Stress Management in Studying

3 tips for Stress Relief.

Our lives and the lives of our children are filled with so much stress that at times many of us get overwhelmed.

For instance, how many of you are multi-tasking? We don’t have enough moments in our day to get it all done. Research has shown that doing two things at once reduces the quality of the outcome of either of the one.

1. The time has come to balance the doing with being. 

Even Olympic athletes start preparing by meditating. You can substantially improve your performance in this way because it is your mind that gets in the way!

For example, you tell yourself you need to fall asleep quickly because of the next day’s test. This stimulates more thoughts in the opposite direction which causes you to remain wide awake instead of closer to sleep.

2. Your perspective about stress affects its impact on your health and performance.

How do you see stress?

•      See stress as a sign that you have a meaningful life and you are involved in things that bring growth. You care about something!

•       Embrace the belief that stressors help you to do your best. Instead of “This test frightens me,” rather learn to adapt an attitude of “This test encourages me to do my best!” 

3. Stress buster: physical exercise

It turns out that your gym sessions are doing more than just lowering your stress levels – they can actually mimic the effects of antidepressants.

Students and learners: MORE RULES OF GOOD STUDYING

 

MORE RULES OF GOOD STUDYING

One of the first steps toward gaining expertise in your work is to create conceptual chunks — mental leaps that unite scattered bits of information through meaning. 

An example is driving a car and it involves the ability to creatively mix together various mini-chunks and chunks in your eye, hand, foot skills as well as technical knowledge of the car. 

Chunk your problems. 
Chunking is understanding and practicing with a problem solution so that it can all come to mind in a flash. After you solve a problem, rehearse it. Make sure you can solve it cold - every step.

 Or pretend it’s a song and learn to play it over and over again in your mind, so the information combines into one smooth chunk you can pull up whenever you want.

What is mindful studying?

1

  THE COMPLETE study COURSE - A MINDFUL APPROACH

  Mindful studying refers to the quality of being conscious of how you learn. 

1. Although you keep in mind where you have come from and contrast that with the dream of where your studies will take you; 

2. you achieve a mental state by focusing your awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting your feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.

  This includes noticing, acknowledging and changing behaviours that do not serve you, like

thinking you can learn deeply when you are being constantly distracted. 
Every tiny pull toward an instant message or conversation means you have less brain power to devote to learning. Every tug of interrupted attention pulls out tiny neural roots before they can grow.

 

      And another is going to bed too late. 

Your brain pieces together problem-solving techniques when you sleep, and it also practices and repeats whatever you put in mind before you go to sleep. Prolonged fatigue allows toxins to build up in the brain that disrupt the neural connections you need to think quickly and well. If you don’t get a good sleep before a test, NOTHING ELSE YOU HAVE DONE WILL MATTER.

How to be more effective and less stressed in an age of distractions:

The age of Distractions

When you think you multi-task, you are actually just switching from one task to another.
And there is a cognitive and emotional cost in doing so!

In order to be more effective and less stressed: 

Focus on NOW

Plan:

                         

You need to know where you are heading, so prioritise according to when you are writing the test and what you need to know for it. Plan on your To Do Today (see picture).

Manage time:

Set your timer for 30 min for your first session and GO!

During the 25 min you can't be interrupted!

 "Learning information while multi-tasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.

Cell phones too, are a distraction. Stop and know it is a recipe for addiction: you receive a text, and that activates your novelty centres. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you 15 seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out “More! More! Give me more!”

 

Sustain your focus on your learning material until the last 5 min before your timer rings - use the 5 min. for relaxation. Sustaining diffusing your brain...

The timer's ring calls you back and activates your next session.

For more information on related matters see Betterhelp.com/advice/stress/

More Rules of Good Studying

More Rules of Good Studying

Use explanatory questioning and simple analogies.

 Whenever you are struggling with a concept, think to yourself, How can I explain this so that a ten-year-old could understand it? 

Using an analogy really helps, like saying that the flow of electricity is like the flow of water. 

Don’t just think your explanation - say it out loud or put it in writing. The additional effort of speaking and writing allows you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are learning.

***

Look at this simple visual to remember what Haiku poems are about: