Study Motivation

Hey loves!

My winter break's end is getting closer and closer which means that I am entering my final period of preparing for my mock exams. I returned to Cambridge yesterday and my cousin joined me because we are planning to celebrate New Year's Eve in London together. Between celebrating my birthday, Christmas, and getting ready to leave home again, it was sometimes hard to motivate myself to study and so I decided to share my best tips for studying with you guys in the above video.

One of the easiest things you can do to keep yourself protected from distractions is to turn your iPhone to greyscale. You can do this in your phone's settings: General -> Accessibility -> Display Accommodations -> Colour Filters. Somebody had once told me about this trick and I decided to try it out a few months ago. I have not switched my phone back to colours since. I realised that I spent less and less time on my phone (and especially on social media) since the things on it were just less attractive without their colours.

Another thing that I find very helpful is to try some breathing techniques when you are starting to lose focus. I used this techniques in longer final exams and it has always helped me to boost my focus. Here are some easy breathing techniques to get started with:

1. Close your eyes. Now focus on the air entering your nose. Inhale deep. Exhale through your mouth. Stay focused on your breathing and inhale deeply again. Hold your breath for three seconds. Exhale through your mouth. Repeat the last exercise but vary the time to five and seven seconds.

2. Hold your hand in front of you and use a finger from your other hand to follow your fingers' shapes. Whenever you go up with your finger tracing your other hand, inhale. Hold that breath until your finger goes down again, then exhale. You can do this once or switch hands and do it again.

I find breathing techniques a very useful tool for staying focused, especially because they do not take a lot of time. You can easily do them in between tasks or during your exam without losing too much of the time you need to finish your work. If you would like to learn more breathing techniques, I would highly recommend the app Headspace. Headspace helps you to focus and you can do a short session everyday. (And no, this article is not sponsored in any way, I just genuinely love the app!)

I hope that you guys found these tips useful for motivating yourself to study! If you have some more tips, I would love to hear them! You can message me here.

Lots of love,

Elena