How to study without falling asleep or zoning out

Reading your notes in silence asks for very little action. Your attention can wander off with nothing to stop it, and your eyes keep moving down the page while your mind is elsewhere. Risko and colleagues measured this during an hour long recorded lecture. Mind wandering grew with time on task, memory for the lecture dropped, and the more people wandered, the less they retained (Risko et al., 2012).

Sleepiness adds to this when the night was short or the session falls early in the afternoon. Both problems share the same way out. Make the session active, with something to produce, and break it up before attention collapses. The next three sections give the levers that have been tested, from the simplest to the most physical.

Szpunar, Khan and Schacter split a video statistics lecture into several parts. Some students answered a short test after each part, the others did not. Those who were tested wandered about half as much, took more notes, learned more of the lecture, and felt less anxious about the final test (Szpunar et al., 2013).

You can do this alone. Every ten or fifteen minutes of reading, close your notes and answer two or three questions on what you just read. Simply knowing a question is coming makes you follow along. This is active recall, covered in Active recall, why quizzing yourself beats rereading, and it has the bonus of making you remember more as well as keeping you awake. The page The Feynman technique for studying, the steps and what research says rests on the same principle, with an explanation in place of questions.

Brooks and Lack cut the night of 24 young adults to about 5 hours, then tested naps of 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes at 3 pm, against no nap. The 5 minute nap brought almost nothing. The 10 minute nap immediately improved sleepiness, fatigue, vigour and test performance, with some effects lasting up to 155 minutes (Brooks and Lack, 2006).

The 20 minute nap gave benefits that only showed up after 35 minutes. The 30 minute nap first caused a groggy phase, then improvements (Brooks and Lack, 2006). For an afternoon session, the short nap is the most practical. Set an alarm, lie down somewhere quiet, and start again with a question session rather than with rereading.

Breaks you decide on the spot tend to come too late. In Biwer and colleagues, students who managed their own breaks were more tired and more distracted than those following fixed breaks, for equivalent work (Biwer et al., 2023). Ariga and Lleras also showed that short switches prevent the drop in vigilance on a long task (Ariga and Lleras, 2011). The page The Pomodoro technique for studying, what a 2023 study measured explains how to set up these blocks.

Finally, protect your night, it works for you. Sleep after learning helps consolidate what you studied (Rasch and Born, 2013). Studying late into the night makes you lose twice, the session is less attentive and consolidation is shorter. The page Sleep and memory, why sleeping after you study matters covers that link.