How to Balance Studying, Work, & Self-Care During Finals Week
You’ve made it to college! The orientation is complete, the first semester is wrapping up and the weeks are inching closer and closer towards finals week.
Suddenly, you have multiple exams (some on the same day) and you are in multi-hour-long study sessions. You are tired, hungry, exhausted and stressed – and there is laundry to do, a room to clean, and a shift at work to show up to.
How do you do it all without burning out?
Don’t worry! (I know, easier said than done.) Finals don’t last forever – even if they seem to. Keeping cool during this academically stressful time is possible, even with a busy schedule. Incorporating self-care is not another task on your to-do list; rather, it’s part of creating the mindsets, systems, and habits that can help sustain your focus, attention, and effort without burning out before you reach the finish line.
What is Self-Care?
Self-care can mean many things. For our purposes, self-care is about supporting mental, emotional, and physical reserves through mindsets and habits that create sustainable focus, attention, and effort.
Self-care is unique to each individual. For some, it may involve ordering takeout and watching a favorite show or movie; others may want to dive into a favorite hobby, spend time with friends, immerse themselves in nature, or go for a solo run.
Whatever self-care means to you, ask yourself these questions:
Will this [activity/mindset/habit] nourish me or deplete me physically and/or emotionally?
Does this [activity/mindset/habit] allow me to come back to my task with more energy and focus?
Does this [activity/mindset/habit] distract me from doing my task in a timely manner?
Keeping the above questions in mind can be helpful when practicing self-care – especially during stressful times – because many (unintentionally) use self-care to procrastinate.
Types of Self-Care
Emotional Self-Care
Emotional self-care is an important part of your overall wellbeing. Our internal “weather” can impact our external actions: depending on how I feel, I may decide to continue to remain static on the couch or proactive at my desk. Similarly, an anxious state of mind can keep me spiraling around in social media trying to avoid taking action on an important task.
Being aware of your emotional state requires sustained effort. It’s about acknowledging your emotions without allowing them to take over.
Physical Self-Care
Physical self-care may not necessarily require bench pressing your bodyweight. Rather, it might involve stepping outside, going for a walk, anchoring yourself in nature, or even nourishing yourself with nutritious food.
Ultimately, your body needs sleep, physcial activity, and food. Denying these essentials can impact your focus, attention, and effort in achieving your academic goals – not to mention goals outside of the classroom, as well.
Spiritual Self-Care
Whether it is connecting with a higher power or simply with your authentic self, your values, and your community, for whatever reason humans tend to do better when we feel part of a larger tapestry, a grander design.
However you may define spiritual self-care, aim to examine its role in your life and expand this role, if possible. Perhaps this means participating in your house of worship, giving back to your community, or examining the larger purpose behind your academic work.
How Does Self-Care Affect Your Mental Health?
In concert, emotional self-care, physical self-care, and spiritual self-care impact your overall mental health. Your academic life is not isolated but rather connected with your wellbeing to support your efforts inside and outside the classroom.
Neglecting your mental health can impact your attention and focus, your grades may slip and your overall performance in classes may be negatively affected as your physical and mental resources are diverted to address mental health challenges.
Effective Tips for Juggling Studying, Self-Care, and Work During Finals Week
1. Prioritize Sleep
Getting a restful sleep is very important. Sufficient, quality sleep helps to not only provide you rest and restoration from the day’s toils, but helps you process and encode the information you’ve learned and studied from your classes.
Avoid pulling all-nighters – and set boundaries on when you will sleep. If you must stay up late to finish a paper or prepare for an exam, keep tabs on how much sleep you are getting and try to replenish your “sleep bank” when possible.
Remember, the time you earn by forgoing sleep may help you complete an urgent task, but it will also take a larger toll that may prevent you from completing other tasks down the road.
2. Move Your Body (Get Those Steps In!)
Exercise is an important part of your mental and physical health. It does not have to involve rigorous effort, but it should be consistent. For instance, it might involve going for a brief walk every night before bed, taking the stairs rather than the elevator in your dorm, parking further from the entrance of a building, or doing 20 push-ups (or jumping jacks) during a study break. Aim to get your body moving! This will improve your overall wellbeing, as well as your focus and attention.
3. Nourish Yourself with Healthy Nutrients
Food is fuel and it is important to nourish yourself with healthy food (most of the time). It may be unlikely that you will eat healthy all the time; you may have had a party with pizza the day before, but you can grab a nutritious lunch today to off-set that less healthy option. Your body will thank you and you will feel better in the long run.
Eating well can also support your studying efforts by delivering longer-burning fuel that is less likely to lead to a crash.
4. Take Power Naps to Get a Boost of Energy
Power naps are short bursts of rest that are built into your schedule to recharge you in a time-efficient manner. Aim for power naps to be no more than 30 minutes. If you are likely to press the snooze button on your alarm clock, keep it across the room with the volume high so that you have to get up to turn off the alarm.
Power naps help to boost your energy because they provide a dose of restful sleep that can be incorporated into your regular schedule, (partially) offsetting the harmful effects of losing overnight sleep.
5. Be Compassionate and Believe in Yourself
Having a compassionate mindset can help to support your efforts. Often, we expect perfection from ourself, but lack the timeline that permits perfection. Additionally, we ought to interrogate and question the expectation of perfection in its own right. We are finite beings and cannot do everything, after all!
Aim to examine your efforts with compassion and look for growth in your abilities rather than shortcomings. Just because we come short of what we had intended doesn’t mean that we “lost” some vague cosmic game; every experience prepares us for the next opportunity and moves us towards our goals.
6. Practice Meditation or Yoga
Having a mindfulness practice can support your efforts to remain calm. Whether a form of breath-awareness like meditation to support focus or a yoga practice that keep you flexible despite long study sessions, find a practice that works for you.
During stressful academic moments, it can be tempting to commit to a schedule that extends you beyond your capacity. If you are incorporating a new practice, aim to start before you begin experiencing stress and keep it attainable. (For instance, rather than meditating for 30 minutes daily, aim for a five-minute meditation while drinking your morning coffee or tea.)
The key is to cultivate sustainable practices for the long term. Setting lofty goals may only lead to disappointment and additional stress.
What to Do if You Feel Extremely Anxious or Extreme Test Anxiety
Often moments of extreme stress and anxiety can prevent doing well on finals. It is helpful to reflect on whether you have a history of anxiety or it is unique to a new scenario.
If your anxiety is new, aim to identify its causes. Is it the result of under-preparation, or because the material is complex? Is it really about your upcoming psych final or does it have more to do with the recent conflict with your roommate? Identifying the cause may help you to take precautionary measures in the future, such as beginning to study sooner, testing your understanding of the material with a classmate throughout the semester, or repairing relations with your roommate before the day of a big test.
If the anxiety is a familiar foe that consistently arises during finals week, it can be helpful to communicate this with your instructor, who may be able to modify the environment or time allotted for the test to accommodate. Also, it can be helpful to determine how much impact this single test (or paper) has on your semester grade. Have you done well enough in the course that this test won’t adversely impact your grade? In other words, consider the larger context before allowing your endocrine system to jump to conclusions!
Finally, condition your body to exam-day stress by quizzing yourself with practices tests and studying in a similar environment to the one you’ll encounter on test day.
Contact Us Today to Start Preparing for Finals!
Finals are stressful and can exacerbate an already difficult time of the academic year. However, knowing ahead of time what this season will involve can be an advantage, allowing you to build up reserves, incorporate strategies, and implement habits to aid.
At North Avenue Education, our study skills tutors are here to support you as you prepare – and build up your toolkit with test-taking strategies, habits, and skills that will help you overcome any exam (or obstacle) ahead of you.
About the Author