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3 Easy Ways To Hack Sleep To Improve Your Performance

November 20, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

Hacking Sleep: How To Get The Most Out Of Snooze Time

Neuroscientists suggest that kids need 10-12 hours of sleep and most adults 7.5-9 hours. But let's be real: When was the last time you consistently got 8 or 9 hours of sleep? Then, ask a room full of teens how many got 10 hours of sleep and count the number of hands. If you teach in a high school, you'll be lucky to see one hand raised.

Luckily, not every student you encounter looks like a sleep-deprived saliva-drooling zombie. Somehow, they are able to survive and learn on whatever limited amount of sleep they get. Of course, lack of sleep, or rather rest, is not the way to go long term. You want to get more sleep!

But if you just can't... because life and bad habits keep getting in the way you might as well find alternatives. So if you just can't get enough of the good thing...

Hack Sleep to Make It More Efficient

Here's how:

Exercise Early.
Supplement with Vitamin C and Mg.
Meditate Before Bed.

Hack Sleep with Early Exercise

Exercise helps your brain get more oxygen and operate better. Morning exercise helps regulate cortisol which is a steroid hormone our body needs to function. When its levels are too high you might have trouble sleeping. A few minutes of exercise in the morning increases cortisol at the beginning of your day. Then it progressively decreases throughout the day.

While it may be hard to start, as few as 5 minutes of vigorous exercise each morning will aid your sleep at night. Your sleep cycle will improve when you hit the pillow with a lot less cortisol present in your body.

Hack Sleep with Vitamin C and Mg

Besides being used in a lot of biological processes, magnesium manages the "sleep" hormone melatonin and your brain chemistry. This helps your body and brain relax so you can achieve higher quality sleep.

Vitamin C lowers cortisol, which as described above you want to be low before going to bed.

Hack Sleep with Meditation

Imagine you're working on an important project on your computer and you just can't stop multitasking. The more browser tabs you have open the more distracted, unfocused, and stressed out you become. What if you closed all of them, took a break, and reopened just the one tab you really need?

Meditation is like closing all of those open brain tabs so you can focus on the present. It's great anytime, but can really help you relax before bed so you can get higher quality sleep.

Can you envision 5-10 minutes of closing your eyes and listening to yourself just breathe right before bed?

Hack Sleep To Improve Your Performance

It's no secret quality sleep improves your brain function and performance in school, work, and life. An optimized brain thinks more clearly, learns more effectively, and creates more vividly.

So if you can't get enough sleep hack it with Early Exercise, Vitamin C and Mg, and Bedtime Meditation.

But don't just stop there. Tell your kids. Tell your students. Tell your friends.

You have the power to change lives. Use it often.

I frequently share brain-based teaching and learning strategies, lessons, and visuals. If you don't sign up for my newsletter below you might miss them. Worry not: I don't eat spam. I don't send it either!

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categories / Learning
tags / focus, teaching teens, deeper learning, learning, teaching, sleep, hacking sleep, rest

The Best Cramming Advice You Never Got

October 30, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

Learning is like playing the blues.

If you wanna get really good at it and be able to improvise, you must practice playing the blues a lot. You must also understand it. The scales, the chord progressions, the beats, the turnaround, the stories, the mood; the "how to blues."

If you wanna get really good at learning you must practice learning. You must also understand it. The brain, the habits, the strategies, what works, what doesn't; "the how to learn."

If you understand how your brain learns you might be able to hack your learning; to improvise and modify sketchy study strategies that mostly don't work and make them more effective.

Today, I attempt to do that with cramming and if you read my last post What's The Brain Deal With Cramming? you know that I don't recommend it and instead advocate for smart spaced practice.

But today...

Just today, I AM PROMOTING CRAMMING. Not because I believe in it but because I find that many students cram, and as unfortunate as teachers find it, many will continue to cram their way through school. And, as my mission is to help everyone learn, I want to take this opportunity and attempt to make cramming more effective - perhaps effective enough that students can retain more information longer - even weeks after they cram it into their brains.

Is this even possible?

There's only one way to find out so...

Let's Hack Cramming!

So there you be! Crazy? Perhaps. But just consider this:

My wife just gifted me the new Van Morrison LP. I played it yesterday for the first time. It's good. It's blues above all else this favorite poet-musician-artist of mine crammed in there.

"The thing about the blues is you don't dissect it – you just do it," said Van Morrison. That's true, but it's also a lie. The truth lives in the idea that blues is performance driven. The lie is that you can't improvise well (cram) without a whole lotta love, know-how, and practice.

You see, his dad bought him an acoustic guitar when he was 11. Starting with learning basic chords and then forming bands before playing as a solo artist, Van Morrison has done a lot of spaced practice over time. And because of this he can cram and do it well.

So, I'm not saying you should cram. I'm not saying your students should cram. But if you or your students will cram y'all might as well learn to do it good. Like the blues... I'm just sayin'

You have the power to change lives. Use it often.

Did you dig this article and infographic? It's the kind of information we don't teach in schools that I am putting in my upcoming all-in-one book, guide, and workbook Crush School Notebook: 12 Weeks To Better Learning. Sign up for my newsletter below to be informed when it comes out and to get my other cramming hack that uses spaced practice. Oxymorons? We shall see!

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I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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categories / Learning
tags / focus, deep work, productivity, teaching teens, parenting teens, CRAMMING, procrastination, deeper learning, learning, teaching

What's The Brain Deal With Cramming?

October 28, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

Cramming. The answer to studying for many students.

I get it. We all have a life and school often ain’t it until we have no choice.

No one plans to cram. It’s not like you say to yourself: I will study for my chemistry test from midnight to 4 am the night before and sleep for 3 hours that night. That’s cray-cray! Who in their right mind would plan to study for 4 hours straight and sleep for 3 hours? Yet, many students wait until the night before to hit the books or review for that big history, science, or English test. They promise themselves to not procrastinate but end up waiting till the very last moment to write that essay or create that presentation. Is this you?

But Is Cramming Effective?

One time, a female student came to see me after school. She bombed her chem test and was bummed out about it.

I studied for four hours last night and I thought I knew it! I even stayed up late to go over everything twice! I don’t understand how I did so bad! Is there any extra credit I can do?

True story except it’s kind of a lie. This wasn’t just one student. I hear this all the time from many students. The truth might be that many just don’t know why cramming is ineffective. I mean you might go to sleep feeling you’ve got it. And then the test comes and you don’t… Why is that?

Well… What happened was…

The information never made it from short-term to long-term memory.

In other words: You never actually learned it. Your brain threw it out. The hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that holds short-term memories and decides whether to keep them or not, decided much of the information wasn’t important enough to keep and so it hit the DELETE button. You might have even understood it, but you still forgot it. And you can’t use that which you don’t remember. Bummer, I know.

Cramming sucks, because you spend a lot of time doing it while results you get are mediocre at best. Even if you do well on the test you crammed for you forget the information shortly after you take the test. That’s not too terrible if you don’t need it anymore. But what if the same stuff reappears on the final, or you need to use it on a project, or in your future job?

The real tragedy happens when you realize that though you did okay on the test you crammed for you did not learn anything. Not really. If you forgot it all a day or two later, you’re not any smarter and you just wasted a bunch of time going to school and cramming. Your brain might have held the information until the morning of the test, but then closed the loop on it and threw it out after you completed the test.

But most likely, the lack of sleep and not enough time for the information to be processed affected your performance negatively. You probably did not do as well as you could have had you used smart spaced practice. Hopefully, you weren’t one of those school zombies who chronically don’t get enough sleep and look like they have more than a few dead brain cells up there.

So What’s The Real Deal With Cramming?

Why does it seem like cramming can sometimes work?

As I mentioned above, your brain, specifically the hippocampus is capable of holding a bunch of information for immediate use. What does immediate mean in this context? It’s hard to say, but the time span is short. It may be 2 hours or 2 days, but probably not 2 weeks. And, unless you are revisiting the information periodically, your memories of it fade away more and more with each passing hour.

Some people are better at holding information than others. One reason for this may be genetic, another is most likely a measure of how well-trained your brain is at cramming. What this means is that you might temporarily remember more facts than someone else and hold them in your working memory longer.

So… You might do well on a test, but the information often doesn’t make it to long-term memory. It is temporarily stored a bit longer. You might remember more facts for a test you crammed for than the next person, but will still forget most of the information in the long term. In a nutshell, you did well on the test but still didn’t learn the concepts because your hippocampus threw them out after you used them for the test.

The way you study communicates to your unconscious brain if the information will be needed in the future. This is why the depth of your learning depends on your approach to learning. Consequently, deeper learning cannot occur when you cram.

This might be okay for subjects and concepts you’ll never use in the future. If you just want to get through… say physics, and you don’t care about getting an A or a B, cramming tactics might help with that… But why would anyone cram for something they really want to learn? Personally, I don’t think anyone wishes to do that with topics they’re passionate about, but most students fail to plan their study sessions out. This is why you end up cramming. You don’t plan not to cram.

Why LeBron Doesn’t Cram

If you want to be successful in your future profession, you will have to become smarter than most people in your field, which means that you need to approach studying it for the long term. The use it and then lose it way that cramming is, does not allow you to be in the top 10% of your field of work. Would we be calling LeBron James “The King” or “King James” now had he just took a thousand shots on the night before the game and skipped practice all the other days? Much like LeBron has to practice repeatedly to maintain his high level of play you need to use strategies that help you retain information.

How do you do that? LeBron has coaches who help him with workout regimens and conditioning. These coaches also schedule team practices. Most of these things are routines; non-negotiables he might not like as much as playing basketball but has to do to stay successful. So what are your non-negotiables? What are the subjects you must not neglect and cram for? Decide and create a plan of practice that will get you to the top.

The Future Does Not Favor Those Who Cram

But here’s the deal. You never know when a subject you decided to ignore and only study for last minute might become useful. Maybe 10 years from now, you’re a businessman who scored a big account, an engineering firm that builds roads, bridges, and skyscrapers, and it quickly becomes apparent to you that you need basic physics knowledge to be able to understand your new client’s needs and what the people you are meeting with are talking about.

You want to hit a home run with this one, and maybe you can even do a half-decent job, but your boss quickly finds out that Jennifer who just got hired can do a lot better job, because she took high school science seriously and just proposed an excellent idea for how to solve the new client’s problem. This is something you couldn’t do in the moment and had no time to learn in the present. Jennifer is the new account manager and you hope to be ready the next time an opportunity like this one comes along…

Luckily, that didn’t happen yet. Your future is all ahead of you. Jennifer is a 9th grader killing it in biology and thinking she might become a lawyer like her aunt Penelope or an entrepreneur like her dad. You are in physics because your college of choice requires it for admission and you’re getting by. You have a respectable B average, but forgot most of what you were supposed to learn last month because you already took that test. You can say: Who cares? It’s not like some freshman will outperform me in the future. Or, you can think long-term and always seek to get something out of every class you take.

The truth is that in the present you just don’t know how or when understanding ideas outside of your expertise may help your future success. You might not always have a choice which classes to take, but you can always decide if you spend your time blowing them off or crushing them. Make the choice that will feel good 5, 10, and 50 years from now.

You have the power to change the world. Use it often.

What did you think about this excerpt from my upcoming learning book, workbook, and guide in one The Crush School Notebook: 12 Weeks To Better Learning available on Amazon on December 1st? It is part of a lesson on cramming to help students understand why it's ineffective. So I don't recommend it, but I think I've figured out a way to hack it to make it well... more effective... Yep, that's what the next post will be about: Hacking Cramming.

Sign Up Below if you're not on my email list yet and I'll send it to you when I write it and create the Infographic for it.

Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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CONTACT ME

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categories / Learning
tags / focus, deep work, productivity, teaching teens, parenting teens, CRAMMING, procrastination, deeper learning, learning, teaching