It happened again. The night before the big biology exam you overslept and sheepishly rolled into the exam thirty minutes late. Oversleeping before a big test is certainly not going to win any points with your professor and isn't a quick ticket to the winning your place on the honor roll. Need to get your academic career back in line? Here's how to stop oversleeping before an exam.
The most common cause for oversleeping is sleep deprivation. If you make a habit of delaying your study sessions until a day or two before the exam, there's a good chance you'll be studying late into the night the evening before. Late night study sessions can wreck havoc with your sleep-wake cycle and cause you to oversleep the morning before an exam. Combine that with the coffee you drank to stay awake and your chance of falling back to asleep after your alarm goes off goes up.
To stop oversleeping, keep a calendar listing dates of important exams and schedule focused study time at least a week before. Spending an hour or two each day covering the exam material will keep mean you have less need to stay up half the night on the evening before the exam. You'll also experience less panic and stress when you don't have to pull an all night study marathon.
The next step is to avoid caffeine within twenty-four hours of an important test or exam. Some of the caffeine that is drunk the day before an exam will still be in your system when you're trying to sleep the night before. Not only can this keep you from your much needed shut eye, it also may increase your risk of oversleeping the next morning.
It may seem obvious by if you have a tendency to oversleep, set multiple alarms the night before the test and place them in several part of the room so you have to get up to turn them off. Once you're out of bed, the chances of falling back to sleep are much lower.
Another way to stop oversleeping is to invest in a coffee maker with an automatic timer. When the time goes off, the coffee will automatically start percolating and you'll awaken to the pleasing scent of freshly prepared coffee. Who can resist getting up to enjoy a hot cup before an exam? Caffeine on the morning of a test may work in your favor by increasing your level of alertness.
You can even use online tools to help stop oversleeping. Head over to snoozester.com and sign up for their wake up call service. You set the times and they'll call you to remind you to get up. They'll even call multiple times until you pick up the phone and acknowledge that you're awake.
By taking a few simple steps you can stop oversleeping and be in class on time to ace your exam.
