Destiny Phillips Coats

How many people would honestly say they are always excited to study? From my experience, I do not think many would say they are. For most people, studying is a pain, a hassle, and a boring-but-necessary  activity. If one desires to do well in school, or in a discipline, she must study. Numerous study tips and tricks have been developed over the years to make studying more enjoyable and easier for students. Schools find study tips and tricks so important most schools have implemented in their curricula a “Study Skills” class, purposed to teach students the proper and most helpful ways to study. As a student who has gone through this type of class, studying while listening to music was never proposed to me. Am I the inventor of this crazy study phenomenon? — no, probably not. However, I would love to share my personal experience and research with you, to possibly make future students’ study sessions a little more enjoyable.

Growing up in a home with four other very loud people, it is sometimes very hard to find a quiet place where I can dive into my books. Come do your chores! Where’s my shirt?! MOM! Stop that Tim! All these things and more are screamed outside my door at the most inconvenient of times — when I am studying. Times have definitely changed since I was in elementary with the constant advancement of technology. At 10 years old, all I could think about was getting a CD player for Christmas. Now seven-year-olds are begging their parents for phones, iPods, tablets, and computers. All this is to say, music is readily available to children of all ages through different formats. My favorite type of music growing up, surprisingly, was classical. I was a competitive dancer as a child who listened to classical music constantly in dance class. I eventually learned to love it! Classical music made hard dance classes more bearable because of the soothing tones of classical music. It took me a while to realize this genre of music could soothe and calm my mind during study sessions. Probably due to anger and frustration, I would close my door during my study sessions because of the crazy amounts of noise in my house. I would then turn on my radio to my favorite classical music station. When I studied, I found myself doing this on a regular basis. Pretty soon, I found it difficult to study without music. The music did three things for me: 1) calmed my mind to focus, 2) drowned out noise in the background, and 3) made studying more enjoyable.

In multiple ways people become distracted while doing a task. I like to classify distractions into three categories: auditory, verbal, and thought distractions.  From my own personal experience, I desire a quiet environment to eliminate auditory and thought distractions and a still environment to eliminate visual distractions. As I have talked and observed others’ productivity in different study environments, I have seen this to be true for them as well. Who desires a noisy or distracting background while they are studying? No one does. It has been scientifically proven we as humans are capable of multitasking, but no matter how hard we try, our full attention cannot be placed on more than one thing at a time. Our mind processes everything we hear and see no matter if we want it to or not. It is a natural involuntary brain function; therefore, in a study session it is important to keep the mind focused on as few things as possible. A way to drown out background noise like talking or the clicking of a keyboard is to play soft music through headphones.

Auditory distractions take our attention/focus away from a task because we hear things that do not pertain to what we are doing. I truly believe auditory distractions are the hardest distractions to cope with during a study session. Studying is a voluntary action. We as students must choose to study. Hearing, on the contrary, is an involuntary action. Humans do not have the ability to turn on and off the function of hearing. They can, however, put themselves in an environment where certain noises or verbiage is not used or encountered. Because hearing is something we cannot control, being in an environment where people are talking or making noise can cause students to lose focus during a session, causing them to waste huge amounts of time. For example, I have been in multiple situations where I was writing a paper and people were talking in the background. From their noise, I in turn lost my focus and typed words they were saying instead of my generated thoughts about my paper. In some cases, I have caught myself as this mistake occurred, but there have been times where I have not noticed until I was rereading my paper later. This is an example of how auditory distractions can be very detrimental in our productivity as students as we study, causing us to lose focus and waste time.

Because we are all different, we all are attracted to different things. Similarly, we all like different types of music. Studying to heavy metal probably will not get most people to their goal of memorizing 50 vocab words by the end of their two-hour study period. However, many genres of music could be great background to a productive study session. Within the many genres of music are tempos — fast and slow. Anyone’s favorite type of music can then become the background to a relaxing and enjoyable study session — but which one is the best?

Classical music can be basic in the number of instruments or very complex if played by a large orchestra. Listening to solo piano music relaxes the mind with its smooth rhythms and tones. Neither lyrics nor various sounding instruments are used, so it’s easy to focus on other things while hearing a soothing repetitive noise, like piano, in the background to a study session. This light music in the background would not be some students’ preferred silence, but for others it can be more soothing and easy to study to when their constantly-generated thoughts are the only things they can hear. In my personal experience, my mind constantly thinks about tons of random things no matter what topic I am trying to focus on. Classical music has helped me drown out my random thoughts and background noise, leaving me solely to focus my mind on what is in front of me. This version of a peaceful background has aided me in being the most productive during my study sessions. Some people might say classical is boring, it puts me to sleep, or I cannot sing along. These all might be true, but under different circumstances than purely listening to music, one can potentially find classical to be the most enjoyable and helpful while studying.

In the previous portions of this paper you have read about ways to minimize visual distractions by choosing a prime location to study in. Music as a study aid could be seen to contradict the entirety of my paper, but not if it is classical. Classical minimizes auditory and thought distractions by drowning out random noises around you, your thoughts, and the chatter of others near you.

Now to take a quick step outside the realm of music, the other component to calming the mind for a great study session is to have little-to-no movement surrounding the student. This is an example of limiting/expelling visual distractions. Unlike our ears, ours eyes give us two options: see or do not see. If your eyes are open, you will see everything within your sphere of vision. If your eyes are closed you see nothing. How many people study with their eyes closed? Not many, therefore the only option when studying is to keep them open. For me, kids walking or moving around a lot in a room is just as distracting as someone talking to her neighbor beside me in class or my mom on the phone at home. Like I mentioned earlier, the mind can only focus on one thing at a time completely. Movement is distracting, plain and simple. The question is why? Why is it so easy to be distracted while studying? Ultimately, I believe it is because studying at its core is boring. Studying is not something we want to do; it is something we have to (should) do. Anything outside of studying is distracting to us because it is what we would rather be doing. What can be done to avoid catching your attention on something else within your peripheral view? First things first, find a space that is typically slow in traffic. At school this is sometimes hard to do when you are typically assigned classes or pick a study hall open to other students. In a school environment or environment where people are around I recommend you sit in a seat in the front that faces a wall. Sitting behind other students puts them in your direct line of sight. If they finish their work, or have nothing to start with, them talking to their neighbor or fiddling with their things can be distracting to see as well as hear. Listening to music can drown out this noise and facing another direction where there will be little-to-no movement is the best way to avoid visual distractions.

What do you do if you are at home? A classic study area in most homes is the kitchen table. At my house my brothers and I all brought our homework to the kitchen table after school. Our mother would then join us to act as our stand-in teacher at home. This of course was great when her help was needed to complete a basic assignment. Now that I am older, listening to others get help from a teacher can be distracting while I am trying to work on my own materials. I have now graduated to studying in my room or wherever I choose. In my opinion you need to study in a room with the fewest possible distractions. For me this means I will study in my room, on the floor, with the door closed, facing the other side of my room. Why so specifically in that location, facing that direction? Once again, students need to minimize distraction. The best way to do this is to prepare for the worst. With a family of five who has no respect for personal space, I have learned to take many precautions when preparing to study. In my house, my room is the farthest away from a television. Growing up I was never allowed to watch TV in my room or during the school week. This tradition from my elementary years has stuck with me all the way to my last year of high school. It is extremely important not to study near a TV. If you are near a TV when you get frustrated or take little breaks, the temptation to turn on the TV is so close to you. Sometimes we tell ourselves we will take a five-minute break. If television gets involved, that five minutes turns into a 30-minute show or a two-hour movie we just could not turn away from. Do NOT tempt yourself. Put it as far away as possible and you will reap the benefits of that productive study session later.

I do not have the luxury of have a desk in my room to do work. This is primarily because my room is big enough for one small human like myself and that is about it. The next ideal location to study would be your bed, right? No! Because I am human and a student I love to sleep as much as possible. Throughout the school year I get about 7 hours of sleep per night. That is not enough; therefore, I am tired when I return home from an 8-hour school day. Going to my bed to study is just asking to be unproductive. All I can hear is my bed calling out to me asking me to sleep peacefully and get some rest. How do I avoid this temptation? I instead sit on the floor. Sitting on the floor gives me a lot of space to spread out my notes and textbooks while also keeping me awake. The floor is hard, similar to a chair and in direct opposition to a nice soft bed keeping my focus on the task at hand versus taking a nap.

As of this writing, I am now in my room, away from noise and on the floor, away from my bed. What else can I do to avoid visual distractions? Close the door and face the other direction! I of course would advise locking the door, but some parents do not allow locked doors, which is totally fine, so instead just face the other direction. By closing your door, you are establishing a closed area where it is solely you and your books. You will not be distracted visually by what is going on outside your door because you cannot see it! Stopping there is perfect for some. For me, however, I cannot look at the door. Looking at the door is another form of distraction and temptation. Looking at the door causes me to think about leaving and doing something else, thus I can be tempted to do just that — abandon my study session. So, I have to face the other way. This is a perfect example of calming your mind as best you can to get rid of as many visual distractions as possible to make for the most productive study session possible.

God’s intelligent design of man includes five senses: smell, taste, sight, touch, and hearing. Our senses allow us to interact with/experience things from the outside world. Because there are so many ways to interact outside of ourselves involuntarily visually and aurally, it is very easy to become distracted by things passing over our eyes and through our ears. Another way to be distracted is with our thoughts. God made us intellectual beings, giving us the ability to mentally walk through any situation. These abilities are dually a blessing and a curse when one is trying to study. Hearing random noises, seeing people having fun in front of you, or thinking about what we are doing later are all issues we come across as students trying to study. Do we wish all these distractions went away so we can accomplish our tasks? Of course, but we do not wish our sensory functions to disappear completely. Instead, we figure out ways to work around these distractions and best utilize our God-given abilities. By reading this paper, I hope you have possibly developed new ways to approach your study sessions to eliminate/minimize auditory, visual, and thought distraction as best you can so your future study sessions can be as best as humanly possible!