So, you got sick and need to study for that test, now what? Does studying while sick work? But if you don’t study now, will you have time?
In this article I will answer whether studying while sick really works and give you some strategies that you can use to be able to study without despairing.
Let’s start by analyzing your current situation.
Does being sick hinder you from studying?
The first thing you need to think about is, does the illness you have today hinder you from studying?
This is a simple question to help you decide whether or not it is worth studying, let’s take an example. During my time at college, due to the busy schedule, I sometimes had migraine attacks. Anyone who has a migraine knows that there’s nothing you can do, just lie down in a dark room and wait for it to pass. If this is your case, there is no other way than to wait and rest.
However, there are those things like flu or strep throat. This varies a lot from person to person, there are some people who, even with the flu, manage to stay focused on their studies, while others have severe headaches.
What I want you to think about initially is there’s no point in forcing it now, sincerely evaluate whether or not you can study now according to your conditions. Furthermore, there is another very important factor.
The importance of rest to avoid worsening the situation
There are cases of people who don’t want to rest and force themselves to continue studying, in which case you could be doing yourself great harm and making your situation even worse.
What do you prefer? Rest and return to your routine soon or force yourself to study now, get worse and stay sick even longer? I’m sure you want to get well as soon as possible, and that’s why rest is important.
Understand that everything has its right time, there is no point in despairing now to try to study. When you’re sick it’s not an excuse, you really need to stop everything.
One way to feel more at ease is to always have a post-illness plan.
A post-illness study plan
To avoid generating anxiety or despair of doing nothing, establish a plan after recovering, a plan to recover the time you had to rest.
For example, there was a case of a person I assisted who was preparing for FUVEST, we were less than a month before the test and she became ill.
In this case, my advice was for her to rest that week with peace of mind that the following week we would do some reinforcement, double the hours of study to advance the material and ensure that everything was reviewed. That simple.
The idea behind the plan is to create a system that has a beginning and an end to advance everything and guarantee the result. Understand that this plan works not only to calm you down, but also to guarantee learning and speed up the content a little more.
What if I get sick during exam week?
In this case there isn’t much to do other than rest. Forcing yourself to study can be worse and make you do very poorly on the test. The ideal is to always look for a specialist and, depending on the case, present a valid certificate to take the test at another time.
But if it’s not possible, don’t despair. You will be able to recover this grade later, but let it serve as a lesson for you to maintain a continuous study system, with review and practice, because when there is a study habit, the drop in test results is very small.
Conclusion
I hope that the arguments I presented here help you decide whether or not it is worth studying while ill. Note that I did not try to provide a ready-made answer, but to make you evaluate your situation, as each person has their own particularities and knows what their limits are.
