By Jessica Nguyen, Staff Writer
If you are sitting on your bed trying to do homework, get off. It’s no coincidence that you just find yourself suddenly on your phone or napping when you should be doing homework. The reason why you are so unproductive: you’re working on your bed.
Think of what you associate your bed with and why you love it so much: its cozy blankets, fluffy pillows, and your body falling into unconsciousness. As you attempt to do work on a bed, you are actually allowing the comfort to take away your focus. Laying in a relaxed position puts you in a position to sleep or grow absorbed with a laptop with social media or Netflix can trap you from doing work.
The lack of space on a bed also contributes to decreased productivity. It’s a cluttered small mess as you try to spread out your papers or find something. Chances are you will also get your sheets dirty from pen, highlighter marks and crumbs.
Sitting on the bed or laying down with a laptop on your chest lead to a sore back and even chronic back pain and strain that seriously injure the spine.
Now maybe you find yourself actually getting work done on your bed, but studying in bed can impact your sleep as well. You begin to associate your bed as a place to do homework or study, and, as you try and fall asleep, your mind is still working and keeping you up. The right amount of sleep is crucial for your body to stay healthy, memorize new information, deal with stress and carry out its life processes. Technology, like the light from phone screens, on the bed halts the body’s production of the sleep hormone melatonin and encourages insomnia, according to American College of Healthcare Sciences.
Studying in your home alone puts you in a more relaxed and laid-back mindset that makes it more difficult to find the motivation to do work. You possess the freedom to do anything you want in your home. Distractions like family, pets and etc. can blocks to productivity. Not to mention, other items in your room, like the T.V. or phone, steal your attention from homework as well, luring you into the warm embrace of procrastination.
So what are good places to study? The library, study lounge or computer lab are beneficial because of others’ presence motivates and positively stress you. In a group of working students, you don’t want to be the only one scrolling through social media or playing games. The library provides plenty of resources with its books and study cubicles that maintain privacy.
Change up your scenery and go to a coffee shop. Caffeine is all around you, and drinking coffee stimulates productivity, raises your mood, stirs creativity and heightens alertness levels. Other drinks beside coffee, like hot chocolate or tea, provide you with a burst of energy. Try drinking two cups a day between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. or 2 and 5 p.m.. Coffee shops also yield productivity because of the focused people surrounding you; mental effort exertion is contagious, according to Belgium researchers, and your performance actually improves in front of an audience. The soft buzz of a coffee shop “distract people just enough so that they think more broadly” while “extreme quiet tends to sharpen your focus, which can prevent you from thinking in the abstract” according to Ravi Mehta from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Going outside is a great way to get fresh air and recharge. Walking around nature is invigorating and makes you more creative. There’s lots of room and can take away stress from studying. Even if you can’t go outside, bringing a part of nature inside like a plant is still beneficial and increases concentration, according to College Raptor.
Meeting up with a partner or group somewhere is another way to increase productivity and memorize ideas in an interactive way.
Changing your location breaks up your routine, providing you with a new environment for your brain to grow accustomed to. This stimulates and inspires you to do new things; during this, dopamine is released that additionally encourages you to work better.
However, if you don’t like people, rules and lack of comfort and space or just can’t leave the house, your room is still an exceptional place to study. It’s a controllable environment, you don’t have to go anywhere and have access to all of your materials. You can still try a standing desk, having a clean, de-cluttered area, moving to a different part of your room or bed or changing your lighting like doing work by a window instead of lamp. If you’re doing written work, turn off the wi-fi to limit distractions or keep it on to listen to instrumental, classical and acoustic music.
Things are different for everyone and the possibilities are endless. I bed you can do anything if you put your mind to it, so have a library (very) fun time studying Barons!
