[Cover image by Pexels on Pixabay]
by Cindy Nebel
While we spend a good deal of time talking about learning strategies and how to balance note-taking, content review, and active retrieval practice, all of those strategies are actually fairly useless if you haven’t taken the time to prepare for learning.
I work at a medical school where learning is a hard job. There is a huge volume of information that students must learn quickly while simultaneously managing research, leadership, and volunteerism in order to prepare for residency applications. The balancing act between all of these requirements can cause a good deal of stress on students. For this reason, even the best students, using the best strategies, working tremendously hard can still falter. Because it turns out that learning requires you to take care of your mental wellness first.
The interaction between wellness and learning operates on working memory. Working memory is the finite space we have to hold onto and manipulate information we are currently working with. It is the space where we connect old information with incoming information, where we reason and problem-solve. Arguably, it is literally where learning happens.
When we are tired, anxious, or overloaded, our working memory suffers.
There is an abundance of research showing that sleep deprivation impacts working memory performance (1). What many medical students don’t realize is that these effects start at a relatively small amount of deprivation, with individuals receiving six hours of sleep per night showing significant impacts on their working memory performance (2). While it has often been seen as a right of passage to sacrifice sleep for the sake of learning, the research clearly shows that getting that extra hour of sleep results in much higher benefits for learning, which becomes more effective and more efficient with sufficient sleep (which is 7-9 hours for most adults).
