Finals week is fast approaching, meaning that soon all across the world there will be millions of stressed and anxious college students. Considering that we’re already dealing with pandemic anxiety, we shouldn’t be surprised that this finals week might be the worst hell week that you will ever experience. Just because we’re going through a tough time doesn’t mean that we can’t find alternatives to develop healthy studying habits. Here’s a few healthy studying habits that might reduce your anxiety and give you a chill finals week…if that actually exists.
- Schedule your time to focus on studying
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Having a routine set up can help you reduce anxiety and during this time, the less anxiety you have the more it will benefit you. By setting up a schedule you can determine how long your breaks are. Set time to focus on something else so you don’t go completely insane and you still get your daily Tik Tok dose. Having a schedule helps you with your routine which is proven to reduce stress as well and you have complete control of your day and what you want to do with that valuable time.
- Don’t blow off sleep
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Sleep is a crucial part of studying, believe it or not. Your brain needs to recharge after a long day of studying or maybe even procrastinating some of your work. Lack of sleep has been linked to poor performances during school and work, so if you studied hard, don’t waste it by not getting enough sleep. When setting up a daily routine make sure to include a set time to go to bed and respect the boundary you set yourself to go to sleep.
- Shut down social networking and gaming
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Social media has taken over our lives and it’s part of our daily routine, but during this time it’s best to limit how much time we spend on social media. What we need to understand while doing this is that by shutting off our social media for a couple of days doesn’t mean the gossip and the news will be gone. For finals week you should focus on yourself and not what TMZ reported last night.
- Don’t forget to eat
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It’s important to eat during this time considering that you need more energy than your coffee is giving you (and it’s not that good for you either.) During this period you should always remember to have your 3 meals and to drink water. It’s recommended to eat healthy foods and snacks since they won’t make you feel sluggish while you study. Try to stay away from caffeine, sugary food, fried foods, and fatty food.
- Try rewriting or summarizing your notes and chapters
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Rewriting notes and summarizing your notes and chapters because it helps you remember important information. You should summarize them in a way that will help you remember the details. Without your notes or chapter summaries you basically don’t have anything to study with. This way you have all the information written in a way that helps you remember, such as key words or key colors or even what memory you’ve linked to the definition of a concept.
- Don’t forget “me time”
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Finals are important but your well being and how you feel is more important. If you don’t feel well or feel too tired it’s more than reasonable to take a break for you to gather yourself again. Studying is something very stressful and it drains your energy, so taking some time for yourself can help regain that energy and keep a constant energy at all times. Plus, during this time it’s important to realize that exams don’t determine who you are, you just need to be satisfied with yourself, not with what others want.
- Cramming might work sometimes, but…
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When cramming for a test you go back to square one, constantly anxious and stressed. On some occasions it may work but it’s definitely not a useful studying tip, it’s more like a 5-minutes craft tip that doesn’t make sense. Cramming leads to many other things such as feeling sick, forgetting details about your material, and having trouble eating, which we now know is a recipe for disaster. When cramming you sometimes don’t even retain all of the details, just the ones that your brain could comprehend during your cramming period which leads to bad outcomes.
This finals week is slightly different from the ones we’ve seen in the past, which causes us to have more stress and anxiety at times. Luckily it’s only one week out of our semester but it doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t find methods on how to make it less stressful and help ourselves and others. Even if these tips don’t work for you or you didn’t get the outcome you expected doesn’t mean that you there’s no other option, you just need to find what works for you and you find that out by trying different things. I wish you all the best of luck during this finals week!