Why Sleep Should Actually Be Considered Part of Studying

As exams begin creeping up, sleep is usualyl one of the first things to get thrown out the window. When you've got three topics left to revise, an assignment due Friday and an exam next week, staying up until 1 am feels like a pretty reasonable idea.

The problem is that those extra hours aren't actually doing you much good.

Sleep plays a major role in memory. While you're askeeo, your brain is basically sorting and filing what you learned throughout the day. So if you've spent much of the evening learning formulas and doing practice questions, getting a decent sleep afterwards is genuinely part of the learning process.

You've probably also tried doing maths when you just can't lock in. A question you'd normally knock over in five minutes suddenly takes fifteen. You read the same sentence four times and forget what you were doing halfway through your working. If you keep pushing late into the night when nothing is realling gping in, you're not just wasting the current hour. You're also making it really hard to concentrate and learn properly the next day. All of a sudden you're tired in class, struggling to take in new content and end up needing more study time just to catch up on what you missed.

Obviously, this isnt an excuse to shut the textbook at 7pm becasue you're feeling a bit sleepy. Sometimes you've just got to get the work done. But regularly sacrificing sleep to cram in another couple of hours probably isn't the genius study hack many think it is.

A solid routine will nearly always beat randomly pulling massive study nights. Do some proper work, get to bed at a reasonable time, then have another crack tomorrow when your brain has been reenergised.

Sometimes calling it for the night is better than staring at the same question for another hour and learning nothing.