It’s that time of term again. Midterm marks are being returned and if you are anything like me, it seems you are going to have to put in 110% to get that 60% average this term. It is this train of thought that may tempt you to pull an all-nighter, especially before a project is due or before one of your final exams.
If you choose to ignore the negative health effects from not getting enough sleep (which most scientific literature agree upon) and still decide to pull an all-nighter, below are some tips to make sure you do the best you possibly can on your project or exam.
1) Know how your body reacts to pulling an all-nighter. It is completely useless to stay up all night studying for an exam if your mind will shut down at 5:00 am and you cannot be productive until you sleep again. The best way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to experiment with all-nighters when you don’t have anything as important to prepare for in order to see how your brain functions. If your mind cannot function after an all-nighter, at least you won’t learn this prior to an important exam. Similarly, see how alert and work-efficient you are at later times, such as late afternoon or the evening, after pulling an all-nighter.
2) Do more than just study. I don’t know a single person who can effectively study for an exam from 9:00 am in the morning until 9:00 pm at night. Likewise, you shouldn’t expect yourself to be able to study from 9:00 pm until 9:00 am. Taking several breaks, including lunch- and dinner-like meals, will help make sure you are still fresh throughout the night. Farrah Foods, Campus Pizza, Pita Factory, and many other places in the plaza are open late into the morning (or are open for 24hrs), so going there for a 2:00 am “lunch” can be what you need to nourish yourself. It can also trick your body (and you) into thinking that you are not stressing yourself by pulling an all-nighter.
3) Avoid coffee are energy drinks. While caffeine can give you the jolt you need to focus for an hour or two, they are not good for you if you are trying to pull an all-nighter. Once the sugar or caffeine rush is over, you are, more likely than not, going to crash. If you are trying to finish an end-of-term project, this might not be too much of a problem, since, odds are, you will sleep as soon as the project is over. However, if you crashed right before or during your exam, you may end up doing worse than you would have had you not studied at all.
4) Work with other people: It is hard to stay up late at night when you are alone in a classroom. Pulling an all-nighter with a bunch of your classmates is not only a great class bonding activity, but can help keep you focused on the material that needs to be completed. One way to do this is to get together with 3 or 4 of your classmates, find an empty classroom (RCH is open 24/7, and from there you can get to nearly every building on campus), and just work in there as the night goes by. Along with taking breaks and eating food, working with others may make you, and your body, forget that it has been up for 30+ hours and allow you to avoid stress and fatigue during the entire night.
5) Have a plan to get back to a normal sleep schedule: One problem that may arise after pulling an all-nighter, whether it be for a project or exam, is that there is the tendency to want to go to sleep immediately afterward. This is not always the best idea. For starters, your body will want to sleep for a long time to make up for the loss – possibly even 10 or more hours of slumber. This will not only cause you to wake up in the wee hours of the morning, but mean you have lost the entire day you could have spent studying. Secondly, your body may adapt quickly to a new schedule of sleeping during the day and staying up at night. This would not be good if you have another afternoon exam. One method I have used is to semi-study (reading/summarizing notes) until 7:00 or 8:00 pm before going to sleep and then forcing myself to wake up at 8:00 am the next day. This way, you won’t permanently ruin your sleep schedule.
Hopefully, these tips can be used successfully if you need to pull an all-nighter, either this term or any other. As mentioned above, it is not always the best nor healthiest way to get studying done. However, if an all-nighter seems like the only option, hopefully these five tips will help make sure you don’t ruin your term as a result of said excursion.
Happy Feet
NIGGERS