Spring fever and sunshine

Now that we’ve made it through winter term and are barreling into spring, it’s not uncommon for students to start feeling less than enthused about sitting in stuffy classrooms when just outside there are blue skies, soft breezes and food carts soaking up the sun.

There’s good reason many of us start to experience spring fever: Our bodies are actually physically altering with the season, with neurotransmitter levels changing and hormonal and basal metabolic rates shifting to turn us all into energized little deviants.

The first step in avoiding a distracted disaster of a term is to anticipate how the sudden sunshine is going to affect you. Thinking about how you’ve previously felt during spring is a great predictor of how you are probably going to feel again this year.

Do you normally get agitated or antsy in April? Do you tend to get overwhelmed by the sudden bump in attitude of everyone around you? Or do you just get so excited about the undisrupted light outside that you can’t quite recall anything that was said in class? Understanding these changing patterns in your body can be an excellent way to ultimately control them.

Once you’ve figured out some of your common spring pitfalls, you can start to get focused—and have a successful transition to the final hurrah before summer.

One tactic when looking at all the coursework you’ve gotten yourself into is to think of what you still have to finish, not all that you’ve already accomplished.

Studies have shown that dwelling on what we’ve already done can make us feel a premature sense of accomplishment that can lead to slacking off. For college students, this means focusing on upcoming coursework is more effective than getting distracted by an awesome midterm grade.

It’s also crucial to realize that being constantly connected through technology can have a serious impact on your ability to function. The University of London conducted a study that found a steady stream of text messages, emails and instant messages is extremely bad for people who actually want to get anything done.

In fact, they found that all that social media we use daily can be as bad, if not worse, for us than a sleepless night or smoking marijuana. Yes, that’s right. Smoking pot can be less detrimental for focusing than all the Facebooking we do throughout the day. Imagine the implications for a sleepless stoner with a tweeting addiction.

Frustratingly, human beings have only a finite amount of attention during the day, and studies have found that every time you’re distracted from a task, you’ll come back to it with less attention and productivity. Often, the result is avoidable mistakes, lost ideas and hindered insight.

In order to get back on track during a season when we’re already distracted by the lack of clouds in the sky, we need to turn things off sometimes. Set a time when you won’t take text messages, answer calls or go online for anything other than research.

Even better, just turn everything off and remove it from your sight whenever you need to get something done. People tend to focus on what’s in front of them, so removing the temptation to post about how gross your coffee is will help you to do your schoolwork.

Just shutting out those distractions for a few hours could greatly improve your ability to do something productive. While most people probably already know it’s important to unplug once in a while, we seem to ignore how much it can impact our ability to focus, and it’s killing our already antsy minds during springtime.