10 tips to Concentrate Better when Preparing for Exam

Many of our daily activities require a good deal of concentration , and this ability to concentrate is very important in relation to learning and memory. However, so many people especially students have this difficulties to resist distractions or maintain a good level of concentration for long time. Here are some tricks to help you concentrate better if you are preparing for exam

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1. Use your metacognition. Learn how attention works in general, the distractions that affect you, when you start fatigued, and so on. These are fundamental aspects that will help you better manage your attention resources.
2. Make regular breaks and better in natural environments. Several studies like the one conducted by Marc G. Berman and colleagues at the University of Michigan in 2008 showed that natural environments such as forests and parks has the power of to reduce attentional fatigue. So, look for a small park and take a short walk approximately every two hours.
3. Train your cognitive abilities. There are growing number of scientific publications that claim to improve mental abilities. Jolles and his colleagues reported in 2013 that memory training has stimulated the connectivity between structures of the fronto-parietal network of the brain involved in attention processing. Thus, online training programs could lead to a more innovative and fun option that allows you to exercise your powers of concentration wherever you are.
4. Change your environment. It is highly recommended that you move away from the environment with possible distractions. Theses are; television, people talking, music from your favorite band will capture your attention preventing you to devote to the important task. It is also important that you are comfortable, so be sure to control the temperature of the room, use a comfortable chair, etc.
5. Practice meditation. In 2007 a ​​team of researchers led by Yi-Yuan Tang, described in an article published in the scientific journal PNAS. They found out that train 20 minutes a day for five days was sufficient to improve performance in a test of attention, besides reducing anxiety and fatigue.
6. Use strategies to control your thoughts. If you see that you are distracted and you’re thinking about something else, repeat a “reorientation’ phrase. Say to yourself words like ‘concentrate’ or ‘Back to study’. This will help you stop thinking and re-focus on the content of you are reading.
7. Play video games. In a classic study of the University of Rochester (New York) published in Nature, shows that people who played action video games improved their visual selective attention, they were able to serve more stimuli and were more efficient in how to use their attentional resources.
8. Change of content. This will prevent you get bored doing the same thing all day. Alternate materials or tasks as well as their degree of difficulty, or type of learning strategies that you should implement. This will help you to avoid getting saturated and keep you motivated.
9. Get organized to control anxiety. Sometimes we have so much to do we do not know where to start, and when we grow up, we keep invading our thoughts and concerns about what we still have to do. A good strategy to prevent distractionis to organize daily activities and keep a schedule, this will facilitate us to focus on the task at every moment that we have to make.
10. Make exercise. A whole body of publications points toward that exercise improves cognitive performance. Michele T. Allison G. Butler Tine and in 2012 published an article in the journal Experimental Educational Psychology in which they showed that the brief aerobic exercise (12 minutes) improved capacity of selective focus on a group of children.

We know the task is difficult, so be sure to strengthen your effort. Of course, it is important to reward yourself, do it after fulfilling a particular goal. For example, if you want to wake up ‘to see what’s in the fridge’, do it when you have completed a part of your job, but not leave it halfway.

With all these, you will improve your concentration level in anything you are doing.

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