Studying at 4 AM: is it good or bad?

As someone who woke up every day at 4 AM as a student, I know that this ritual helped me a lot to study more with my limited time. When I was a student, I had a 7 AM to 7 PM class, so I had to make full use of my time. Thus, I came across studying at 4 AM which has helped me keep up despite my busy schedule. So this article will answer if studying at 4 am is good or bad.

Studying at 4 AM is good because 4 AM is the perfect time to stay focused. The reason for this is that 4 am is the time where everything is quiet and peaceful, which makes concentrating in studying easy. However, studying at 4 am is bad if you didn’t have enough sleep.

While studying at 4 AM is good and helped me a lot, I also know that there are also consequences of studying very early such as at 4 AM. We are going to discuss more on this topic in this article.

Furthermore, if you want to study smart and be significantly more productive in your school works, then I made an article which gave a lot of information on how to be more effective in your studies. In there, I provided 20 tips for you to become an effective and hardworking student: How to Be a Hardworking Student

Is studying at 4 AM good?

Studying at 4 AM is good if you had enough sleep. The reason is that science has proven that sleep deprivation can negatively affect the retaining and recalling of information. However, studying at 4 AM is a good time to learn since it is easy to concentrate when studying early.

The reason why studying at 4 AM is really good is because we are less distracted when we study early.

When studying at latter times, there would be lots of distraction which is harmful to our focus.

This involves constant notification, chats from your friends, duty in your dormitory and so much more.

What happens is that these distractions harm our attention.

When our attention is fragmented due to constant distractions, it would be extremely harder to study.

With studying at 4 AM, we can have some quiet time where we can only study. This would maintain our focus and can make us study more efficiently.

In fact, most of my learnings when I was in college came from studying early. This means waking up at 4 AM to study. I like that technique and it worked better than pulling an all-nighter.

When we studying at 4 AM, there are significantly fewer distractions since most people are still asleep at this time. This forces us to stay focus and the increase in concentration helps our brain retain more information.

Thus, it is a good idea when we study at 4 AM. But some people take this on a whole new level.

If you are on for a challenge, then I also recommend you check out this article where we take our productivity to the next level. Waking up at 4 AM is definitely a good idea for learning since we can easily stay in focus when we study at 4 am. But some people put things on a different level since they start studying at 3 AM. If you are interested in waking up at 3 AM, then you can check this article: Is studying at 3 AM good

Now, let’s discuss what waking up at 4 am can do to your studies. That is because I am one of the people who experienced a lot of benefits to waking up this early. Thus the next section would discuss more why waking up at 4 to study is a good idea.

Is waking up at 4 am good for study?

Waking up at 4 am is very good when it comes to studying and learning. The reason is that 4 am is a very peaceful time with fewer distractions. This makes us stay focused on our studies that make learning more efficient and productive.

However, there is something to take note of.

Getting up at 4 AM is healthy if you have a full night of sleep. The reason is that there are lots of harms sleep deprivation can do to us such as learning impairment, failure to retain information, and loss of focus.

Because of that, we would discuss here why both sleeping early and waking up early to study are beneficial.

One of the advantages of waking up early to study is what’s happening in our brain.

When we are sleeping, our brain is transferring information from our short-term to our long-term memory.

This is like our brain is transferring these short-term memories so that there will be free space. And we learn much faster when there are lots of spaces left in our brain.

So, right after waking up, it is like our brain is ready to absorb new information. So studying right after waking up is a good idea when we are talking about learning.

However, there is a second benefit. The quiet and peaceful time 4 am can bring has numerous advantages to our productivity.

Working at 4 am is very beneficial because it is just quiet with fewer distractions.

It has been proven multiple times by science that whenever our attention is fragmented, we learn much slower.

That’s why we learn more information relative to the time when we are completely focused on what we are doing.

Since usually at 4 AM, everyone is still asleep, there are no notifications or any distractions that can bother you in studying. Thus, you can study in a much more efficient manner.

Now, let us combine both of these advantages. You just woke up so your brain is ready to learn new things, and you are working in an environment where you can completely focus on what you are doing.

This would significantly increase the speed of your learning.

That’s why when I was a student, I was able to graduate with honors even when I always prioritize sleep.

The reason for that is sleep is very essential for learning. Combining the benefits of sleeping and studying early, then you will have a very productive learning experience.

That’s why waking up early such as 4 AM is a good idea if you want to study in a very efficient manner.

However, studying all night including 4 AM is a terrible idea. This is what we will discuss in the next section

Why is Studying All Night a Bad Idea

Studying all night is a bad idea because it harms learning. The reason for this is because science has proven that lack of sleep causes us to fail in retaining and recalling information. This means that studying all night will not just be tiring but also counterproductive.

The reason for this is because our brain needs sleep in order for us to free our short-term memory.

When we sleep, we actually transfer our new memories from short-term to long-term. Medical experts call this consolidation of memory.

When this happens, we free up space from our short-term memory which we can use to learning new information.

The result is we can learn more since we have space for new information.

That’s why when we sleep, it is like we are freeing some space in our brain in order to retain information.

Now, let’s put this into an all-nighter which is famous to a lot of students.

When we don’t sleep, our space for new memories is actually full because we didn’t have our sleep yet. What happens then is that the new information we are studying won’t be retained in our brains.

In short, we would just forget a lot of what we learn. In fact, science has proven that there is a 42% increase in learning when we have enough sleep.

40% is very big. It is like the difference between acing and failing an exam.

For more information regarding sleep deprivation and learning, you may visit another article I made where I discussed if it is alright to study all night. You may find the article here: Is It Okay to Study all Night?

That’s why studying all night is a bad idea. But if you had enough sleep and woke up at 4 am to study, then it will be perfect since you will be learning at a very efficient rate.

Source:

• Hu, Peter, et al. “Sleep Facilitates Consolidation of Emotional Declarative Memory.” Psychological Science, vol. 17, no. 10, 2006, pp. 891–98. Crossref, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01799.x.
• Drummond, Sean P. A., et al. “Altered Brain Response to Verbal Learning Following Sleep Deprivation.” Nature, vol. 403, no. 6770, 2000, pp. 655–57. Crossref, doi:10.1038/35001068.