Maintaining Healthy Habits During Final Exams
How I got straight A’s and 8+ hours of sleep every night
Like many college students, I have struggled with anxiety, sleep, food, and more. Therefore, I am always working to develop healthier habits. This semester, my health goals were as follows:
- Getting in bed around 10 pm and sleeping between 11 pm — 12 am.
- Working out almost daily but allowing myself to have days off whenever I needed.
- Eating healthy but in a non-restrictive manner.
- Take time to relax offline (spending time with family, meditating, going on walks).
- Going to get my morning cup of coffee and only having one cup a day.
Finals Season and Healthy Habits
During finals season, it’s become common and even almost expected to pull all-nighters, barely get any sleep, or be caffeine-dependent. For many students, it’s also common to neglect their mental health, practice unhealthy eating habits, or drop their normal self-care habits like working out or even showering.
Over time, I had taught myself that in order to prioritize my academic performance, I had to prioritize my health less. Every semester, finals season has become an excuse to wipe out so much of my hard work in developing healthy habits.
This finals season, I wanted to see if I really had to sacrifice academic performance to prioritize my health. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.
Over the last week, I took three rigorous final exams and wrote one 15-page final paper. At the same time, I was also in bed by 10 pm and got 8 hours of sleep each night. I worked out in some form every day, relaxed plenty, and didn’t even fall behind listening to my usual podcasts. My diet stayed consistently healthy-ish and I only drank my morning cup of coffee every day.
This semester, I got straight-A’s in all of my classes, proving to myself that it is possible to maintain a healthy lifestyle while also maintaining personal academic standards.
How I Maintained Healthy Habits During Finals
I used color blocking and to-do lists.
The most tangible actions I took during finals week were to color block my Google Calendar and keep up my to-do lists. Every morning, I listed out everything I wanted to get done that day on Notion. I then color-coded my to-do list by changing the color of everything that needed to get done that day to red. Then, I’d go into my Google calendar and block out the times when I wanted to do each of the things on my to-do list. I differentiated the mandatory or time-sensitive events with the more flexible things I needed to do with different colors on my Google calendar. I would make sure to leave time for meals, breaks, and to generally overestimate how much time it would take me to do a certain task.
I trusted my schedule.
Through my online organizational system with Notion and Google calendar, I would only need to think about what I needed to do that day once. This way, I really only spent five minutes every morning organizing my thoughts so that I could easily reference them throughout the day without having to waste energy remembering what I needed to do.
Although I didn’t force myself to follow my schedule strictly in general, I tried to always stop working whenever I planned to stop working for the night. I found it to be completely doable to have a hard stop on my work before 10 pm because I trusted my schedule and that I could continue the next day.
I set myself up for success.
Like many college students, I often find myself procrastinating or relying on the final exams to boost my grade. This semester, I tried to put in consistent effort throughout the semester so that I had a buffer in my classes when it came time for finals.
Through putting in consistent effort and keeping up with the course material, I found that my classes actually felt much easier and easy to balance. When it came time for midterms or finals, I was much more prepared than in previous semesters. This semester, I only had to review the material rather than learn a lot of the content from scratch right before exams.
I took the pressure out of finals and treated it like no big deal.
I tried really hard to not put too much pressure on myself during finals season. This semester, my university gave us the option to choose pass/no credit for our grades instead of having them count in our GPA. For my grades, the stakes were a little bit smaller this semester.
Additionally, because I set myself up for success throughout the semester, I had a buffer for myself during finals. Unlike previous semesters, I didn’t need a really great grade on my final exams to do well in the classes.
Lastly, I knew that grades didn’t determine my intelligence or even how hard I had worked. They were just letters and numbers that encompassed a small part of my academic progress.
I carried on with my other daily activities.
Part of me maintaining my established healthy habits is carrying on with my other daily activities. In the past, I have generally stopped all of my daily habits during exams to fully focus on my exams. This semester, I continued to do the things I loved including keeping up with my favorite shows, podcasts, and more. I even got the second dose of my COVID vaccine in the middle of finals week. I scheduled the shot so that the symptoms wouldn’t interfere with my actual exam day, but didn’t make too big a deal out of avoiding my exam period in general like I would with any other obligation I had to take care of.
Through living my life mostly as I normally would during any other weeks, it was easier to also maintain my normal healthy habits like working out, eating balanced meals, and sleeping 8+ hours.
Takeaways
I was able to maintain my healthy habits while getting straight-A’s in my classes because I treated this semester like a marathon instead of a series of sprints.
Previously, I would take turns prioritizing periods of extreme rest and periods of hard work. This semester, I worked in a lot of rest time into my consistent work and realized that I could maintain my health goals, including getting in bed by 10 pm every night during finals season.
I highly encourage everyone to prioritize personal healthy habits and figure out how to work them into a consistent schedule. Trust me, your health goals are a marathon, not a series of sprints.
