Tips for finals week
As finals week is fast approaching, stress is beginning to mount, and more and more of us are starting to feel overwhelmed. While collective empathy is great, it does little to help us when we are at the bottom of a pile of work. So, for anyone out there who is in the same boat as me and is just starting to feel the pressure of the end of the semester mount, here are a few tips that help me to be productive and prevent a spiral that just puts off the work.
1. Take breaks. Yup, you read that correctly. Your brain can only do so much work for so long before it stops processing information. It takes a lot of energy to receive, interpret, and store information, especially if you are trying to remember it for more than the next two to three minutes. The current research says to take regular breaks when you do your work, and how long those breaks are and how often you take them depend on you personally. Have you been feeling really distracted lately? Maybe take a five-minute break every 15 minutes. If you are ready to sit down and bang out a project, maybe a five-minute break every hour is enough for you. Use a timer if consistency is a challenge for you, and really stick to it—don’t let a five-minute break turn into a 45 minute one—that defeats the purpose of a break.
2. Put your phone away. If you need it for your timer and it’s your entertainment for your five-minute break that is okay, but otherwise, turn it off. Research shows that just having it on the table is a distraction, like putting a cookie in front of a kid and telling them they can’t have it. Put your phone on do-not-disturb, tuck it away in a drawer or in your backpack, and close out any unnecessary tabs on your computer. Not to mention, there is also research that your phone will only increase your anxiety, which can make it difficult to complete work.
3. Sleep, especially the night before a final. You may feel like you are functioning, but trust me, the neural connections in your brain are struggling. A lot of people feel pretty good after five hours of sleep, including me; but what you can’t see or feel is the lack of higher-level processing and analyzing that you are going to need for your test. Not to mention, sleep plays an important role in consolidating information for retrieval later on. Studying right before bed is actually a great way to prepare yourself for the test the next day. Get a full six to eight hours, not just the night before, but all of finals week. It takes three days of good sleep to make up for one all-nighter. And don’t play on your phone before bed, it will disrupt your sleep even if you get a full eight hours.
4. Focus on application questions, not definition questions. Obviously, you need to know what an agonist is before you can answer application questions about it; but your professors don’t want you to just know the material—they want you to be able to apply it. Professors like conceptual questions, and it is easier to learn five or ten concepts than fifty to one hundred definitions.
5. Last but not least, find a study location and environment that works for you. Be honest—can you study or get work done with your friends, or do you get too distracted with them around? Can you work alone, or do you need an accountability buddy to make sure you stay on track? These are the questions, folks. I personally like a semi-public or public location that is quiet. You may want something different, and if it works, go after it.
Good luck with finals, folks—I hope these tips are helpful to you, and I’ll see you on the other side.
