If you have a teen about to sit exams, share this with them – it’s full of practical, science-based tips to make studying less stressful and more effective.
If you’ve ever sat down to study and found yourself reorganising your desk, making snacks, or suddenly very interested in the family cat, you’re not alone. Studying well isn’t about grinding for hours; it’s about understanding how your brain works and using that to your advantage.
In this short video, Kim Tay from The Wellbeing Works shares 11 practical, science-backed study tips to help students focus, remember more, and feel less stressed. From the “five-minute rule” that beats procrastination to clever memory hacks using movement and colour, these tools are designed to make studying smarter — not harder.
🎬Watch the video below and download the free PDF guide to keep these tips handy during exam time.
Here are the links mentioned in the video:
🎬 Watch:
Ali Abdaal on the Retrospective Revision Timetable here → Retrospective Revision Timetable
And his videos on Active Recall and Spaced Repetition:
11 Science-backed study tips for students
# 1 Procrastination Is Normal – Beat it with the 5 Minute Rule
Everyone puts off studying. You are not broken; your brain just likes comfort more than effort. Next time you find yourself still on TikTok after ‘just looking for inspiration from cute cats,’ try the 5-Minute Rule.
⏱ Do this: Set a timer for five minutes and just start. You’re allowed to stop after five.
💡 Why it works: Once you’ve started, that resistance melts away, your brain thinks, “Well, I’m here now…” and you usually keep going. Even if your first five minutes are watching a study-skills video (see Tip #2), it still counts as starting.
# 2 Make a Smart Plan – Focus on What’s Most Important
Forget the giant “six-week revision timetable.” Instead, try Ali Abdaal’s Retrospective Revision Timetable. You focus on topics based on how confident you feel (red = help, yellow = okay, green = nailed it), and always ask:
“If the exam were tomorrow, which topic would make me most nervous?”
That’s where your time’s best spent.
🎬 Watch it here → Retrospective Revision Timetable.
# 3 Use Active Recall + Spaced Repetition
Reading notes again and again feels productive — but it’s mostly brain karaoke. You think you know the lyrics because the page is singing them back to you.
✅ Active Recall: Close the book and try to remember — write, say, or draw what you know.
🔁 Spaced Repetition: Rather than cramming everything in at once, come back to the same topic later. Each time you revisit it, your memory gets stronger.
🎬 Watch → Active Recall Explained → Spaced Repetition
# 4 Think Big: Use Space and Colour
Your brain loves places. It remembers information tied to locations, shapes, and colours.
🎨 Try this:
- Use large paper, walls, or windows to write or draw your notes.
- Make mind-maps or diagrams.
- Stick them around your room (or anywhere in the house!) — each wall a topic zone.
💡 Why it works: Turning your head or moving your body to look at different notes literally gives your brain “spatial hooks” to hang information on.
# 5 Study Together (and Teach Someone!)
Explaining a concept to a friend, your dog, or even your nan turns you into the teacher, which helps you understand and remember more. Even studying with someone else, in silence, helps our brains work better.
💬 Quiz each other using flashcards or past paper questions.
⏱️ Take turns teaching a concept for five minutes each (“You do respiration, I’ll do photosynthesis”).
🎙️ If you’re studying alone, record yourself (just your voice) explaining it — or teach your dog. Dogs are great listeners.
💡 Why it works: Teaching activates memory and focus circuits more strongly than re-reading. Plus, it’s way less lonely.
# 6 Focus & Energy Tools
- Sharpen concentration: Stare at a fixed point (not your screen) for 30 seconds while blinking and breathing normally. It resets your brain’s attention circuits. (Focus Lock)
- Boost alertness: Take a deep inhale through your nose, immediately followed by a full exhale out your mouth. Repeat about 10-15 times. (Cyclic Hyperventilation)
- Increase focus: Listen to white noise or chill instrumental music (around 60 bpm e.g. baroque music). Avoid lyrical bangers — your brain will sing along.
- Remove distractions: Put your phone in another room. Out of sight, out of mind. Even seeing it reduces focus.
- Stay motivated: Study 25 minutes, rest 5 minutes. Rinse and repeat. (Pomodoro method)
# 7 Take Breaks That Boost Your Brainpower
It’s tempting to grab your phone in a break, but scrolling TikTok or watching YouTube shorts drains your brain’s energy – it uses the same mental fuel as studying. Instead:
🏃🏽♀️Move, stretch, or step outside.
🌳 Look out a window at something green.
If you’re feeling stressed or stuck on a problem, lift your gaze to the horizon, literally look far away. It switches your brain from “stuck” mode to “big-picture” mode and calms you down.
# 8 Move to Think Better
A short walk, a few jumps, or even jiggling your leg wakes your brain up. Sitting still too long increases cognitive load (makes thinking harder).
🧍🏽♂️Study at the kitchen bench while standing.
🚶🏽➡️Record yourself reading something you need to understand or remember and play it back while walking.
# 9 Nature = Brain Fuel
Being outside or even looking at nature helps you focus and feel happier.
🌿 Why: Your brain loves natural patterns called fractals (the repeating shapes in leaves and clouds). They calm your visual system and reduce stress by up to 60%.
Even tiny doses count — 40 seconds of greenery can sharpen attention.
🪴Sit near a window. Even a tiny plant on your desk helps.
# 10 Learn With Your Hands & Body
You don’t just learn with your head, your body helps you remember and understand things better too. It’s called the enactment effect: when you move as you learn, your brain stores that memory more deeply.
🖐 Try these:
- Gesture your learning. Use your hands to show direction, shape, or size, trace an atom’s orbit, outline a graph curve, or show tectonic plates colliding.
- Act it out. Pretend to be a water droplet in the water cycle — evaporate up, condense into a cloud, rain back down. You’ll never forget it.
- Make shapes with your body Use your arms like arrows to show vector direction and magnitude, spin yourself for rotation, step sideways for translation, and flip your hand over to show reflection in geometry.
- Teach yourself while moving. Pace around and explain the topic aloud – your body helps your memory stick.
💡 Why it works: Movement activates more parts of your brain: visual, motor, verbal, and emotional, creating stronger, longer-lasting learning.
# 11 Memorising Hacks (Faster Ways to Remember)
Memorising facts for exams doesn’t mean staring blankly at a wall of notes; your brain remembers best when information is visual, funny, or linked to movement.
💡 Use your body as a memory map
Attach each idea to a part of your body to help recall it later – it’s called the body-peg method.
🧬 Biology – Photosynthesis
1️⃣ Head – sunlight beaming down = light energy
2️⃣ Nose – sniffing carbon dioxide
3️⃣ Mouth – chewing glucose biscuits
4️⃣ Shoulders – leafy chloroplast capes catching sun
5️⃣ Hands – holding oxygen balloons floating away
🖍 Other Quick Memory Tricks
- Draw or doodle: turn processes into cartoons — a comic strip of a cell dividing or a volcano erupting.
- Link it to yourself: connect facts to real life (“oxidation” = my bike rusting after the rain).
- Close your eyes to recall: less distraction, better memory.
- Make it weird or funny: the stranger the image, the stronger the memory. Picture Shakespeare’s Iago (from Othello) whispering lies while riding a Lime scooter through Venice — jealous, sneaky, and totally out of control. You’ll remember his deception easily.
💡 Why it works: The more senses, humour, emotion, or movement you use, the more “hooks” your brain has to pull the memory back later.
🚀 Bottom Line
There are lots of ways to be more efficient with studying. Experiment with what works for you: use your body, space, environment, and friends to help your brain do what it does best. Move more, look up, make it visual, test yourself, and take breaks that actually refresh you.
And remember, even if your “study session” starts with unloading the dishwasher, you’re still warming up your brain (your parents will thank you).
🔬 The Science Behind It
All of these tips are backed by research — here’s where the science comes from and what it shows.
1. Procrastination (The 5-Minute Rule)
Starting a task, even briefly, lowers the “activation energy” barrier that stops us from beginning. Once we start, motivation follows.
Source: Ayelet Fishbach, University of Chicago — research on motivation and goal initiation. For a free download of 8 ways to Beat Procrastination go here: https://thewellbeingworks.com/contact/
2. Smart Planning (Retrospective Revision Timetable)
Focusing on what you actually know (rather than guessing weeks ahead) helps direct your time where it matters most. Ali Abdaal’s “Retrospective Revision Timetable” method aligns with research showing that self-testing and reviewing weaker topics improves efficiency.
Sources: Ali Abdaal; cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988).
3. Active Recall + Spaced Repetition
Retrieving information strengthens memory more than rereading — this is called the testing effect. Returning to material over spaced intervals builds long-term memory by interrupting the “forgetting curve.”
Sources: Roediger & Karpicke, 2006, “Test-enhanced learning”; Cepeda et al., 2006, “Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks”; Hermann Ebbinghaus, 1885, “Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology.”
4. Use Space and Colour
Information tied to space or physical layout is remembered better — a concept known as spatial encoding. Using large surfaces (like whiteboards or walls) helps the brain see relationships between ideas.
Example: Research by Robert Ball (Weber State University) found that bigger displays improved memory and problem-solving because they engaged peripheral vision.
Source: Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind (2021).
5. Study Together (and Teach Someone!)
Explaining something to another person — the tutor effect — improves both understanding and memory, because it forces the brain to reorganise knowledge. Studying with others also raises alertness and motivation by stimulating social and emotional parts of the brain.
Source: Fiorella & Mayer, 2013, “The relative benefits of learning by teaching”; Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind.
6. Focus & Energy Tools
Fixing your gaze on one point activates attention circuits in the prefrontal cortex and frontal eye fields. “Cyclic hyperventilation” (fast nasal inhales, mouth exhales) increases alertness via the sympathetic nervous system.
Sources: Andrew Huberman, Stanford University (Huberman Lab); Ward et al., 2017, “Brain drain: The mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity.”
7. Take Breaks That Boost Brainpower
Looking at natural scenes or moving restores attention and reduces mental fatigue. Lifting your gaze to the horizon switches your brain into “allocentric processing”.
Example: A University of Melbourne study found that people who looked for just 40 seconds at a green, flowering roof performed better on a cognitive test than those who looked at concrete.
8. Move to Think Better
Even small movements improve focus and learning.
Examples: Radiologists at the University of Maryland spotted more abnormalities when reviewing lung images while walking versus sitting still. Another study showed that people solving maths problems performed better when allowed to sway gently than when told to stay completely still.
Source: Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind; Glenberg et al., 2004, “Embodied comprehension of word problems.”
9. Nature = Brain Fuel
Viewing natural “fractal” patterns (like leaves, waves, and clouds) reduces stress by up to 60% and helps the brain enter a calm yet alert state called wakeful relaxation.
Example: Richard Taylor’s work at the University of Oregon showed that people viewing fractal images experienced lower stress and smoother eye movement patterns, indicating visual ease.
Source: Richard Taylor, University of Oregon; Yannick Joye, 2012, “Perceptual fluency and natural environments”; Sullivan et al., 2014, University of Illinois.
10. Learn With Your Hands & Body
Gestures, modelling, and acting out concepts make learning more efficient because they engage motor, visual, and language systems at once.
Examples: Atit et al. (2015) found that geology students who gestured while describing rock formations improved their spatial reasoning; Goldin-Meadow’s studies show that children who gesture while learning maths grasp abstract ideas faster.
Source: Goldin-Meadow et al., 2012; Atit et al., 2015; Madan & Singhal, 2012, “Motor imagery and memory.”
11. Memorising Hacks
Connecting ideas to yourself (the self-reference effect) or pairing them with humour, emotion, or vivid imagery makes memories last longer.
Example: Rogers et al. (1977) found people remembered words better when asked whether the word described them. Adding movement or imagination — such as linking a concept to a strong mental picture — further boosts recall.
Source: Rogers et al., 1977, “Self-reference effect in memory”; Madan & Singhal, 2012.
