Are you feeling unprepared to tackle an entire semester’s worth of work you avoided into two hell-weeks of stress spasms and caffeine-fueled emotional breakdowns?
Then follow these tips to turn your finals week experience into a breeze.
You might not even need the caffeine to get by, and you may have time to catch up on your favorite binge-watching shows.
1. Take 15-minute study break every 90 minutes. Get up, stretch, grab a snack, scroll on @hoodclips on Instagram for a laugh, or just do anything to give your mind a break.
If you push your mind too far, it’ll be harder to retain the information you need to memorize for your final. Self-care, kids!
2. Add an extra five minutes to that break. What’s an extra five minutes? We’re hard-working, learned adults, and sometimes we need that time to watch all of the Snapchat stories we don’t remember posting last night. If anything, it’s going to make your brain feel better about coming back to studying. Right? Treat yoself!
3. Google Chance the Rapper’s Kit-Kat commercial song. Break me off a piece of that emotional-breakdown procrastination bar, am I right?
4. Wonder about how much better of a person you’d be in an alternate universe. Would alt-you be doing this right now?
Be on a now-45-minute break watching Chance the Rapper videos on Youtube after 10 minutes of studying for a test that’s tomorrow and worth 60 percent of your grade that you haven’t studied for at all up until this point because you’re afraid of facing your responsibilities and the possibilities of overwhelming failure and the consequences thereof? No. Not at all. Stress about that.
5. Decide you’ll be better after a nice Panda Express dinner. Hey, you’ve worked hard. All of that stress and worrying about your test shows you care, so why not reward yourself?
6. Make the perfect driving playlist for the seven-minute drive there. Make sure it’s the perfect mix of trap, pop, indie, and singer/songwriter. You need that song mix of “IDGAF” with that “my girl left me for Target’s new collection ‘Hearth and Home’ by Chip and Joanna Gaines” with that “I’m carefree and unstoppable no matter how many DUI’s I get!” After listening to those songs, you’ll be ready to conquer that test material.
7. Savor. Every. Bite. Enjoy slowly. Studies show that eating slow makes you more intelligent, likeable, and more likely to not be a POS who’s waiting until the last damn minute to study for their test that’s more important than their own life right now. It also makes you feel like you should be a food critic, or featured on Chef’s Table.
Orange chicken tastes better with a side of 60 percent of your semester and self-worth literally stacked on your back.
8. Wake up in a cold sweat to the sound of Fran Drescher’s voice blaring on the TV. Oy vey! You fell asleep to the popular 90s sitcom The Nanny featuring Fran Drescher as the quirky Jewish nanny from Queens. Your life right now is playing out like that episode in Spongebob where he spends hours writing the word “the.” Only you haven’t even written anything. Are you even prepared to tackle the real world? Do you even know what that’s like?
9. Try to read your note-cards through your tears. This isn’t a bad thing. It lets you look at your text material through a different light. Also, this moment will probably be the most visceral moment you experience as the past 15 weeks flashes before your eyes and all of the moments you could have been studying taunts you and reminds you how terrible of a student you are. Being so present in the moment like that will help you remember better. Diamonds are made under pressure, so if you want a better diamond, wait a little longer.
10. Take the test and vow to never let this happen again. Only it will. You know. We all know. You can’t escape the worst parts about you. What you can do, though, is remember that 15-minute breaks every 90 minutes of studying will make you a better student. Like I said, self-care is important!
Happy Finals Week!