Whether you’re currently a student or not, it’s most likely that you’ve studied something before. I was never a big studier until I reached high school, but, for me, and a lot of the students around me, studying has been a critical part of my life.
The reason you’ve clicked on this article is due to the fact that you’re probably an ambitious student who has goals to reach higher scores and better grades. However, I’ve found that what lies before these goals is one major obstacle: finding effective study hours.
All the emphasis is on the word “effective” right now. The biggest mistake most studiers make is how they stretch out a few hours of their time and start strong, but after half an hour is gone, they begin to mindlessly gaze over textbook pages and passively take notes; essentially discriminating the idea of effectiveness.
So how can you make, say, 5-6 long and brutal study hours seem feasible? And more importantly, how can we make them more effective?
This is hard, no doubt, but achievable.
Here, we will be discovering 6 reliable ways that allowed me and many others to become better studiers across long periods of time.
1. Prioritize Quality Over Quantity
First, I want to address a common mistake that most people tend to make when going for longer study sessions.
A big mess-up that most people get caught in is prioritizing how long they study over how effectively they study. What this means is students will try to study for as long as they can, thinking they will retain more information that way.
This way of approaching your study sessions is detrimental.
When you get into this habit, you’ll feel fulfilled with your study hours, but you’ll get nothing from them. You’ll essentially end up wasting your time and effort.
When aiming for longer study sessions, you need to center them around quality, rather than quantity. You’ll need to start small with short and effective study sessions.
You won’t be able to immediately study effectively across 4 hours. It’s something your brain has to build up to.
Slowly, but surely, you’ll be able to really focus over way longer study sessions. It’s all about being patient, starting small, and building your way up to a mindset where you feel more comfortable and engaged over longer time frames.
2. Take Frequent Breaks
Taking breaks is a critical part of studying for 2 reasons: it relaxes you and restores your waning concentration.
If you’re a beginner at studying for very long sessions, your focus begins to drop at around 30 minutes of effective studying. After that, you’ll begin to passively read pages and mindlessly guess your flashcards.
For this reason, breaks become an essential factor that keeps you going. A 5-10 minute break every 30-odd minutes gives you an important energy boost that will keep your mind from numbing.
During the break, do anything but study: take a walk, eat something, watch the birds outside, etc. Do something that excites you; it’ll give you some motivation to study in the first place.
3. Take On Challenging Topics First
Get your most important or challenging to-dos done in the forenoon when you’re at your best, energy-wise.
This kind of prioritization matches your energy with the difficulty of the task at hand. As a result, you face fewer mind-draining tasks later in the day when you’ve dissipated most of your mental and physical energy.
On the other hand, if you were to pick the easier tasks for your top-notch self, you would be left with a load of challenging work later in the day, when your energy and focus do not want to be tested.
4. Eat Right
Who would have known that eating strategically would allow us to study longer?
Turns out that, although your brain constitutes just 2 percent of your body weight, it guzzles 20 percent of your daily energy intake. Studies have shown that non-pleasurable mentally exhausting tasks drain this energy faster.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to eat in a way that conserves the energy that we need, when taking on these mentally tiring tasks. So how can we do that?
Eating higher proportions of low Glycemic Index (GI) foods (examples: oats, porridge, low-sugar muesli, granola bars, yogurt with seeds/ nuts, low-fat dairy, soups, salads, anything wholegrain, and most fruits), release glucose (sugar) slowly into the bloodstream, maintaining energy levels for a longer period.
High-GI foods (examples: pizza, white bread, burger, cake, chocolate, cookie, potato chips, sugary beverages, and ice cream) have the opposite effect: your energy levels rise fast and crash equally as fast, resulting in fatigue and drowsiness.
In short, eat healthy to conserve your energy.
5. Simply Focus
Because your brain is an energy guzzler, it’s important not to dissipate your energy by letting your mind wander into debilitating, irrelevant thoughts.
Thoughts that linger on things like:
“What’s the weather gonna be like tomorrow?”
“What if I fail this exam?”
“What sounds good for lunch?”
And so on…
A lot of these mind-gnawing thoughts tend to creep into our thought bubble without us even knowing. So how can we stop this?
You need to get into the habit of catching these thoughts as soon as you recognize them. Eventually, you’ll be able to spot these distractions as soon as they reach your train of thought.
It’s not easy to completely silence this line of thinking, however, our whole goal here is to conserve energy and brainpower. In this case, making room for more relevant thoughts should be something to aim for.
6. Try to Study/Work in Daylight Hours
In a study, Mirjam Muench and his team exposed two groups of people to six hours of either artificial light or daylight for two days and found that “compared to the afternoon, people who had DL (Daylight) were significantly more alert at the beginning of the evening, and subjects who were exposed to AL (Artificial light) were significantly sleepier at the end of the evening.
The DL group was also found to perform better on cognitive functions—functions such as reasoning, memory, and attention—on the second day. This brings up a key point for studying long hours.
It can be highly beneficial for you to move your study area to a place where natural sunlight is present. This not only conserves your energy and brainpower but also greatly enhances your ability to think critically.
If an area of sunlight is unavailable to you within your home, you may want to consider studying at your local coffee shop or another convenient area outside.
Either way, a little sun never hurt anybody.