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I think have a bug of this form, and it’s been an issue for me for a long time.
When it’s school break or a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, I find that it’s peaceful for me to study mathematics because I feel like I’m not being forced to study certain things. But as soon as school starts, and I take a math class where the material starts to become unfamiliar to me , and there’s no motivation being provided for the material as to why we are doing what we we’re doing, it feels forced and so I become stymied by listening to music and browsing articles on psychology/cognitive science, reddit ,or lesswrong to figure out this burnout , and then bouncing back to thinking whether I should suppress my curiosity to do well in the class , or should I let my curiosity run free but in return not doing so great in the class.
Because if I don’t suppress my curiosity and hence flow with mathematics, then I feel like I’ll run the risk of diverging away from the course material, which in turn I’ll do badly on exams because I didn’t focus on the required topics enough.
I’ve taken some proof based courses like real analysis, so it’s not like I don’t know how to prove some things in a typical traditional math undergrad course . It’s just that I feel guilty not focusing on my school , so I retreat to listening to music or reading psychology or browsing lesswrong articles to escape from these negative feelings on whether I should focus exclusively on the math in the class or playing with math I find interesting but at the risk of performing poorly in my class. I know these two activities don’t have to be mutually exclusive: you can play with math you find interesting that’s been assigned by the professor. However, the math assigned by the professor might not be interesting sometimes at first, so I burnout from being bombarded by "should" statements.
Any input/advice/guidance from anyone here would be greatly appreciated. I've been having trouble fixing this bug alone.