Exam Studying With Music - Experiment

 One of my biggest challenges lately has been focusing for a long period of time. An interesting aspect I've been learning about myself lately is that my endurance and tolerance for discomfort tends to increase when I'm listening to music. I wanted to try and optimize for this characteristic by thinking about how I can use music to improve my exam performance.

Today, I found myself listening to music as I was going over flashcards to study for a therapeutics exam that I have coming up next week. I found myself getting very tired in the late afternoon, but after throwing on my noise cancelling headphones and my favorite study music, the work felt like a breeze or at least I felt like I could go on for hours regardless of how much work I would need to put in. I'm even experimenting with music as I type out this blogpost. Hopefully you enjoy the rest of it!

Mid-week Update: 

I made a bit more progress as I spent time creating flashcards for my exam while listening to music and even going over a ton of them throughout my day. I noticed when I listen to movie scores my focus is a little better although it is not always perfect of course. If you don't know what those are, they are movie soundtracks and can vary from suspenseful to action and even calm. I usually prefer a fast pace soundtrack to keep myself awake because calm movie soundtracks make me dose off more often. I found a good solution to this is to have a variation of this song throughout my Spotify playlist. If you want to know what songs I listen to when I study, feel free to leave a comment below. Listening to music has allowed me to keep studying through long periods even when I didn't feel like studying. I found myself not in the mood to study mountains of information until I threw on some songs to keep me going whether they had lyrics or not this was sort of my coffee for my study sessions.

Final Update: 

I ended up at least passing my first exam of the year using this method. However, the one caveat was that the early morning before I took my exam I was studying without music. Surprisingly, I noticed music was still playing not through my devices but instead in my own head! That's right, the music was motivational and somehow memorized in my mind. I'm not sure if listening to the same playlist for a long time did this but it was working. 

In the exam room, I couldn't hear the music in my head anymore. My focus just narrowed to taking the exam. I was able to recall information as it came up although I did not know everything as usual. I noticed that my mind tends to waiver to random things during the exam and that is when I realized I needed to stop and breathe for a bit. Still no music I can hear.

Note: At night, before bed I would briefly scroll through lecture slides and study guides on my phone in order to try to build what people call photographic memory. I'm not sure if it could have affected my results but the material did appear in my mind like a book thanks to this allowing me not to mix up different disease states and medications. I'm also not sure if my nightly meditations may have helped increase my focus and discipline but I did see some help with breathing when it came to exam day when I needed to stay calm.

Besides listening to music, at times, I would listen to podcasts to help when I'm creating flashcards as the exam was drawing closer this past week. It may have helped but it did give me a bit of a slight headache. Personally, I find that listening to what other people are doing in their lives helps me to give myself that extra push when I'm growing tired of working. I especially find productivity or non-fiction podcasts the most motivating for this activity.

Drawbacks:

No method is without its flaws and this was no exception. Post-exam period, I found myself having what I call "Exam PTSD" which is when you take a hard exam and all you want to do is study more. This activity is done almost mindlessly and honestly the sleep deprivation and stress level make this an understandable adverse effect. I found it difficult to stay awake that afternoon after the exam and I tried listening to more music but it just wasn't working. I have resolved to get off study music binging for a week until my body and brain can recalibrate itself to a calmer state sufficient for daily happiness. Another drawback was that I needed to be mobile when studying which means remembering to charge my devices or schedule my calendar a week in advance. This can feel taxing at first but I found it to pay dividends in the long run. However, don't over-schedule your day for every time block with varying activities, instead, choose at least 4 or 5 big ones you want to accomplish for the day and block off 2-3 hrs for time on that. 

Another big one is the lack of social time. When you throw on those headphones and play your music, you go in with the intent of not planning to be disturbed until your session is over. I sometimes felt like I was alienating my friends by not constantly checking up on them but on the inside I know that they would understand.

Final Thoughts:

Music can have a sort of helpful effect when trying to find that extra motivation to study for exams. Of course, there are other study methods, but this has been working for me for this big exam, so I do plan on testing it out for my next exam which is a much larger amount of content focusing on cancer drugs and gastrointestinal (stomach) medications. I will update with a new post on that soon, but for now I'm currently experimenting with podcasts during my flashcard creation periods once again. I'm still getting over the drawbacks of the last exam but I know with enough rest and lack of music things will be better. Music can be a tool used for success and for procrastination after applying this method to my work.

Also note that everyone is different, I don't play video games or binge Netflix so this method may or may not be as effective for you. The only way you will know is to try it out and search for success or failures somewhere in it. This is my last year of taking regular didactic lectures so I was willing to experiment with any possible study methods to learn more about myself and the different study techniques.

I hope you find something helpful here.