If You Struggle With Anxiety, Overwhelm, Or Just Plain Feeling Like A Failure, I Have A Mantra For You

When to use flash cards: memorizing words/vocab, numbers, equations, names, dates, and verbatim facts or lines.

When to use mnemonic devices: memorizing steps of a process or sets of facts/information/people, especially in an order.

When to use concept maps or drawings: learning (rather than memorizing) relationships, processes, concepts, systems, etc.

When to use tables or charts: learning or memorizing systems (eg. conjugation in a foreign language), sets of sets of information (eg. people and when they lived and what they did), and other large/complex groups of information.

When to use songs: for learning or memorizing anything.

Disclaimer: this is a general guideline. If something else works for you, do it!

General Tips

Know and respect your limits. Overworking yourself will lead to crashing down and need for unproductive recovery times. It’s better to work slowly but consistently, both for your self-esteem and for your general productivity.

You are not weak for seeking help. Help has the goal of making you be on equal footing with everyone else, not give you an advantage. And, more than anything else, it says nothing about your personal worth.

Set yourself achievable goals. Stress and pressure will make your disability feel even heavier and more limiting than it already is, so give yourself some leeway by setting reasonable objectives.

You have the right to say no. No to friends who want to go out, no to family members who want to get a say in how you handle your time, no to a boss who wants to schedule you over time. It’s your choice.

Lifestyle

Get good sleep hygiene. Even if you have a hectic schedule, try to go to bed and wake up within the same hour every day and set yourself a getting-to-bed routine that includes shutting down screens 30min to 1h before bedtime, relaxation time, and perhaps meditation. If you need to go to bed later than usual, do not try to calculate how many hours of sleep you will get, simply set your alarm and go to bed.

Use a routine. Routines make things less heavy for you and make it less likely to forget important things.

Try to eat healthy. It can be hard on a student budget, but things like beans and legumes can be bought in bulk for cheap and are easy to cook and nutritious. Over the weekend, you can cook batches of food that can be frozen so you have easily accessible meals on the go for 1-2 weeks.

Drink water. Avoid using caffeine if you can as it disturbs your body’s natural sleep-wake cycle and it can become addicting.

Exercise a little. It can be just short walks around the block or some gentle stretches. Whatever gets you moving around, brings a bit of fresh air and leaves you some time to think about something else than your studies is beneficial.

Try to avoid cluttering at all costs. This one is hard to do, but when you’re sick, accumulated clutter can really feel overwhelming. Should you ever find yourself unable to keep things clean, try cleaning the clutter little by little over a week or two instead of trying to tackle it all at once.

Getting Help From Your School

Contact your office of disability. Do it as soon as possible when you get registered to a new school to get the forms you have to hand out to your doctor to get accommodations.

Explain your situation to your teacher. No need to go full on as if they were your doctor, but explaining that you might need to miss out a little more often than the average student could help them be more understanding of your situation. Also name and explain the accommodations you are entitled to.

Meet with your disability counsellor. They are the ones in charge of deciding which accommodations are fair for you considering your abilities and limitations. Don’t hesitate to meet up again with them if you feel like you are struggling a lot more than your classmates, or if your professors are not collaborative.

Be aware of your options. You can have different accommodations to help you in class, like having a designated note-taker, the right to record classes, etc. Other accommodations are related to exams and assignments: additional time to hand out assignments, more time on exams, the ability to do exams in a separate room, the ability to use a computer (for people with dyslexia and other related disabilities), etc. Trust your disability counsellor to know what’s right but don’t hesitate to make suggestions.

Get financial help. There are grants specifically for students with disabilities. Governmental help can also be adjusted relatively to your disability, either with more money granted to you or a higher ratio of grants-to-loans.

Study Habits

Use the pomodoro method for school work. Your brain has limited energy expenditure. You will get more out of multiple hours of school work if you take frequent breaks to move around, drink water and rest your mind.

Plan assignments in advance. If you have a disability, chances are lack of sleep and stress have a huge impact on your ability to concentrate. If you plan your assignments in advance, you get to start working on them for short amounts of time every day instead of a huge burst, giving yourself time to review your paper before submitting and not being stuck with pulling an all-nighter.

Get a reduced course load. Even non-disabled students tend to prefer reduced course loads because it allows them a less stressful/fast-paced study planning and they have more time to fix mishaps.

Make your to-do list short and achievable. It’s way more empowering to be able to go through your whole list and do a little bit of extra than never finishing your lists.

Keep a back-up day per week. You never know when you might find yourself facing a bad mental health or physical health day and need some rest. Try planning your study and assignments in such a way that you have an extra day to complete them should you need to postpone work.

Ask for help from your teacher. It might seem intimidating, especially if you have anxiety and such, but teachers are there to help and they’ll be more lenient towards health-related mishaps if they know you’re a good student who genuinely wants to work. They’ll also be more likely to consider revising your grade should you end up a shy few points from passing.

These are very broad tips that might not be applicable to everyone. I know most of these helped me, so I hope they help you a little. I know you got this. 💕

MoonAlchemy’s 2018 Beltane inspired Giveaway! 

This giveaway is in no affiliated with Tumblr. 

Hello, everyone! I have been waiting for the right time to begin this giveaway, and today is that day! I have collected some Beltane inspired items that are just begging to fin a place on someone’s altar. 

RULES: 

You MUST be following me.

Think of something you are grateful for in your life. (feel free to send it to me in a message, or tell someone you care about!)

Only reblogs count.

DO NOT tag as a giveaway.

Extra entry: Favorite my Etsy shop, or an item if you already do! (message me your username on here!)

No giveaway accounts, and please don’t spam your followers!

Only open to U.S. residents, sorry!

Winner chosen on April 25, 2018! 

What you can win:

Three chime candles (red, yellow and green)

One succulent tea light. 

One Quartz point.

One piece of Rose Quartz

One piece of natural Citrine

A super awesome full sized chalice

Faux Dahlias

Large Vials of Rosemary, Basil, and Rose Petals 

Handmade necklace with faux florals inside. 

One full Celtic Cross tarot card reading from me! 

Thank you for your continued support and have fun!

me: i just got off break AP student: break? 🤓 the only breaks i get 📖📄 are between paragraphs 📝👓☑ i never rest 🙋☕💀 just grind 💯📈📚for those fives 🖊🎓

english essays would be way cooler if they’d teach us to be just, super critical of classic literature 

imagine if the standard teaching approach to essays was more along the lines of “here’s an outdated written work by a member of the ruling class of a society that was conspicuously more prejudiced than ours. use textual examples to demonstrate why it would be hella inappropriate and probably quite shitty to publish-glorify today.

“i’m sad and idk how to feel better”

“i don’t know what to draw”

“i always mess up”

“BUT I SUCK”

02/01/2017

⭐️ Starting on my physics study guide! I’m actually really excited about getting back to school, so a bit of a routine is established. I’m a creature of habit, so knowing that there are assigned tins blocks for me to do things in really helps with keep my mood and life level.

I’m liking the Earth-tone aesthetic I’ve got going on here, so I think I might apply it to other projects in the future!

Supplies used: - Staedtler marsgraphic duo in fawn and flesh - Tombow ABT in 977 - Pigma Micron 005 in black

Going for GOLD

On Jan. 25, we’re going for GOLD!

We’re launching an instrument called Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, GOLD for short. It’s a new mission that will study a complicated — and not yet fully understood — region of near-Earth space, called the ionosphere.

Space is not completely empty: It’s teeming with fast-moving energized particles and electric and magnetic fields that guide their motion. At the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, these particles and fields — the ionosphere — co-exist with the upper reaches of the neutral atmosphere.

That makes this a complicated place. Big events in the lower atmosphere, like hurricanes or tsunamis, can create waves that travel all the way up to that interface to space, changing the wind patterns and causing disruptions.

It’s also affected by space weather. The Sun is a dynamic star, and it releases spurts of energized particles and blasts of solar material carrying electric and magnetic fields that travel out through the solar system. Depending on their direction, these bursts have the potential to disrupt space near Earth.

This combination of factors makes it hard to predict changes in the ionosphere — and that can have a big impact. Communications signals, like radio waves and signals that make our GPS systems work, travel through this region, and sudden changes can distort them or even cut them off completely.

Low-Earth orbiting satellites — including the International Space Station — also fly through the ionosphere, so understanding how it fluctuates is important for protecting these satellites and astronauts.  

GOLD is a spectrograph, an instrument that breaks light down into its component wavelengths, measuring their intensities. Breaking light up like this helps scientists see the behavior of individual chemical elements — for instance, separating the amount of oxygen versus nitrogen. GOLD sees in far ultraviolet light, a type of light that’s invisible to our eyes.

GOLD is a hosted payload. The instrument is hitching a ride aboard SES-14, a commercial communications satellite built by Airbus for SES Government Solutions, which owns and operates the satellite.

Also launching this year is the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, which will also study the ionosphere and neutral upper atmosphere. But while GOLD will fly in geostationary orbit some 22,000 miles above the Western Hemisphere, ICON will fly just 350 miles above Earth, able to gather close up images of this region.

Together, these missions give us an unprecedented look at the ionosphere and upper atmosphere, helping us understand the very nature of how our planet interacts with space.

To learn more about this region of space and the GOLD mission, visit: nasa.gov/gold.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

Excited to finally be using the #bulletjournal system again in 2018! This is my study plan for the upcoming week, well, at least part of it. . As anyone has been saying: how are we so close to 2018? Or should I say to some people in different timezones than me: happy 2018!!! ✨ . Do you have any resolutions for 2018?? I do!! And I will be sharing them with you on my new blog in a post very very soon! Also, look out for a video about my planning system this upcoming week 😊