I once heard that there are people whose bodies produce too much adrenaline, making it impossible for them to laze around. If that is true, then my body must be having an adrenaline defeciency because all it ever wants to do is relax and sleep. It takes a great amount of effort for me to get it out of bed every morning and only the promise of adorning it in a red gown for graduation, gets it to wake up. I sometimes go as far as showing it the graduation ceremony that the university posts on youtube, where it admires all those other bodies (that were succesfully dragged through a PhD by their owners) walking in a procession, wearing that very red gown it covets.
Beyond the PhD, I also have to convince this body to stay healthy. I therefore have to deny it all those sweet things that it craves and cheat it into doing exercise three or so times a week. For that, I have to vary the exercises, otherwise the body will not go for more than a fortnight, before rejecting a routine workout. Luckily, it enjoys swimming, so I try to do that once a week, throw in a cycling route with lovely views then maybe do a dance session with it's favourite music.
In this way, I have managed to keep the body in check and to get my research going but once in a while, there is a rebellion and I let the body take a short break before I start slave-driving it again. To compensate for all that suffering, I have promised the body that I will let it go on a very long holiday when our research is through, and all it will have to do is sleep all day, and party all night. Of course this is a long way off, but I entice the body to keep dreaming and make the money needed for our expensive holiday. Labels: Perseverance, PhD, Prose, Research, Success, Trying, Weight-loss