In the midst of the most hectic and stressful week of the semester, it is important to make time for study breaks. You may be spending hours studying and pulling all-nighters during this week, which, inevitably becomes very mentally and physically draining.
In order to perform your best during finals week, it is important that you take care of yourself and allow plenty of study breaks throughout the week. Otherwise, you will burn yourself out or eventually affect your brain’s ability to remember and retain information. Students usually do much more studying than usual during finals week, so it is very likely that student’s brain will not adapt well with the extra studying time.
The first thing to do when planning out your finals week is to create a schedule of when you will be studying and when you will take breaks. Wake up at a reasonable time to start your day, use a planner and plan out your day out hour-by-hour. How you decide to break up your time studying and your time taking breaks is up to you. One way you can split up your studying and break time is to take a 15 minute break for every hour that you study. If you prefer to study for long periods of time, consider taking a 30 minute break for every two hours you spend studying. It is very important to create a schedule because it will help you time studying more organize and efficient.
Once you have established a schedule for studying and breaks, you should then figure out both how you want to study and what type of studying you will be doing. Just how there are different types of learners, there are different type of studying methods. If you learn through physically doing something, you are a kinesthetic learner. Kinesthetic learners should consider studying by writing out problems by pencil, make models of what you’re studying or draw out diagrams and illustrations. If you are a visual learner, reading through your textbook, look at illustrations and highlight important information in your textbooks. Finally, if you are an auditory learner, you should say information you’re studying outloud, listen to textbook audio or schedule an in-person or Zoom meeting with your professors to ask questions.
After you figure out how to study based of your type of learning, you should figure out how you want to prioritize and divide up studying by course and subject. Do you want to study the harder classes first or will you study the easier ones first? Or, do you want study in order of the finals you have throughout the week. For example, if you have a math final on Monday and your last final is biology on Friday, you may want to study for math first and biology last.
The last thing you could do when planning out your finals week is to figure out what you want to do on your breaks. As established before, breaks are an important part of studying. How you decide to spend your break is up to you. However, you should do something that either relaxes you, is fun or resets you mentally. If you are looking to do something that relaxes you, try meditating or listening to your favorite music. If you want to do something fun during your break, try doing your favorite quick workout or playing a video game. Finally, if you are looking to do something that will mentally reset you, try watching an episode of a show that doesn’t require any mental energy to watch like a reality show or a comedy show.
