Top 3 tips for a better study

 

When students inquire from me to offer them tips for studying effectively, I compare our minds with an MP3 player. once we study, our mind can full up like an MP3 player. Once you recognize hitting a storage limit, you'll do something about it.

If you're popping in new ideas into your mind like mp3's into an mp3 player, there'll come some extent once you can't store any longer information - a minimum of temporarily. Many students beat themselves up over this. Instead of self-torture and suffering, I suggest being productive.

What does one do when you're mp3 player is full and you continue to want the contents? Most move the contents onto their computer's disk drive. If new ideas are mp3's, then we will say our mp3 player is STM and our disk drive is LTM. A helpful question to ask once you hit a study limit is, "How am I able to best move these new ideas (mp3's) from my STM (mp3 player) into my LTM (hard drive)?"

Tip #1: Sleep

They studied Stanford University's top students and were surprised by what percentage of hours they slept. on the average, each slept eight hours a day. It's worth repeating; they found students who consistently get straight As at one among America's top universities slept 8 hours each day.

They found once we get a healthy amount of sleep, the knowledge we take in during the day, STM gets downloaded and processed deeper in our LTM. Every day we repeat and use information in STM is another download into our LTM with sleep. That does not necessarily mean we memorize the knowledge forever. Over time and repetition, the once awkward and unfamiliar ideas become easier and familiar because the days pass. Sleep allows this to happen.

During the day, ideas and experiences may gather and float around like movies in our heads. You would possibly have noticed, after an honest night's sleep those ideas and experiences settle. The night before you'll have felt mentally unhealthy and unable to review further. Because of the miracle of sleep, once you awaken you are feeling better and may continue studying. That mental clutter was organized and sunk in. Those ideas (mp3's) moved from STM (mp3 player) to LTM (hard drive). The action requires to urge this relief: get 8 hours of sleep.

Tip #2: Exercise

You may feel burned out because your mind is exhausted. If ideas are busy spinning around in your head they consume energy. At that time, I suggest going to a fast jog. Do something physical because while you worked your mental muscles and you'll have neglected your physical muscles. Your body may are sitting dormant the entire time. once you jog or do something physical, you get out of your head and re-energize your body.

Let's say each a part of our body uses about 2% energy (oxygen, nutrients, etc). Relatively speaking, our brain uses 20% of our body's energy. One major artery runs down each leg. 2 major and a couple of minor arteries run-up to our brain. Notice how the dimensions of 1 leg compared to what's inside your head. once we run out of oxygen, what is the main concern to our health? Not enough oxygen to the brain. Brain damage. Once the brain runs out of oxygen it can't run the remainder of the systems in our body and that we die. Our brain is an energy monster. So what we've to try to when we're burned out studying is shut it off for a short time. Let it calm down.

Have you ever noticed when too many programs run on a computer it slows down? Computers usually heat up and hamper once they are overworked and can't process anymore. When a computer gets thereto point one among the simplest thing to try to do is to show it off. Let it rest. once you turn the pc on again, memory has freed up and it's able to continue working.

Our brain also can get to some extent where it's overworked and can't process anymore. It too heats up and slows down. It can not handle new information or solve more problems. Though we will not close up our brain sort of a computer to release resources. What we will do is redirect our resources faraway from the abstract world of our mind to the concrete world of our human body. Once we do that, we give our brain an opportunity and permit blood and oxygen to circulate to re-energize us.

If you're taking that jiffy to jog, shower, or bring awareness back to your body, you'll notice your STM (mp3 player) has more energy to require in additional information (mp3's). Continuing the comparison of our minds to an mp3 player, our mp3 player's (short-term memory) battery was running low. After recharging it (physical exercise), we were ready to continue loading mp3's (new ideas).

Tip #3: Write

They say our STM can only hold five plus or minus two ideas at a time. More simply, we will only hold three to seven ideas at a time counting on things. (This is one among the explanations why local phone numbers are only seven digits. If they were longer, we might forget.) If our mind is brooding about other things we've to try to, then each of these to-do items is taking over a slot we might be used for studying.

In terms of our mp3 player comparison, if we've three loading slots and every one three are loading mp3's (new ideas we'd like to review for) then we will say we're loading at 100%. If we start loading two other items (other ideas), our loading time slows by two-thirds. If we've three loading slots in our STM (mp3 player) and two slots are wont to remember to reply to a friend's email and remove the trash, what percentage slots can we need to study (load mp3's)? One. Our studying time crawls at a grueling pace versus if those slots were liberal to digest, organize, and play with more information.

So how can we release those memory slots and speed up our study time? Pull out a blank piece of paper and something to write down with. Write everything down that's running around in your head. Write down every little thing until it's all down on paper. Using our previous example, we might write down: Reply to friend's email and remove the trash. this is able to immediately release those limited resources to use while studying.

Write all of your to-do items down. Jot all of them down there on paper. Every idea that's running around in your head, just write it down. Write until your mind is clean and beyond clutter. We're taking those other ideas and backing them up where they're safe and you'll easily access later. Rather than taking over your valuable and limited study resources, those other ideas are saved on a solid piece of paper (backup hard drive).