The more active the brain is, the more energy it uses. We become mentally exhausted, take breaks, eat and nap in order to replenish our energy reserves. Then to psych ourselves up to repeat the cycle over and over until exams are over.
It can be so hard to readjust your thinking processes from relaxed to memory and recall. Reading is more than just looking at a page and seeing the words. It's analysis of the words we look at and the sentences they create to come to an understanding of what is being said in the sentence, paragraph or chapter.
Once I get started with studying, I can seriously go on for awhile, take some bathroom breaks and some naps and get right back to it. But once the flow is disrupted by, say, a phone call from a parent telling me to do this, that and the other, I'm completely knocked off my axis and cannot possibly continue. Having to perform other actions that I have to psych my mind up to then to go back to studying right after? Difficult. I'm busy, let me concentrate. When I bother my Mom when she's busy, she bites my head off. I express a little frustration because I'm busy, she gives me a lecture about how I should just do what she asks and stop complaining (I don't actually complain, I merely grunt).
It's not fair to be busted like that just because I'm not the one who pays the bills and makes the money. I can't do it yet, duh. I just wish parents could be so much more understanding of how not-s0-simple studying is. It's more than merely reading a few books and making a few notes. So many mental processes are conducted that we can't even imagine.
