Have you seen the movie Limitless?
Eddie Morra is a total loser of a writer who is barely keeping his life together. Then, around the same time that his girlfriend gives him the boot for being so terminally tragic, an old friend slips him a pill he claims will change everything. The pill purportedly enhances brain health and mental focus, though it is yet to be tested.
Dubious but with nothing to lose, Eddie takes the pill.
Minutes later, a rush of acute mental clarity slams into him like a 1,000-foot tsunami. Everything Eddie had ever seen, heard, read, and experienced is within arm’s reach, available to be plucked out of his brain and applied to any situation. His writer’s block magically lifts, and he finishes his book, which is utterly sensational.
Suddenly, Eddie finds himself winning at life, getting heaps of sex, and making money hand over fist.
There’s more to the movie, of course, but the point is: wouldn’t it be AMAZING if you could pop a pill and, just like that, unleash the full potential of your brainpower? That sure would come in handy during your exams!
Unfortunately, such a pill doesn’t exist. But there are ways you can unlock greater clarity, focus, memory, and concentration, which are indispensable tools for studying.
Having built the world's best flashcard app, Brainscape has done a lot of research into how humans learn best.
What we have found and what countless peer-reviewed studies irrefutably show is that the very best way to optimize the effectiveness of your studying is to optimize your brain health. And since your brain is a flesh-and-blood organ, it needs what the rest of your body needs to be healthy.
If you’re hungry, tired, dehydrated, and stressed out, all of those hours of hard studying won’t translate into the grades you deserve.
So, let’s cast aside the bad study habits of old and get yourself into optimized shape for exams by promoting your brain health in these five ways:
- Feed your brain: The best foods to eat for optimal brain health
- Water your brain: The role of hydration in good brain health
- Recharge your brain: The importance of sleep when studying for exams
- Invigorate your brain: Getting exercise during exam time
- Relax your brain: Eliminate stress during exam prep
1. Feed Your Brain: The Best Foods to Eat for Optimal Brain Health
The right mix of healthy foods can (1) improve energy, (2) sharpen focus, (3) optimize brain health, and (4) generally lift your mood and wellbeing.
With food playing such a crucial role in physical and mental wellbeing, eating the right foods can place you at a distinct advantage, particularly during exam time. A healthy diet can make you smarter and sharper.
1.1. The Right Study Diet for Optimal Brain Health
Doctors, medical institutes, and Oprah Winfrey have been telling us for years: the best diet for promoting brain (and whole-body) health is one that is balanced and features plenty of the following:
- Lean proteins like white fish, plain Greek yogurt, beans, peas, lentils, skinned poultry, and eggs.
- Healthy fats (those omega 3 fatty acids) from avocados, fatty fish like salmon, nuts (particularly walnuts), seeds, and extra-virgin olive oil.
- Dark, leafy vegetables like broccoli, spinach, Swiss chard, and kale, which contain vitamins K, B6, and B12 for improved alertness and memory.
- Complex carbohydrates like whole-grain bread, brown rice, rolled oats, quinoa, barley, corn, vegetables, and fruits, etc.
Together, these foods contain a potent blend of vitamins, fiber, protein, and healthy fats that are scientifically proven to improve wellness, but particularly brain health. This is exactly the kind of advantage that can take you from a B to an A, and even add a pretty + sign to that A.
1.2. Foods and Habits to Avoid to Protect Brain Health
The college diet is notorious for its appalling paucity of literally anything green. Students tend to rely on a fixed diet of instant ramen noodles to power their bodies through consecutive late-night study sessions (and you wonder why you haven’t pooped since last Tuesday).
The wrong foods can make you feel sluggish, fatigued, and forgetful. A diet consistently lacking in the right nutrients for good brain health can compromise your ability to focus and retain information.
These foods are hurting your body and your brain health:
- Sugar-packed treats: candy, chocolate, donuts, sodas, energy drinks, and fruit juices.
- Refined carbohydrates: white bread, chips, fries, and pasta.
- Greasy, fried foods: fried chicken, hamburgers, pizza, fries, and other deep-fried, greasy, salty, calorie-dense fast foods.
1.3 Crash Dieting
The last thing you should be at any time during your exams is hungry. Eat healthily, yes. But eat enough and make sure you are getting a good balance of protein, carbohydrates, unsaturated fats, and nutrients.
Avoid fad diets that are unsustainable and leave you feeling fatigued.
1.4 Boozin’
Alcohol impairs concentration, memory, and good judgment, which explains why you wound up streaking naked across the quad that one time.
Seriously, though. It’s exam time. You need your brain to be in tip-top condition. You need it to perform like the rent is a month overdue. Imbibing alcohol while studying, or the night before an exam, is about as smart as strapping a boulder to your back and jumping off a cliff.
In addition to compromising brain health, alcohol also has a nasty habit of preventing your body from falling into a deep, restorative sleep, which is when your brain does its important housekeeping work.
Save the beverages for after the exams. Now, more than ever, you don't want to limit your memory, focus, or sleep quality.
2. Water Your Brain: The Role of Hydration in Good Brain Health
Did you know that the brain is 73% water? If you’re not getting enough water in your body during exam time, it can affect your attention span, memory functions, and ability to concentrate.
Pro Tip: Avoid drinking water 90 minutes before going into an exam so you can use the bathroom right before and not worry about bladder distractions.
2.1 Recommendations for Staying Hydrated During Studying
The question you may be asking is how much water should you be drinking every day? This is a bit of a tricky question to answer because it depends very much on your lifestyle, environment, and your body’s unique requirements.
According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, however, adequate daily fluid intake is:
- About 15.5 cups (130 ounces) of fluids a day for men.
- About 11.5 cups (95 ounces) of fluids a day for women.
These recommendations include fluids from water, other beverages, and food. About 20 percent of your daily fluid intake usually comes from food and the rest from what you drink.
So those guidelines we’ve all heard of to drink 8 glasses of water a day are pretty much on point.
2.2 “Ugh, I Really Don’t Like the Taste of Water.”
Rather than downing the equivalent in sugar-packed soft drinks, fruit juices, and energy drinks, dress up your water!
Add a few slices of orange, lemon, strawberries, cucumber, or some other pleasant-tasting fruit or vegetable to a jug of water. Try herbs like mint, basil, or rosemary, which will flavor your water without any sugar. Drinking your water ice-cold also helps it go down easier.
Alternatively, grow up. Water is good enough for every plant and animal on earth. It's good enough for you.
3. Recharge Your Brain: The Importance of Sleep When Studying for Exams
Back in the Precambrian Era, when I was in high school, I followed in the footsteps of hundreds of thousands of history students before me: I left my exam preparation to the last minute (well, to the last three days, to be fair). No problem, I thought. I’ll just sacrifice sleep.
And so I did, getting a paltry three hours of sleep before my final exam. Not smart.
Was I tired? Heck, yes. I looked like Steve Buscemi on a bad day. The worst part of it was that morning, on the way to my exam, I realized in pure horror that I could scarcely recall a single narrative of the essays I had attempted to memorize the evening before.
Less than 12 hours after cramming all that study material into my brain, it had vaporized into thin air, leaving behind nothing but the faintest traces of Tsarist regime, Bolshevism, and oompah music. Certainly not enough to ace a history exam.
This is one of the most important reasons why sleep is essential for brain health and for preparing for exams. A tired brain forgets.
3.1. The Importance of Sleep for Good Brain Health
If you’re not convinced by my anecdote, listen to what the science has to say: In an article by Johns Hopkins Medicine, a leader in medical education, research and clinical care, sleep expert and neurologist Mark Wu explains that sleep significantly impacts brain function.
“First, a healthy amount of sleep is vital for “brain plasticity,” or the brain’s ability to adapt to input. If we sleep too little, we become unable to process what we’ve learned during the day and we have more trouble remembering it in the future. Researchers also believe that sleep may promote the removal of waste products from brain cells—something that seems to occur less efficiently when the brain is awake.”
Beyond mere fatigue, headaches, and a predisposition to taking your spouse’s head off for minor infractions, chronic sleep deprivation can be linked with depression, high blood pressure, a compromised immune system, and even seizures.
Remember that the next time you plan on pulling an all-nighter study session.
While we're talking study, Brainscape’s engaging study app is an excellent aid that helps you prepare for exams in good time, saving you from even needing to go down this route in the first place.
Even the most knowledge-intensive subjects—like the bar exam and medical exams—can be prepared for with our adaptive flashcard learning platform. This comes down to the app’s intelligent design and algorithm, which is based on decades of cognitive science research. Brainscape works with your brain to help you master the material, manage your time effectively, and retain the information in half the time it would otherwise take you.
3.2. When Studying Gets in the Way of Quality Sleep
The science is clear on the importance of sleep for brain health. But are you studying in a way that’s actually compromising your ability to sleep? The wrong study methodology can actually cause insomnia: difficulty falling and/or staying asleep.
Here are four common pitfalls to avoid when studying and trying to maintain healthy sleep patterns:
- Leaving studying to the last minute: Not preparing adequately can cause such severe pre-exam anxiety that you can find it impossible to fall asleep.
- Cramming: Trying to stuff too much information into your head can cause serious cognitive overload and burnout.
- Studying right up until bedtime: Stop studying at least 30 minutes before your intended bedtime. Research has shown that exposure to light, particularly blue light (from digital screens) suppresses the secretion of melatonin, a hormone that influences circadian rhythms. Mess around with these primal rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, and you’re practically inviting insomnia over for an all-night romp.
- Overdoing caffeine and energy drinks: That 8pm quad long shot grande is probably interfering with your sleep.
3.3. When Sleep Gets in the Way of Studying
Okay, so what if you’ve made the same mistake my teenage self did and now have an entire history syllabus to cram into a day? It’s not optimal, but there are a few things you can do to remember more of what you’ve crammed than if you didn’t follow these last-minute study tips:
- Caffeinate, but on a slow drip-feed: Rather than slamming your body with a quadruple shot of espresso, take frequent, small sips of your coffee, tea, or energy drink. Low doses of caffeine administered at regular intervals may help you focus better and for longer.
- Review your study material in the morning: A sleepy brain is leakier than a submarine with air vents. It's crucial to revisit what you’ve studied the morning after to refresh those memories and solidify those cognitive pathways. In fact, the more spaced repetitions, the better; although, with very little time to prepare for your exam, a single follow-up in the morning will have to do.
4. Invigorate Your Brain: Getting Exercise During Exam Time
Who the heck has time to exercise before an exam?
According to Dr. John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, YOU do:
“First, [exercise] optimizes your mind-set to improve alertness, attention, and motivation; second, it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another, which is the cellular basis for logging in new information; and third, it spurs the development of new nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus."
Improved memory, longer attention span, the increased production of neurochemicals for learning, and the repair of neurons—with such a succulent smorgasbord of study benefits, the question isn’t whether or not you should be exercising ... it’s how.
4.1. The Best Exercises for Studying
When we talk about exercising between study sessions, we’re not talking about logging a two-hour-long gym session or training for a marathon.
What we’re talking about here is taking strategic study breaks during which you engage your body in gentle to moderate aerobic exercise.
What does this look like?
- Go for a 20-minute walk around the block
- Hop on your bike or stationary bike for a 30-minute ride
- Do a few laps in the pool
- Go for a 45-minute run
- Sit for a session of lounge-floor yoga
- Grab your partner and ....
The benefits of exercising between study sessions are two-fold: (1) You get the rush of physiological and psychological benefits from the exercise and (2) you take a little mental break from the books, which gives you the energy to tackle the next one.
4.2 Using the Feynman Technique While Exercising
Here’s an awesome study trick that lets you kill two birds with one stone ... practice the Feynman Technique while out on your walk or run!
Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in quantum mechanics. He was also a brilliant and ground-breaking teacher who proposed that the best way to learn something is to break it down into its atomic parts—its bare, basic conceptual framework—so that you can effectively explain it to a grade 6 student.
While out running or going for a bike ride, you can try this trick by focusing on the material you’ve just covered in your previous study session.
Try to recall everything you’ve studied and “teach it” to an imaginary 6th grader while you don't have the written information in front of you. You can do this quietly in your head, under your breath, or even out loud if you don’t give a crap about looking like a crazy person.
The Feynman Technique (1) reinforces your knowledge by freely recalling the information and “teaching it” to an imaginary child, and (2) identifies areas in which your knowledge is shaky or propped up by assumptions.
The fact that you can do this while exercising just supercharges the benefits of taking an effective study break.
5. Relax Your Brain: Eliminate Stress During Exam Prep
Stress is a perfectly natural response of the human body to an environment in which danger is perceived: being stalked by a saber-toothed tiger, the impending bar exam, a girlfriend threatening to dump you for a poster of Ryan Gosling ...
A little stress can actually be a good thing. It can serve as the motivation that lights a fire under our arse, driving change—and driving improvement. Whether that requires you to run like hell, get a nicer girlfriend, or put in the time to study for the bar exam, the results are definitely in your favor.
But there comes a tipping point where stress begins to cause negative psychological effects. These can even go so far as having physical manifestations. And, trust me, a case of irritable bowel syndrome never helped anyone escape the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger.
5.1. Steps to Mitigating Stress and Improving Brain Health
The problem for students, in particular, is that stress can inhibit activity in the brain’s hippocampus, which prevents the formation of conscious, deliberately learned, long-term memories.
What’s the solution? Short of developing a dependency on Xanax—which we strongly advise against—it’s holistic management: a combination of therapeutic introspection, self-care, and, very importantly, proper exam preparation!
Ultimately, nothing will relax you before an exam quite like being prepared to write it.
Here is a step-by-step guide to managing exam stress:
- Identify what’s stressing you out. This may take real introspection, so meditate on it, go for long walks, write in your journal, or talk to a friend or even a therapist.
- In doing this, allow yourself to think about your stress from an objective perspective rather than living and feeling it. You’re trying to understand the nature of your anxiety and what is triggering you.
- Once you’ve identified a stress trigger (e.g. I am stressed that I might fail the test), ask yourself: what’s really the worst thing that can happen? You might get a bad grade? You might fail the class? That sucks, but you’re not going to die and it’s not the end of the world. You can always do better.
- Realize that you have the power to change the outcome. As much as you may feel powerless in the looming shadow of a terrifying exam, you have total control over how well you are prepared. Plan to study, put in the time, and your anxiety will likely melt away.
- Following on from # 4, use Brainscape to study. By its very nature, Brainscape breaks big, scary learning goals into long-term, medium-term, short-term, and very short-term goals, in the form of flashcard collections, decks, and cards. You can make the flashcards yourself or find flashcards on Brainscape's knowledge genome so you can get started right away.
The Road to Better Brain Health
Feeling tired, drained, stressed, or unfocused isn’t just a major pain in the ass during study time: it’s your body telling you that what you’re doing isn’t working. So listen to your body and ask the right questions in response:
- Are you eating balanced meals?
- Are you avoiding the heavy, greasy foods that can make you feel fatigued?
- Are you drinking enough water?
- Are you limiting your intake of sugar, caffeine, and alcohol?
- Are you getting enough quality sleep?
- Are you exercising?
- Are you taking enough study breaks?
- Have you tried Brainscape’s adaptive flashcard study app to help you prepare in smaller, more manageable doses?
Ask yourself these questions to determine what’s missing from your lifestyle so that you can supercharge your mental acuity and brain health just like Eddie Mora in Limitless ... only without the nasty side effects and terrifying loan sharks.
Sources
Graham, S. (2020, May 12). Regular mini doses of caffeine more energizing than morning mug. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/regular-mini-doses-of-caf/
Harvard Medical School (n.d.). Foods linked to better brainpower. Harvard Health Publishing. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/foods-linked-to-better-brainpower
Kim, E. J., Pellman, B., & Kim, J. J. (2015). Stress effects on the hippocampus: a critical review. Learning & Memory , 22(9), 411–416. https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.037291.114
Ottewell, E. J. (2002) Think to drink: The effects of adequate hydration on student performance. University of Lethbridge Faculty of Education. https://hdl.handle.net/10133/830
Ozawa, M., Shipley, M., Kivimaki, M., Singh-Manoux, A., & Brunner, E. J. (2017). Dietary pattern, inflammation and cognitive decline: The Whitehall II prospective cohort study. Clinical Nutrition, 36(2), 506–512. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clnu.2016.01.013
Ratey, J. J. (2013). Spark: The revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain. Little, Brown and Co.
US Department of Health & Human Services (2004). Alcohol's damaging effect on the brain. Alcohol Alert, 63. https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa63/aa63.htm