I took an American history class my Freshman year in college. It was one of those “core classes” that everyone was required to take at some point in order to graduate. If it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have taken it. Lets just say that I wasn’t much of a fan of history at that point in my life.
I ended up doing fine in the class grade-wise, but it certainly wasn’t enjoyable. During every session the professor perfectly fulfilled his title; he stood behind his lectern and simply “professed”.
No notes.
No props.
No handouts.
No whiteboard, blackboard, or projector.
Not even an occasional attempt at a joke to create a memorable attachment point in his 25+ students minds. He just rambled on about the day’s topic—with minimal voice inflection, if I remember correctly—and expected each of us to take notes as we deemed appropriate.
There was a text book, of course. And it turned out to be my saving grace. (I was a good student, but you’d have never guessed that had you observed my note-taking abilities.)
You see, I technically misspoke before. There was a handout that was given to us a few times over the course of the class, exactly a week prior to each test. It was a single sheet of paper that contained a list of ten questions about what he had talked about over the previous few weeks. He would randomly pick three questions from that list to put on the test. We had to pick two of those questions and fill up a bluebook with our answers.
Awesome… 🤦♂️
Each week prior to an exame, the textbook became my best friend. From the moment we received the questions until the day of the test, much of my free time was devoted to reading (and re-reading) the multiple chapters that related to the questions on “the list”. I basically wanted to cram as much (boring) information into my brain as possible as many times as possible so that I could hopefully regurgitate enough of it on test-day to make it seem like I had actually learned something. Needless to say, I was awake far later into the evenings (sometimes into the morning) than normal during those weeks.
And that finally brings me to the point of this week’s tip.
Toward the end of those weeks when I had a few hundred pages yet to (re-)read and felt like I was retaining nowhere near enough info to even fake my way through the test, the very last thing that I thought I had time to do was exercise. Fortunately, exercise was important enough to me that I made myself walk over to the university’s fitness center around 8 PM each night to get in an hour of lifting before heading back into the dorm lounge to read for another few hours before bed.
During those hour-long training sessions, I intentionally left my worries at the door (mostly because I didn’t want to think about them) and paid attention to the physical weights that were my current challenge.
And here’s the cool thing: every single time I got back to the dorm and sat down to start reading again, the work that I had yet to finish seemed smaller and less time-intensive than it had prior to my training session.
Now there’s certainly plenty of research that says that dividing our work (or study) time into smaller chunks with rest periods between them helps us retain more information or do better work than when we perform “marathon” work/study sessions. Basically, we remember more of what we saw/heard/read/did first and last than the stuff in the middle. And shorter sessions obviously have more starts & stops than longer sessions of equal total duration.
There’s also plenty of research that shows that exercise of any kind helps to improve our sense of well-being and confidence. I’m sure that both of those conditions played a part in making my American history study time both more productive and subjectively less daunting.
So what’s the takeaway?
Basically, whenever you’re feeling anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, or “stuck”, simply spending a few minutes moving your body and focusing your mind on the movement that you’re performing will improve your outlook, memory, and—believe it or not—creativity when you get back to the task at hand.
Those movement sessions don’t need to be an hour long. And they don’t even have to involve using external weights (although they certainly can, obviously).
They just need to involve movement.
Putting It Into Practice
A few times throughout the day—they can be random times or, preferably, when you’re feeling some negative emotions creep into your head—stand up and take a short walk. If you feel so inclined, do a few pushups or body weight squats as well. If you’re in the office, do them in the stairwell to avoid strange looks from your co-workers. Or, better yet, get a co-worker or four involved. You might laugh a bit in the process, which is also helpful. Of course, if you’re at home and have kettlebells or dumbbells, you can do a few swings or getups too/instead.
Most importantly, pay attention to your movement and leave your work/studies/troubled thoughts at your desk. The challenges will be there when you get back, but I promise that they won’t seem to have quite the bite that they did before you moved your body and cleared your mind.
By the way, I still take this lesson to heart. In fact, writing this tip was a lot easier after I took the time to do my daily get-ups (5/side with whatever weight I feel like using that day) when I realized that I had been staring at a blank page and blinking cursor for far longer than I should have.
Try it. It works. 🙂