To maintain and achieve desired grades, some students tend to study for hours on end in an attempt to perfect the material for each class. It is well known that cramming the night before a test is not the best strategy for studying and maintaining material, but could students be overstudying when they are not cramming? Over studying can cause negative mental and emotional effects about which students might not know. So, what is overstudying exactly?
Studying is reviewing an educational topic that one has already learned. Time is taken out of a student’s day to review the material given in class and work to understand it or memorize it. Overstudying is when too much studying is done over a period of time, and comprehending the material then becomes forced. Even though every student has his or her own limits when it comes to studying, overstudying pushes the limits of students’ attention spans. Overstudying can turn a productive period of review into something counterproductive. It could cause students to forget information and push themselves to forcibly learn more than they are able to. Sophomore Noemie Rivera said, “I think you can never be too prepared, but with overstudying, you lose sleep, which is important. You can get overwhelmed, and it does more harm than good.”
It has become expected of students to study and prepare for long periods of time so that they do well in their classes. However, overstudying can lead to poor sleeping habits, mental exhaustion, and an increase in anxiety or depression. According to the article “Overstudying: How Much Studying Is Too Much?” on The Savvy Tutor’s website (thesavvytutor.com), “Overstudying can cause long-term physical symptoms similar to what many people experience as burnout, including poor sleep, headaches, stomach aches, and digestive issues…burnout results when students feel overly stressed and overwhelmed due to a real or perceived need to study beyond the point of what is healthy or productive.”
Overstudying can also ruin the sleep schedules of students. Sleep is important for studying because it helps facilitate learning and allows students to store the information learned throughout the day. Overstudying prevents students from getting the sleep that they need to remember and retain the information that they are learning. It can also lead students to not be able to concentrate on tasks at hand. Lack of sleep caused by overstudying can also lead to other issues, like mood swings, slower thinking processes, lack of energy, and poor decision making. There are negative side effects that students experience when working late at night. Junior Chloe O’Callaghan said, “I get negative effects the next day after staying up the night before studying. I get headaches if I don’t sleep enough.” Along with impacting sleep, overstudying causes students more stress. It pressures them to feel like they have to get high grades since they devoted so much time to working on a subject. Freshman Zoey Garver calls it “stressful” and “overwhelming when studying the night before.”
Along with this, school performance and grades can change. According to the article “Impact of Overstudying and How to Prevent” on the West Wales Chronicle’s website (westwaleschronicle.co.uk), “Overstudying might lead to mental disarray and make it harder to remember what [was] learned. Inability to concentrate in class and the inability to recall new information can have a significant impact on [a student’s] grades and engagement in class.” Not having proper engagement in class can lead students to fall behind in their learning and cause more stress to study the material.
Finally, overstudying can cause a decrease in social interactions between students. Students might become so preoccupied with their studies that they might forget to be active in social activities and being around other students. They can pull away from other people because of the stress and anxiety that overstudying can cause. They can be constantly worrying about their work and not be able to live in the moment or be themselves. Such stress can cause students to have a negative mindset and can worsen their mood. This can lead students to want to be alone and not want social interaction.
Overstudying has become the expectation for students who want to achieve high grades. Even though it may often be viewed as beneficial, overstudying can cause more problems than it solves and can affect students in more ways than they think.
