What if I told you that there is a lot more you can do to increase the chances of passing your exam besides studying itself? Yes, you heard that right. Your performance in an exam can be impacted by a lot of variables and not just how much you have studied. Most people fail to realize the fact that passing an exam has more to do with performance on a specific day than over a long period of time. This simply means that if you are someone who has not put in any effort to optimize your performance for the exam, you have lost the competitive edge over someone who has already factored it in. Don’t get me wrong, none of the tips provided below can make up for a bad prep, but even if they give you as little as a 1% increase in your probability of academic success, I feel it’s well worth a shot. In the article below, I’ll mention the main areas that you should factor into your prep if you wish to maximize performance on exam day.

Sleep

1. Get 8-9 hours of sleep the night before your exam

You’re setting yourself up for disaster if you don’t get adequate sleep the night before an exam. You might think that I’m exaggerating this point so here’s some proof as to why you should start giving this the importance it deserves. Lack of sleep leads to higher risk of academic failure, says Dr. Keith Wilmore, medical director of the BYU Student Health Center. This means that students who lack sleep get lower grades than those who sleep enough. Another research states that compared to peers who get only six hours of sleep, students who sleep seven hours per night during the exam period score an average of 1.7 points higher (on a scale of 20) on their exams. Another research carried out at Ghent University by Dr. Stijn Baert has a similar conclusion by stating “All else equal, students who generally got good night’s sleep performed better on exams,”. If this isn’t enough proof, another research concluded that “Adequate sleep the night prior to an examination was positively associated with student course grades and semester GPAs”.

Not only this, there are other side effects of sleeping lesser than required. Firstly, your ability to memorize things will reduce. This means if you’re planning on pulling all-nighters the last few days before your exam, your ability to remember what you are studying will progressively decrease. Secondly, you will start becoming forgetful. Don’t confuse this with the prior point. While that speaks about the ability to learn new things, this point indicates that you will start forgetting what you already know as well. That’s the last thing you want to happen to you on exam day.

Now, do I think you’ll face major symptoms of sleep deprivation in one night of bad sleep? Not really. But even if it does affect your cognitive ability or mental clearness to the smallest extent, I think it’s important to take it into consideration. After all, professional exams ,in particular, are not always direct, and if your lack of sleep is the reason you fail by one wrong answer, it’s not justifiable at all.

2. Say no to blue light

This is important even if you don’t have exams. Our body-clock, the thing that helps us decide when we feel awake and when we feel sleepy, is actually set by a rhythm regulated by light. This is known as the circadian rhythm. So how does light regulate the circadian rhythm? A hormone called melatonin is secreted in our body which helps us fall asleep. When it gets dark, our pineal glands secrete melatonin, which in turn helps us fall asleep.

Here’s where blue light comes into play. Thanks to technology, most of us are glued to our phones and laptops late till night. These devices emit short-wavelength enriched light, a.k.a. blue light, which comes in and disrupts our circadian rhythm. Whether it is shorter wavelength light from the sun or it’s from your phone, your circadian rhythm will get disrupted. Thus, in turn, reduces melatonin secretion and reduces the quantity and quality of our sleep. In fact, a research done at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) states that “Participants reading a light-emitting e-book took longer to fall asleep and had reduced evening sleepiness, reduced melatonin secretion, later timing of their circadian clock, and reduced next-morning alertness.”

Well, the simple fix to this is to stop using your devices after sunset. Now I know this is only theoretically possible so here are some solutions instead:

• Use blue light blocking glasses.

• Use the in-built ‘Nightshift’ feature on your phones to reduce blue light exposure. (in-built in Macs as well)

• Download an app like ‘f.lux’ on your laptops to reduce blue light exposure.

Keep in mind that while these solutions will work to some extent, they still aren’t perfect. In such a situation, my recommendation will always be to get some rest and listen to some great podcasts.

3. Fix that sleep schedule

This point only applies if your sleep schedule is all over the place. If that is the case, I’d suggest you to start waking up early at least 2 weeks in advance so as to get your body used to the new schedule. Moreover, it would be better if you attempted your mocks at the same time you would write your actual exam so as to make your body used to it.

Training

1. Avoid high-intensity training in the week of exams

When I say high-intensity training, don’t confuse it for the more common high intensity interval training, a.k.a. HIIT. High-intensity training means training close to max effort. So this means if you go to the gym and lift weights, it would be over 80% - 85% of your 1 Rep Max. In the same way, max effort sprints where you go completely all out could be classified as training with a high intensity. What does this have to do with your exam, you must be thinking? When you train in the gym or elsewhere, apart from your muscles being stimulated, your Central Nervous System (CNS) is also simulated. Now while we all know that rest is crucial for development in any sport, we often fail to look at the body holistically and consider the stress on our CNS.

For example, let’s say you do a heavy weight training session two days before your exam. The following day, i.e. one day before your exam, you go for a max effort run. Now while you might think you have spread out your cardio and training and hence you have sufficient rest, you’re failing to look at the big picture. You see, while you might be giving your muscles a rest from a particular type of stimulus, your CNS is still taking a beating.

This would be alright in the long term if you manage your sleep and nutrition really well as fatigue levels tend to fluctuate within our bodies. But, what you’re not considering is its effect on your cortisol levels. Cortisol, a.k.a. the stress hormone gets impacted by these high-intensity training sessions. Think of it as your bodies defense mechanism for thrashing your CNS. Cortisol takes charge of regulating the changes in your bodies as a response to situations like anxiety and tension. This makes it the last thing you want to mess with on exam day. Even research suggests that moderate to high intensity exercises may increase cortisol. Now while these levels might be acute and not have long term effects, it is still a better idea to lower your workout intensity the week or two before your exams in my opinion.

Instead, for your weight training, you can simply structure a 2 - 4 week block where you drop the intensity and up the volume (amount of work done) a bit to compensate for it. The day before your exam, the best thing you can do is go for a long walk. Walking has been shown to be amazing for stress management. Put on some good podcasts and get in 30-60 minutes of walking. A study in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine compared to couch potatoes or those who exercised strenuously, university students who walked and did other easy to moderate exercise regularly had lower stress levels. The effects were even better when walking in parks or forests as concluded by studies undertaken in Japan.

Just as I mentioned with sleep, start incorporating these changes into your lifestyle at least 2-3 weeks before your exams. Fatigue takes time to dissipate and is very complex for our understandings, so the best we can do is to structure our training in a way that doesn’t leave us more stressed than we should on exam day.

Nutrition

1. Don’t eat in a deficit in the final weeks

This should be obvious. Don’t diet while giving your exam. When you eat lesser calories than you burn, your body starts preserving energy by giving importance to functions necessary for survival by pushing away things that aren’t as important for staying alive. Now while I know this would only occur in an extreme case of dieting, it is not possible for us to guarantee that your body will prioritize remembering that ‘one formula you read on page 536’ when you’re in an underfed state.

While I couldn’t find any direct studies on this topic, here’s the one I found. A 1989 research on malnutrition and cognition in Kenyan schoolchildren done by Sigman, Neumann, Jansen, and Bwibo found that children with more adequate diets had significantly higher scores on cognitive skill assessments, “regardless of the social and economic resources of the family”.

While this study talks about malnutrition specific to children in underdeveloped countries or amongst people living in poverty at that time, it still concludes that caloric deficits have negative consequences on cognitive function which could further impact academic performance. Also, to add to this, dieting affects your cortisol levels as well.

Taking all this into consideration, as long as we are consuming lesser energy than we burn, we can’t be sure of whether or not we’re optimizing our performance academically. Thus, it is better if you switch to maintenance calories approaching your exam. To err on the side of caution, I bump it up to a slight surplus and let my hunger auto-regulate.

2. Eat foods rich in micronutrients

Just as much as how much you eat matters, what you eat matters as well. We see that learning and behavior are affected by nutrition in the research done by Lahey and Rosen (2010), who suggested that diet can influence cognition and behavior in many ways. According to this research, one-third of children who filled the food habit questionnaire had an inadequate intake of fruits and vegetables. These same students show poor school performance when compared to those consuming an adequate amount of fruits and vegetables.

While nutrient-dense foods should make up most of your diet, satisfying your cravings doesn’t completely have to be ignored. If this sounds too confusing for you, try to follow the simple 80/20 rule where 80% of your calories come from “clean, healthy” sources and 20% can be filled with what satisfies your cravings. This will help you stay sane during the final weeks of your prep.

3. Don’t change meal timing or meal frequency on exam day.

Like your sleep and training, start following a fixed nutrition schedule at least a few weeks before your exam. For example, I practiced Intermittent fasting on a regular basis and gave the AM session for all the three levels of the CFA exam in a fasted state (who doesn’t love the added cognitive benefits of fasting - or is that still up for debate?). Now, you don’t have to do this. This is just to illustrate that I stuck to the same schedule I was used to and faced no problems in the nutrition department. The best way to go about this is by setting up a nutrition schedule and attempting mocks at the same time as you will give your exam to see how your body reacts to it.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this gives you an insight into fatigue and stress management while prepping for an exam. I repeat, these tips cannot compensate for a bad prep. Instead, what they will do is help you feel a lot more relaxed, more importantly, help you have peak performance on exam day. Maybe, you could do just as well without incorporating any of the aforementioned advice, and that is a choice for you to make. But I feel that since you are putting in all this effort studying for your exam anyway, doing a little more to optimize performance won’t do any harm, and at the least, you’ll be sure that you gave it your best. Here’s a quote;

References

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3. Carmack, C. L., Boudreaux, E., Amaral-Melendez, M., Brantley, P. J., & de Moor, C. (1999). Aerobic fitness and leisure physical activity as moderators of the stress-illness relation. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10626033

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6. Kassel, G. (2018, November 12). How exercise affects cortisol-the stress hormone. Retrieved from https://www.wellandgood.com/good-sweat/exercise-cortisol/

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10. Zeek, M. L., Savoie, M. J., Song, M., Kennemur, L. M., Qian, J., Jungnickel, P. W., & Westrick, S. C. (2015, June 25). Sleep Duration and Academic Performance Among Student Pharmacists. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4571043/

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