to anticipate spring as you did before the pandemic hit. Though not everything is where we normally would wish it to be, this spring has brought us all much closer to what we once knew than last spring did. While I’m sure you have not forgotten the beginning of spring two years ago, when everything you were anticipating started to be ripped away from you, or last spring, when hoping for a return to normalcy did not go as planned, seeing the return of some previously canceled events and the lifting of restrictions on others should make this spring a much more positive and enjoyable experience than the previous two have been.
As great as it may be to anticipate upcoming sports, performances, proms, graduations, and any other end-of-year activities being restored to you and/or made to more closely resemble what you remember from life before the pandemic, knowing you have more to look forward to now only makes it even more imperative that you continue to work on your study skills than it was when having less to look forward to these past two springs might have gotten you down. Returning to more of a normal life this spring means that spring fever is looming, so the better you prepare now to be able to focus on your studies then, the better your academic year will turn out to be. A lot has been written and said over these past two years about how many of us have forgotten how to navigate parts of our lives that have been so drastically changed for so long. If you find having a much busier spring schedule this year to be one of those things, making sure you have good study skills to fall back on can go a long way toward making this spring the best it can possibly be.
As hard as it may be to believe right now, spring is coming, and all signs point to it being a much more full and positive one for you than the two that preceded it were. As you look forward to anything and everything about it that is more like what you remember from before the pandemic, make sure not to let your excitement keep you from persevering with your work. Maintaining your focus at this time of the year is no easy feat, but if you keep focusing on your study skills and on balancing your studies with all you have to look forward to, it can be done.