Then I remembered an article I had read over here: people who smile get happier, even against their will. Our brain is so used to associating the feeling with the gesture that it actually works both ways.

Angry as I was, I forced myself to smile. And, against all odds, it worked: I instantly felt better. Like magic.

So, yes, here’s the magic tip – whenever you feel down, just SMILE! Doesn’t matter what you’re thinking of. Just smile.

That’s it. The single best happiness tip.

Enjoy

Pay attention in classes
Sure, it’s obvious and you’ll hate me for telling you this, but if you pay attention during your trimester/semester, finals will always be easier. Try to do your homeworks yourself, study during midterms, etc. This method worked nicely for me till the end of high-school – by paying attention in classes and asking questions whenever you don’t understand stuff, half of the studying is done as you go – after-hours study is now a piece of cake – a matter of rereading your class notes.

The above tip, however, doesn’t always work in college or afterwards – after all, on many occasions you’ll have to skip classes for various reasons – you might be working or you simply are too tired to go to class from all the partying. You have to take studying a bit more serious.

Collect all the material a couple of weeks BEFORE the exam
For me, in college, the couple of weeks before the exams was the busiest part of the semester – I had to get photocopies of a lot of class notes. Since I used to miss half my classes in order to go to job, I ended up running around borrowing other’s notes and get them photocopied. By sorting the notes and looking for what’s missing, the first contact is established. Try to remember as many things as possible from each written course – chapter titles, sections titles, etc. You will barely notice it, but eventually these things will stick to you and help consolidate the knowledge.

Skim briefly.
Once all the material for a given course is in place, ordered and neatly arranged, spend half an hour skimming through. Take between 10 and 30 seconds per page, reading the most important things on it – pay attention to titles, underlines, bolded notes. Don’t start reading stuff, don’t get started on demonstrations. This is the “getting in the mood” stage, where you further improve your knowledge of the field, keeping at the same time a complete top-down vision of what the aim of each chapter is, etc.

You never have enough time to study for your exams. So you should try getting a bit more organized:

Start as soon as you can
The old fairy tale – “it’s too early to start studying, I’ll forget everything if I start now” is just that – a self-lie to argument your procrastination. It’s never too early to get started. It might be too late, on the other hand. No good can come, for instance, from starting to study with only one day or two before the test. You need to get started at least 3 to 4 days in advance. For most difficult classes, sometimes even weeks of study aren’t enough. It all depends on the circumstances and on your skills.

Discipline
You always overestimate yourself. You are never as committed as you think you are, nor as smart, nor as hard-working. You need to make a study plan and stick with it. Get started in the morning, when there are less chances to be distracted by unforeseen events. Study in bursts, for instance two-three hours in the morning, two in the afternoon. Whatever schedule suits you, as long as you stick with it.

Plan your study – Cascade or Iterative
Some people prefer to read one course a day, looking on the recommended material, checking out internet resources and generally only focusing on one chapter at a time. My method is a more iterative one, where I’d rather go through the class notes as much as ten times, each time looking into it a bit more in depth. This leaves less time for reading the extra material, but it suits me better – I don’t have the memory of details, but I can remember things if I have a logic understanding of the whys and the hows. As I said, your style may differ, the important thing is to understand how your brain works and study accordingly.

Don’t waste your nights
Being tired dumbs you. Studies have shown that a tired student has much worse results than a student with a lower IQ. Sometimes it’s better to leave some chapters unread than to be too tired for the exam because you spent the night before it studying.

Relax regularly and take breaks
While having studied without any break for the last 20 hours is something to brag about to your colleagues, it’s really nothing to aim for. Your brain gets tired quickly and it will show. What you need is to keep your head clear and your energy level up till after the exam. For instance, don’t study for more than two hours in a row. Take small breaks in between. After two hours, take a longer one – change the context, take a break, take a walk. Try to think of nothing or of something else.

Take naps and sleep healthy
While you sleep, short-term memory is turned into medium and long-term one. What this means is that while you sleep your brain gets better at storing knowledge. You can try this: read the material once, right before you go to sleep. When you wake up, re-read it: you’ll discover you memorized it a lot better than expected, even better than if you’d have spent the whole time studying.

Don’t multitask
I can’t stress this enough: as much as we’d like to dream of it, we really aren’t Quad Core 2 Duo processors, nor multi-parallel computer clusters. We simply suck at multitasking. Sure, we can do several things at the time, but only trivial ones. Studying for exams is not one of them. Don’t study when interesting things happen around. If you really want to study in front of the TV, make sure it’s not showing any movies, sports or other things that may wake your interest. Try instead to find a quiet place, a comfortable position(not too comfortable, mind you – you don’t want to get too sleepy) and roll up your sleeves. It takes a bit to get in the flow, the perfect mood for studying, but once you get there it all becomes soo easy…

Careful with caffeine
Coffee, Coke or Red Bull are ok to get you through a night of clubbing, but not one of studying. Caffeine, though boosting your short-term memory, has a temporary effect at the expense of the ability to focus. If you feel really tired after a lot of studying, try to take a micro-nap – a quick 10 to 30 minutes nap. As pointed above, it’s a lot more useful for a successful study.

When in trouble, ask around
Don’t be lazy, shy or stubborn. If you have problems with some subjects, go ask your friends, go ask the teachers, or go look for it on the Internet. Seeing things in a different light and having someone else explain them to you is most enlightening. Even better, try to help others as much as possible. Explaining stuff to others is actually a huge boost for your own understanding and memory(just go take a look on the charts over here – see the cone of learning)

Always look for what’s been passed the years before
I’m always surprised when I hear that this mantra is ignored by so many students. Really now, this should be the first thing you do, right after you first read the courses. Go get the subjects from the last years exams. It will give you a feel of how to study, the kind of tests, the kind of questions, the kind of thinking involved.

Want more tips? The internet is full with tips on more efficient studying. From speed reading skills to mnemonics, to getting organized, all you have to do is a quick Google Search.
My favorites? Scott Young’s post on holistic learning and Speed Reading, the book Breakthrough Rapid Reading, Kevin Trudeau’s Mega Memory.

As usual, if you have your own pointers to share with the world, drop a line or two in the comments.

No matter how smart you are, there’s always place for improvement. While the subject has been covered by LOTS of blogs, and although we really can’t add anything new, there’s always place for a quick “Best Tips” and “Best Resources” roundup list

Best Tips Roundup

1. Exercise – the Romans used to say “Mens sana in corpore sano” – Healthy mind in a healthy body – I really can’t comment enough on this one. Take long walks in the nature, pick up a favorite sport to practice, etc. It is the best way to boost one’s cerebral power.
2. Don’t eat junk – the less junk food, the more natural products – milk, vegetables, fish and fruit are known to help the organism and the brain especially. Oh, and creatine(found in red meat) seems to help a bit, too.
3. Don’t read junk – your attention and memory are of high value – don’t waste them reading daily news and celebrity gossip. Bring quality into your intellectual life and the results will follow Aim to read some classics instead – major poetry or novels you hated in your English class, major essays, history, art or science.
4. Be curious, Ask questions, Aim to answer – No, curiosity didn’t actually kill the cat. High IQ is in close correlation with high curiosity. Don’t be ashamed to ask questions, don’t be ashamed to search for answers on the web. Always aim to study some more, even if college ended years ago for you. Pick up new languages, new skills, new hobbies, or simply browse around Wikipedia and see what interesting things you can learn. Oh, yes, learning improves the IQ like nothing else.
5. Don’t panic. Relax. – breaks, relaxation and meditation are great for rebooting the brain. Have a problem you’re stuck with and don’t see the solution? Step back, change the context, think of something else. Most times the solution will come after a while, in a completely unrelated context.
6. Force the brain! Do things differently – use the computer mouse with the other hand, do stuff around the house with the eyes shut, switch hands in daily tasks, struggle to move muscles you didn’t know you had (who of the audience can move the smallest toe independent to the others?) – this will exercise unused parts of your brain and boost them.
7. Nothing is really forgotten – really now, memory is like an enormous hard-drive, it can store A LOT. What you have to do, however, is to defragment it once in a while and try to use some Google search spider on it. Namely, try to remember as many things as you can from as various contexts as possible. This will improve synapses and help you retrieve information in the future.
8. Sleep healthily – experiments on students have shown that being tired is like having a much lower IQ. So… don’t get too tired – sleep regularly and healthily

I could go on and on, but it’s better I point you to some other great articles on the subject:

Best Tips Links Roundup

1. Wikipedia’s entry on the IQ
2. NewScientist – 11 steps to a better brain
3. online free version of the cool How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition book
4. Boost Your Brainpower! – Five ways to get your gray matter going.
5. How to Boost Your Brain Power
6. RirianProject – 22 ways to overclock your brain
7. NewScientist – meditation helps your brain
8. Solve Tough Problems with a Brain Reboot

What about getting smarter while procrastinating? The answer is simple – mind games. There’s a plethora of brain games out there that help you improve your attention, memory, cognitive and language skills and logical thinking. I’ll only list a couple of the most famous:

1. Lumosity Lumosity is the brain fitness program designed by neuroscientists that is scientifically demonstrated to improve your memory, attention and processing speed.
2. Crossword puzzles
3. Sudoku
4. IQ tests
5. Memory games – plenty of those around, I can’t really chose one link