As a student, there are a lot of things that we need to do and learn. Constant focus, consistent practice, and ever-expanding workloads are showered upon us day in day out.
As a student, there are a lot of things that we need to do and learn. Constant focus, consistent practice, and ever-expanding workloads are showered upon us day in day out. We understand that it is important for us to learn, grow, sit for our exams, and get top grades to secure good careers for your function. Our academic performances in the present determine the quality of life that we are possibly going to have in the future.
But it cannot be denied that we are racing against time to keep up with our study schedules. There's the social life that we need to take care of, we have to pay attention to our health and even excel at other skills like dancing, playing a sport, or mastering an instrument.
We also need to keep strengthening our memory muscles so that we retain the information that we receive, and master the skills we learn. The current world we live in so distractive with its flashlights and notification calls coming from every pocket. Due to this, we need to put extra efforts into keeping ourselves focused at the tasks at the hand, even when we focus, 7 out of 10 times our brain fails us, and gives us no or limited information when we try to recall useful information, such as during a presentation or an exam.
Many people flunk classes due to this high pressure, some jeopardize their health and sacrifice their social lives to notch up their grades. Many people pursuing success in academics in colleges and universities even use medications such as Modvigil and Modalert which improve their concentration span and information retention capacity.
If you are one of these people who want to improve their grades and make way for better career options and a comfortable and successful lifestyle for you in the future, there are a few hacks to try to increase your capacity to focus in your studies or in any other skill you are trying to master.
Hacks to Increase Your Focus and Improve Your Memory to get Good grades:
Set Specific Time and Location to Study:
Our brains are incredible at recognizing a pattern in everything we do, they are like super-advanced and constantly running computers that keep analyzing what we literally every second of our life. This is not a bad thing as our brains form different patterns only to make our lives easier. But this very same program that creates patterns to improve our life can come to bite us in areas we list expect.
Such as when you are trying to study in your bed on a Saturday night, but you can't help but scroll through your social media accounts, or watch a show. Despite our best intentions to study, we cannot study on a Saturday night because we have conditioned our brain to seek social media validation and movies on a Saturday night.
Some people use pills such as Waklert to get laser sharp focus on the tasks at hand, but similar results can be achieved by using these hacks.
Here's a list of things to condition your brain to study at your desired time and increase your face:
- Allocate a different place for studying, it can be a small desk, a large chair, or a corner of your room or even the library and reserve a specific time duration for studying. Use these locations only for studying and at the same time every day. This will allow your brain into associating the places or place and the specific time period with studying so when you are in this place it will subconsciously add in more focus and cut down internal distractions.
- Cut down as many external distractions as you can, turn off any high volume music, put your phone on mute, and inform your friends, roommates and family members that you have reserved that specific time for studying so that they don't disturb or distract you unless it is an emergency.
- Putting on some soft instrumental music that has been produced to increase productivity and boost your focus will come in handy if you are portable studying with some white noise. Avoid anything with lyrics, no matter how soothing it is, those songs can easily distract you.
Explore more than one form of learning and memorization:
If you want to study for a long duration of time, make sure that you don't bore yourself to sleep by studying. Studying can be fun and quite exciting if you do some planning beforehand can make an active effort to keep things interesting.
- Never spend more than 90 minutes on one topic or subject, a study has proved that you will start to lose focus after this duration. After the 90 minutes are over, take a small break. Breaks give your brain the relaxation it needs, and the new topic or subjects at each session will increase your concentration span.
- Use different ways of learning such as some good video showing you how a machine actually works, or try to map events like a game. Create your own fun associations to remember stuff. Make studying a fun thing to do with coloured charts, test yourself, and reward yourself appropriately when you do well.
These are a few hacks to try out to increase your focus, retain more information, and come out of your exams with flying colours! Try them and make learning more exciting and productive for you.