How to study 12+ hours per day without hurting your...

dotman

At risk of feeding the troll...

have you tried standing up?

ΔxΔp≥ћ/2

Does your neck get sore or just your bum?

fizziks

I agree. And just sitting down 12+ hours a day isn't healthy either. If you love math so much, why not join an academic math club at your school? You know there are people out there that may share your interest similar to your commitment. Have you tried going out to the school's library to study? Don't limit yourself to just in your room.


Don't abandon all your memories of a social life. Networking is a great way to get jobs and interviewing skills are vital. If you cannot socialize with a simple person, you won't get far in life, no matter how much knowledge you have.

hrc969

I know some people like which you mention I'm sort of like mathboy and this got me advanced enough for me to start taking graduate math classes in my second year of university. There was a grad student in there who was a Harvard alumni and advanced for his age. It was very depressing to him that a guy like me was in the same class. Gladly I am not like that and I feel honored to know people who are more advanced than I am or than I was at their age. But yes it can be a serious problem for some.

Like I mentioned above, I am very similar to you in this studying alot. I had one particular quarter where I took 6 classes (28 units) at a quarter system school. I ended up having 6 finals on five days. I did alot of studying that quarter. I purposely chose my classes so that I wouldn't mind that much studying and still continue to study and extended number of hours. I thought that the post about taking 15 minute breaks was very relevant.
In fact what I do is that I take a 5-10 minute break. Not from studying but from sitting. During this time, there are alot of times where I will just stand up and walk around and continue reading. Sometimes I go eat some fruit or talk to my wife or play with my son. But after a little while I go back to studying and no more hurting for a while. You don't have to even take a break from sitting every hour. Every 2 or 3 hours can be good enough. But one break for 12 hour study period is probably not enough. Oh I id have to get cushions also (4). But combining that with short breaks every hour or two fixed the problem for me.

mathboy, let me also support what Cyrus is saying here. I also use to hang out with friends in high school and was not as productive as I have been now. Now it is not impossible to build a social network and study many hours a day all at once. If you make the people you socialize other advanced math majors or other people who are passionate about mathematics then that's very good. If not then you can also (should do it even in addition to what I just mentioned) talk to professors. All of my professors have been very nice and willing to talk about subjects I am studying even if they do not pertain to a class they are teaching. While this is not the same as sitting there with a book and studying this can be even more useful sometimes. What you should do is find a balance between self studying and talking to others about mathematics. In this way you can learn more and you are still communicating with other humans.

sadhu

i am too a kind of person with little social interests
i find peace in my own thoughts, i do have a passion for maths and science right from my early childhood (well my child hood is not over yet)
i admire you for such dedication, but may i comment that don't study for your need ,just interest......
i am used to study 18 hours a day but that depends on what i study ....

what i only have to say to you is that
If you are truly interested in maths or physics , i bet you time does n matter , what matter is , are you satisfied or not.

malawi_glenn

Friends open up contacts etc for work. When you eventually apply for PhD-position you are then working in a team. The human body is not built just for sit on a chair, go out and exercise and make friends. Find friends that you can study togheter with at least.

turbo

There is a real medical risk involved in sitting for a very long time - deep vein thrombosis. If you don't get up and walk around a bit periodically, blood pools in your legs and can cause dangerous clots to develop, which could result in a pulmonary embolism.

mathboy

Ok, guys. I'm going for a walk.

malawi_glenn

mathboy: you dont wanna end up studying in wheel chair or in a hostiptal right? ;)

ehrenfest

I also have the encountered the problem of aches due to over-studying. I have ADHD or something so whenever I am sitting I am always tapping my feet or tapping my hands or something. Maybe that is what makes it easy for me to study long hours. I would also recommend going to a library or somewhere where other people are studying because there it is less difficult to fall asleep and the environment seems to foster learning better.

The ache that I am most familiar with is my back, not my bum, and to solve this I usually just move to my bed or some chair that has a different contour or just shift my position.

As for your lack of interest in friends, I share that. But that is mainly because there is hardly any other undergraduate at my university who is really interested in math and physics like I am. If you go to a college with other strongly motivated math and physics students, GET TO KNOW THEM, and collaborate with them as much as possible, because your learning will increase multiple-fold when you work together. Otherwise work your bum off (pun intended) and get into MITs grad school, where there will be tons of people worth interacting with.

mathboy

Ok, I'm back from the mall. Having bought nothing and heckled by a salesperson, I must say that it was a TOTAL WASTE OF TIME. Back to my studying now...

fizziks

I would seriously take his advice. My mom's friend suffered from the same problems from sitting on her sewing machine and working 14+ hours nonstop. One day she suffered spasms in her legs and had to go to the hospital.

No it wasn't. If you don't want to take our advice, then you're wasting your time looking through these forums. Exercising or taking breaks from studying is not a waste of time. Spending 12+ hours a day on a desk studying is a waste of time. Life's too short to have your head into a book 24-7. Your health is by far more important than your studying. If you don't want to make friends and be remotely social, that's fine, but you can't live a healthy life of sitting down and studying the entire day.

quasar987

Back to the topic: Someone mentioned studying lying down. Have you tried that? Personally, whenever I'm not writing, I'm lying down on my bed.

ehrenfest

If the reason that he is studying is that he is ambitious and eventually wants to get out of his chair and perhaps get out of a university that is not very stimulating and make important discoveries, I think it is fine to be reclusive. If on the other hand, he is just studying because he hates the world, that is probably not good. There are a lot of college campuses where it seems like everyone is set on maximizing their alcohol consumption, minimizing their learning, and caring enough about their careers only to graduate. If he is at a college like this, I would say ignoring the social scene is not a bad idea.

BTW, I have heard that there is a limit to how much your brain can remember from a day's worth of studying, and twelve hours of studying is probably pushing that. Make sure you break up your time between learning new things and doing practice problems.

mathboy

Yes, I've found that I sometimes have to lie down sideways on the sofa to read to relieve my sitting problems. But it only works if I'm only reading. When I want to write out my solutions (which is most of the time), I can't lie on the sofa anymore.

mathboy

Good point. I learn about 1 section per day, which is not much, because I spend about 11 of those 12 hours doing problems from that section.

eastside00_99

Its comendable really: my personal hero had similar habits as you and kept it up for over 10 years of his life. Later he left mathematics though.

I would recommend, just to get some yin in your yang, that you read an interview by J.P. Serre to see what his experience of working on mathematics has been like. I don't think being a mathematician is about having encyclopedic knowledge of mathematics; to me, it is about playing with ideas, expressing them, re-expressing them, talking about them with others!!!, and so on. That's what I worries me is that you are not playing with the ideas.

To being on the level of a Harvard grad after a year: all I can say is yeah right! Being in the same class doesn't mean you are on the same level; I can sign up for Midevil French Literature 3 but doesn't mean I am on the level of Ezra Pond. Besides, four years of idle playing with mathematics combined with some solid study far outshines 1 year of straight study just in experience alone.