Scholastic All-Nighters: Why and How

Last night I pulled what was probably the last all-nighter of my college career, which feels bizarre.  There are plenty of worthy reasons to stay up all night, but from now on my education will not be included in that category.  I’ve had more all-night paper-writing and studying sessions than I care to think about over the past four years, and my general conclusion is that they are to be avoided as much as possible.  But sometimes, you don’t have a choice.

If you are prone to procrastination, like I am, you might realize the night before that you have several hours of work ahead and no remaining daylight between you and your due date.  Or maybe you simply have a lot of projects coming down to the wire all at the same time, as frequently happens with finals week and sometimes midterms as well.  When these situations come up, you have to make the choice as to whether pulling an all-nighter will ultimately help you or harm you.

When debating whether to force my brain to essentially work overtime, there are some important considerations.  The first is whether I am currently running a sleep debt already – some weeks I will sleep less than I really should and that loss accumulates.  At that point, piling an all-nighter on top runs the very real risk of mutating me into a zombie rather than a functional person.  The best time for an all-nighter is when you are well-rested already.  The second thing to do is look into the future and check to make sure you won’t be repeating this process every night for the next week.  There is no way you will be running at full capacity after staying up for more than 48 hours straight.  For an all-night study session, it is best to be well-rested before and well-rested afterward.

If you aren’t facing an overwhelming lack of sleep after considering the past and future, then your attention needs to turn to what you will be doing the night of.  All-nighters are good for rote studying and cramming, but not necessarily the best for critical analysis.  If you need to apply a lot of intellectual power to an assignment, it is better to do that first and leave any memorization for afterward – avoiding a brain burnout before you even get around to the most mentally challenging requirement.  Before you set out on your sleepless, studytastic night, make a schedule.  Even if all semester you have avoided budgeting your time, you really do need this. Cram sessions are so crammy because there is a severe time shortage.  In addition, abandoning sleep tends to compromise your judgement.  It is better to look at your schedule and let your brain follow that than improvise on the fly – that’s a recipe for night-before panic.  Scholastic all-nighters require discipline, and the channeling of that anxiety into results instead of hopeless stress.

With all that said, all-nighters are bad for you.  Humans sleep an average of eight hours a night for a reason, and denying your brain REM sleep has all sorts of nasty consequences that are still being studied.  One of the more interesting results that was recently found was that REM sleep is important to the formation of memories: every sleep session, the brain is cataloging the events of the day before by storing information and making new connections.  It is easier to remember what you did last Monday if you had some good rest Monday night.  All-nighters short your memory-making circuits.  Therefore, while they are practical for getting you through the exam the next day, they are detrimental to retaining knowledge long-term.

There are ways to help mitigate the negative effects of amputating eight hours of brain-healing downtime.  If possible, take a short nap the afternoon before.  Avoid junk food: you don’t want to make things harder on your body than they already will be.  If you need caffeine to help keep you awake, manage your dosage: don’t binge that evening and risk a meltdown at four in the morning.  Imbibe small servings throughout the night instead.  Eliminate as many distractions as possible because they will divide your already compromised focus.  It helps if you have like-minded friends who want to study with you at the same time, because you can police each other and keep yourselves on-task (Important: friends who are not study-brained will not be as helpful for your focus).  Once you have passed your deadline, taken your exam, turned in your paper, presented your project: SLEEP.  Sleep, sleep, sleep.  Your brain will thank you, and hopefully forgive you for abusing it the night before.

My last scholastic all-nighter?  Very successful.  I completed a 15-page paper, worked on another, and studied for an exam the next morning.  The paper got finished, good progress was made on the second, and I felt much more confident for the exam – pretty sure I got a good score!  The largest chunk of what I had left to do before semester’s end is gone, and I just have three papers (all in-progress), one class project, and one final exam left to do before I’m home free.  And I can finally break off my love-hate relationship with all-night study sessions for good.

Nonword of the Week: Restress

Restress: to experience anxiety about the same issue more than one time; to have a recurring worry

Example: Chelsea restressed about Monday’s final exam every three hours or so.

Related nonwords: brainful, redread 

Yeah, my finals week is getting to me.  Is it that obvious?  I am a chronic restresser when it comes to things like major tests and papers. Get out of my brain, panicky feelings! Leave me alone!

Have a unique nonword of your own?  Leave a comment!
Not sure what a nonword is?  Check out my first nonword of the week.

Disclaimer: I do not condone idle word-mangling.  Please mangle your words with care. Should not be attempted by the faint of heart or those with reading disorders.  Side-effects include peculiar looks, disapproving frowns, essay markdowns, and utter confusion.

The Feast Before the Storm

There’s something vaguely sinister about having end-of-class parties before the final assignments are due.  Events where you consume potluck junk food and sugary drinks are supposed to be rewards for getting everything done, a chance to relax and socialize post-exam or post-paper.  But there seems to be a disturbing trend in my classes of having these year-end celebrations prior to the due dates for the term projects.

It gives off a “last meal” vibe to me – let’s socialize, have some refreshments and a little fun AND THEN ENTER THE WEEK OF DOOM.  These parties don’t do much to reduce the constant stress level that is life before finals week.  That background stress is still hovering at about an 8 the whole time, even if I’m not actively thinking about all of the writing and studying left to be done.  Class festivals make it worse, because the distraction and relief is fleeting…the day or even the hour after brings a head-on collision with the extensive to-do list.

I understand that the format of finals week demands this sort of reverse-order celebration. The tests are scheduled to be the very last interactions with the educational system, so student end times are staggered over a couple of weeks and professors have the time to grade everything.  But still.  I wish that wasn’t the case.  This pre-exam partying is messing with my head.  I need to get back to my new mantra for the last two weeks of my college career: Not done yet.  Not done yet.  Not done yet.