Nursing students often study too much because they want to know everything or can't stop due to stress, but fatigue actually hurts retention. Aim for two hours of study per lecture hour per week, and focus on quality over quantity by eliminating distractions and targeting the right material.
Are you struggling to pass your exams? Or maybe you're passing, but it's taking just about everything you have to make it happen. If you're feeling this way, you might actually be studying too much. And in this video, I'm going to tell you how to fix it so you can be less stressed and still pass your exams. Let's do it. There are two major problems I see nursing students making when they study in nursing school. They want to know everything about everything, so they never stop studying because they're worried that they'll be tested on the Footnote on page 843 of the textbook, right? So they feel like they need to read everything or they already know a lot for their exam, but they can't stop stressing about it, which just drives them to keep studying and keep studying and keep studying because they're so worried about passing. Are you in category one or two? I was mostly in category one where I just wanted to know everything about everything. So it was really hard to stop studying. But either way, both of those are a major problem. And here's why. If you never give yourself a mental break and you just keep trying to learn more and more and do more in nursing school constantly, you're actually going to retain less information than you would have been able to if you had just given your brain a break. I mean, how often have you had it happen where you are so tired that you just cannot learn anything else, like nothing else is going in and you read the same paragraph graph over and over and over again, but it doesn't help. Literally nothing else can go into your brain, right? It happens all the time. Now that's a major problem, especially in nursing school, because you have to actually remember things for your exam, right? Novel concept. So if you are studying too much, here's what to do. Start with a benchmark for how many hours you should study and work from there. Now, I always recommend studying for two hours outside of class for every hour that you are in class per week. This goes for a lecture class, not skills lab or clinical, just lecture. So don't go troll my Instagram telling me that. I said for you to study for 50 hours a week because you have two full days of clinical. No, that's not what I'm saying at all. Okay, this is a good starting point or a good guideline for you to follow in the beginning and then work off of. So if you're in a three hour lecture class on a Tuesday, and let's say that's for pharmacology and you're in a two hour lecture class on Thursday and let's say that's fundamentals, Then you'll study for six hours per week for farm and four hours per week for fundamentals. Do you see how that works? So try to study for two hours for every hour that you are in lecture class per week, not per day. So don't go study for six hours per day for farm. No, no, no, no, no. Six hours a week. Okay? Now if you are studying much more than that on a consistent basis, it's really worth looking at where you are spending your. Are you actually focused when you study or are you just scrolling through TikTok? Or are you focusing on studying the right things and not getting caught up with wanting to know everything like what we had just talked about? Obviously if you have a huge research paper that's due or it's coming up, or you have a big project that you have to do or something, then that will probably require more time above and beyond this two hour benchmark, right? But overall, aim for studying for two hours outside of class per week for every hour that that you are in lecture class. But if you are finding yourself studying for way more time than this, you don't want to miss this video where I walk you through how to study more efficiently so that you can save time, have more of a life and still pass your exams. And my friend, go become the nurse that God created only you to be. And I'll see you over there in that next video.
