I think it would be nice to look at ‘what is best way to study?’. The aim is not just to study a specific number of hours every day. The aim is to absorb all the knowledge and information that we study and store it in our deep longterm memory so that it would stay with us for a lifetime. It is also important to be able to dive in and retrieve this stored knowledge and apply it whenever it is needed such as during a written exam or during an interview or during an actual life situation.
I can suggest ways to sharpen the mind so that absorbing, retaining and retrieving happens with ease. The human mind is already endowed with these abilities naturally when it is rested, refreshed and relaxed. But modern lifetime living has rendered our minds to be tired all the time. We have no way to find out when our mind is tired and we have no knowledge or skill to switch off our mind to allow it to completely rest and get refreshed.
Even if we manage to study and retain all the information and knowledge in our memory, we find it very difficult to retrieve it and use it when it is needed the most due to stress and anxiety. Our mind goes into a flight or freeze mode and we go blank. Is it not a fact that when we review our exam question papers later on at home we realise that we knew all the answers but we could not remember it during the exam.
Learning to enjoy deep wholesome sleep and also learning to switch off our mind frequently during the day to allow it brief rests is the best way to study and excel in studies. When we cultivate a few practices into a lifelong set of routine habits, we will be able to do so effortlessly. The following article provides the way.
Is a 5 hour sleep enough for a student?
The following article tells us why our minds are tired all the time.
Selvan Srinivasan · 1y
Are you mentally tired or not?
I think the question probably is – “Are you always mentally tired or not?” I used to be always mentally tired probably for almost twenty years up until five years ago. And I realise that it was mental exhaustion only now after learning to rest my mind and going through an unbelievable life transformation as a result of that. When we are professionally engaged with our work, our mind is busy with mental activity which includes planning, working, calculating, computing, watching something (videos) listening to something (such as podcasts), reading, studying, focusing, concentrating, paying attention, etc. When we relax from doing any of the above work, we take rest by keeping our mind busy with other mental activity. These include the monologues in our mind with ourselves, the dialogues we carry out mentally with an imaginary person, the voices of others in our mind telling us what not to do, memories of past events, worries about the future, fantasising, imagining, dreaming, etc. We are habituated to this and so it seems to be happening effortlessly and automatically, although we are doing it. We don’t know how to stop it. This leads to mental tiredness and eventually to perennial mental exhaustion. Sleep doesn’t seem to rest our mind completely probably because we continue our mental activity in the form of restless dreams. In my opinion, based on my personal life experience of completely healing myself and several others from supposedly incurable illness, mental exhaustion is the root cause for all the chronic lifestyle disease afflicting humanity in modern times. I have written extensively about how to find out if we are mentally tired and how to completely rest our mind to allow our bodies to heal holistically. You can find all these information and free tools such as videos for physical movements and audios for guided meditation in my website to help release the mental restlessness and enjoy wholesome rest. This will help you experience active, energetic life all the time instead of feeling tired all the time.