How to Study After School When You’re Tired - Energy Hacks and Study Tips

You Are Always Tired

• When you wake up in the morning, you're tired.

• When you come back from school, you're tired.

• When you study, you're tired.

In our society, we are pushed to study harder, work harder, and fill our entire schedule. Every second not spent working towards our goals feels like a wasted moment. But does this actually increase our performance?

Tiredness lowers our brain’s ability to memorize, connect, and be creative. It reduces our motivation and goodwill, leading to poorer choices and less control over our responses.

We need our whole brain to study efficiently, yet we often use only half of it and abuse our mental power.

Think of it this way:

A car uses fuel to go. If you never refill it with fuel and use it without stopping, it will stop and break.

Interestingly, we accept this as natural for cars, but when it comes to ourselves, we forget about it and push on without properly recharging.

The worst part is that in our society, we are so accustomed to being tired all the time that most of us don’t even recognize tiredness anymore.

Being tired has become so natural for us that we think we have a normal energy level! We are used to studying in a tired state and to the time it takes us to study this way. We don’t notice how hard it is for our brain to connect the dots and stay focused.You can double your study speed simply by studying with a well-rested brain.

Just to give you an idea, I know it’s a boring topic, but think about sleep… sleeping and memory are deeply connected!

During sleep, our brain enters a phase called REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement). It’s during this phase that we process most of the information we absorb during the day. Our brain sorts, cleans, and decides what to move into long-term memory.

The long-term memory has an ocean of space compared to the short-term memory, which has the capacity of a drop in the ocean.

While we sleep, our brain memorizes and frees up space in our short-term memory, giving us more "GB" for the day ahead.

Due to school schedules, work, hobbies, etc., we deprive ourselves of this efficient process. Day by day, we feel more and more tired, overwhelmed, and inefficient.

What to Do About It

Don’t worry, we’re not only talking about sleep today. I have a collection of tips and habits you can include in your daily routine to increase your general energy level.

By the way, I’ve always been the burnout-type student. I used to study all the time with unhealthy schedules to get the grades, until my body forced me to stop, even causing fever. But I then realized how much my brain’s abilities were slowly decreasing, especially in terms of curiosity, desire to explore, and motivation. I was studying just for school like an information-processing machine, and the quality of my studying and knowledge were decreasing, along with my grades. I was studying more and more, and my grades were just getting worse every day.

Here are 4 habits and tips that helped me, to improve your energy throughout the whole day:

1. The Chair - Our Silent Enemy

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have published a study confirming that spending too much time at a desk not only harms one's mood but also damages the brain, reducing its ability to form new memories.

We all spend 6 to 8 hours sitting at school, and once we get home, what do we do? We sit down to study for another 2-4 hours or more. It’s a normal part of our society. Avoiding it at school is difficult, but at least when it comes to studying at home, we can improve.

Solution? Get up:

- Breaks: A good habit is to integrate the Pomodoro technique (study for 45 minutes and break for 10). During the breaks, stand up, stretch, and move. It will instantly increase your energy level and refresh your mind, boosting your focus again.

- Standing Study: Last year, I got a liftable table—a game changer. It's just an adjustable table to put on my desk and set at my height so I can study standing. It’s a great tool; you forget you’re standing, and I find myself “dancing” all the time, making my study sessions much lighter and more energetic. Here’s the link of my desk, if you’d like to try it out.

2.Screen Time Tip

You already know that scrolling on social media drains our energy and takes up much more time than we would like.

I recently found a great tip that truly helped me finally reduce the time I spend on social media: simply log out of them.

I logged out of my Instagram account, and it showed me how many times I unconsciously tap the icon and open the app. Finding myself logged out reminds me to pause and ask if it’s actually the right moment to open the app or if it was just an unconscious reflex.

It’s crazy how many times throughout the day I avoid mindless scrolling and dedicate myself to more interesting and useful activities.

3.Sleep Patterns

Sleeping is important, and you know it. It’s the most crucial part of our energy-keeping habits. Here are 3 good quality sleep habits to better your sleep pattern:

1. Find Your Time: Not everyone needs to sleep 8 hours. For example, 7 hours are perfect for me. I feel refreshed, whereas sleeping too much makes me tired. The key is to find your ideal sleep duration and stick to it. Going to sleep and waking up at the same hour most of the time regulates your biological cycle, making you naturally tired at bedtime and awake after 7-8 hours. Consistency is key.

2. Early Night Birds: Some people are “morning people,” while others are more productive at night. Take this into account when scheduling your study time.

3. Morning Sun: Getting direct sunlight in the morning as soon as possible regulates our hormones, signaling our body to wake up and improving our energy levels and alertness during the day. It can be as simple as 10 minutes of sunlight, reading a book on the balcony, or taking a short walk.

4.Recharging Energy

When we rest, we often engage in low-effort activities like watching TV, scrolling, or playing video games. The point is that these “relaxing activities” don’t truly recharge your energy. You can see this during summer holidays, for example, when, after a few days of doing nothing, you feel as tired as if you had studied all day.

Happiness and energy don’t come from doing nothing. Our brain needs interesting stimuli and creativity to reach the optimal state—the flow state.

"Contrary to what we usually believe, the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

To recharge, try to spend time on “waste-time” hobbies—the kind of things you enjoyed as a child that you know make you happy and energized (or explore new ones!).

Examples include:

- Painting

- Crafting

- Cooking

- Hiking

Or whatever else you always give up because it seems "purposeless."

That is clean energy recharging and new fuel available for you.

Summing Up

Your energy level drastically changes your performance. We are so used to living in a tired state that we forget our own mental potential. By making a habit of restoring our energy level, we can increase our performance, happiness, and abilities.

Take this week to experiment with what it feels like to be energy RICH and let me know!🥰

Isa

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