How to Improve Focus
We’ve all faced the times when we have to be focused on the task at hand, but can’t seem to muster the concentration needed to complete the task to the degree of quality necessary. While you can never fully eliminate this annoying speed bump to success, you can do things to curb its influence over your day. Eat For Your Brain Everyone knows that when you eat better, you feel better. If you make sure to put the best things into your body, you can be sure your body can perform at it’s best level, and the brain is no exception. Foods like blueberries, salmon, flaxseed and coffee in moderation are a great start. You should consider following natural foods blog to help you come up with delicious ways to feed your brain the nutrients it needs to be at 100%. The Five-More Rule This is a great one once you get used to it. Anytime you find yourself in the middle of a particularly draining task and you feel that you’d rather stick hot bamboo shoots under your fingernails than end one more moment working on it, force yourself to do five more. Weather you’re reading a boring book, or working on math problems. If you can force yourself to do just five more before you decide to take a break, you’ll be even closer to accomplishing the task when you come back to it later. Also you should know that some foods are said to have positive impacts on a college student‘s ability to study, but there are just as many foods out there that can have a negative impact. If you want to get the most out of your study sessions, you need to know which snacks to avoid. Here are five foods you don’t want to eat come study time. Spicy Foods Spicy foods will mess with your stomach and cause you to make instant bathroom runs. (Yes, that would be runs because of runs) you may love the chili sauce, but you need to reserve that for another time. The last thing you want is an upset stomach while studying. Turkey Turkey is very heavy, and it is guaranteed to make you sleepy. Try a different meat instead or eat a nice salad. This may not sound as delicious, but it will definitely help you study. Bread Bread is highly absorbent, so it will soak up anything you drink after eating it. This will make your stomach feel incredibly full, which will either cause a tummy ache or make you very sleepy. Try to eat crackers instead of bread. They’re not quite as absorbent, and they still taste great with most sandwich toppings. Potato Chips This is more of a mess standpoint than anything else. Potato chips are inherently greasy, and they’re bound to make a mess all over your books. Stick with crackers or at the very least baked chips if you want to maintain some shred of cleanliness. Candy The sugar high from candy may be great, but it comes with a crash you won’t want. Try to each fruit instead because it contains natural sugars. Apples, oranges, pomegranates and more are all great for staying alert, and they will keep you awake or a longer period of time. Avoid eating gummy bears until after your test. Then you can pig out all you want.
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Today’s university students are lucky. They have, at their disposal, a huge library of books, the Internet, online discussion groups that let you brainstorm with classmates in the middle of the night. However, there is no substitute for good old-fashioned hard work. There is no gadget that is more effective than simple human discipline and determination. Unfortunately, many students fail in this regard. They have no study habits, and the independence of the college environment make it even more difficult to “obey” a rule when there is nothing except their own willpower to enforce it. The secret is concentration. Without this valuable still, it becomes near-impossible to master any subject matter despite reading the textbook over and over again. Thoughts wander, your attention distracted by phones, TV, your nails. Get to business. You have to clear your head of any other non-related thoughts and get into “the zone” where only you and what you are reading matter. Yes, sometimes it helps to be “narrow-minded” if it means narrowing your focus to what you are studying! You will also need to set up your own study area, preferably in an area where won’t be any people moving around and talking in the vicinity. Sometimes a small thing like moving where your desk faces—so your back is to the noise, and you’ll face a blank wall—can make a difference. You can also get an answering machine so that you won’t hear the phone ringer, or if you’ve got a chatterbox roommate. playing instrumental music on your iPod to drown out her conversations on the phone. Also, work around your body clock. Look at your natural patterns of activity. When are you more energetic and alert? What time of the day are you able to get things done really quickly? If you can work for long bursts during the early morning, then take a nap after dinner and wake up at one. You’ll get more done than if you forced yourself to study during the evenings. It’s best to take breaks instead of forcing yourself to study for long chunks of time, where your concentration dips. Schedule 10-minute breaks. Writing papers is one of the most important skills anyone should master in their life, but students especially benefit from it. Good essay editing skills are not important only in high school or college, but can also lead to good presentation skills throughout one’s professional career. It’s well known that a student has to write at least a few hundred essays in his life, so the sooner he can master the skill, the better. While there are lots of features that separate good papers from bad ones, there’s one skill that’s critical to successful paper writing: learning to find and use evidence. How to Cram before a TestCramming is far from a good studying technique, but sometimes you don’t have another choice. Perhaps you misread the test date or you had a family emergency come up that prevented you from studying effectively. Maybe a Justin Bieber concert came to town and you had to fight a stampede of 12 year old girls just to get home. Whatever the case may be, there will probably come a time when you will have to cram for an exam. When that time comes, I hope you can put some of the tips below to good use. Here are a few ways you could go about cramming for a test you have to take in the near future.
Study and Snooze The study and snooze method is best way to maintain the information you cram in before a test. Research suggests that taking a 90 minute nap after a study session can significantly improve a person’s chance of retaining information for a test or quiz. If you study a small chunk of information and then take a nap, you will wake up with that information still fresh in your mind. You may consider doing this all night to get in as much info as possible, but watch out for sleep deprivation. That could actually cause you to do worse on your test because you aren’t awake enough to think clearly. Try to balance the sleep and the studying enough to do well on your upcoming exam. Prioritize the Information You aren’t going to be able to cram a semester’s worth of information into one night. It just isn’t going to happen. Rather than focusing on the big picture, focus on the most important points in the class. Your professor probably harped on a few topics more than others, so try to start with those topics first. They are the ones that are most likely to be on the test. You can learn the little information if you have time, but you need to make sure you learn as much as you can in the little time that you have. That way you have the best chance of at least passing the test, and possibly even doing well on it. Try to figure out the most important things in the class and work on those first. Then you can worry about the other stuff if you have time. Review in the Morning Eventually you need to get some sleep so you can be well rested for your test in the morning. Before you go to the test though, review your study materials so the information is fresh in your mind. If you slept well right after you studied, you should still have a lot of the facts in your mind. Flip through your flashcards or glance over your textbook, just to get your mind as familiar with the information as possible. Then you will hopefully have a memory of it for your test. Re-Study after the Test When you get done with your exam, take the time to go back and review the information you missed. You can wait to do this when the grades are out, or you could do it right at the beginning. The fact is that your college courses are supposed to prepare you for your career. If you don’t pay attention now, you will never be able to succeed later on. Sacrifice a little time re-studying so that the information goes into your mind for good. Then you will be able to recall it when it comes up in the future. |
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