How to biologically prime yourself before finals season

Food edition (prematurely preparing for December)

Much of your performance on your final exams is determined before the day of, but there are many ways you can ensure that you are at your biological best. This blog post will focus on foods, but as a general rule of other things you can do:

• Rest:

  • Ensure you are receiving sufficient sleep before the exam. From personal experience, this is most effective if you have established a routine time to sleep/wake-up at least a few days before the exam, so there will not be surprising lingering tiredness.

• Studying:

  • Long-term memory requires sleep, as well as spaced repetition. Cramming is not an effective use of your time, avoid it whenever possible.

Many of these seem obvious, yet I’ve noticed that many of my friends and peers don’t really… follow these. The hope is that by going through the biological processes, we’ll be more tempted to actually optimize our biology. I’ve included the top three most relevant pieces of information that I found - please feel free to share more :)

Food: Don’t

1. Consume simple carbohydrates such as those found in soda/candy. They provide a quick burst of energy, which helps in the immediate short term. They increase fatigue within 30 minutes of consumption, and lowers alertness within 60 minutes.¹ This is primarily due to when your levels of sugar are higher than they usually are, your body produces insulin, which brings down blood sugar. This is known as hypoglycemia (more commonly, a sugar crash). Other sources of simple carbohydrates include white bread, pastas, and rice.

2. Consume fried and fast food. Much like simple carbohydrates, you are most likely to experience short-term effects. The scientific literature for this is surprisingly sparse, yet very straightforward. A couple examples:

   1. Rats fed a high-fat diet showed “significantly higher levels of neuroinflammatory markers”. ²

   2. The same study above referred to another that had data which supported the hypothesis that a single day of feeding high-fat diets is enough to  impair episodic memory, spatial memory, and contextual associative memory.³

   3. This paper refers to many other studies with statistics that would be of interest: https://academic.oup.com/pch/article/25/1/33/5728415

3. Dehydrate yourself. I’ve had a couple of friends that do this with the aim of minimizing the amount of time they need to run over to the bathroom. However, drinking good amounts of water is essential for fatigue and processing. Drinking small amounts of water (200 mL, or one glass) is enough to “alleviate feelings of thirst, improve hydration status, and attenuate anger, fatigue, and TMD in young adults”. The same study found that for improvements in working memory, a larger drink (500 mL, or one bottle) is necessary.⁴ Another study found that students who brought water into the exam hall with them performed 5% better than their peers, on average.⁵

Food: Do

1. Consume complex carbohydrates. These provide you energy in controlled bursts, which allows you to operate at maximum capacity. As referred in an earlier blog post, complex carbohydrates with high levels of soluble fiber provide an even slower release of energy. Good foods include apples and oatmeal. 

2. Eat protein-rich foods. They keep you full, and they reduce anxiety. As an added bonus, the amino acids in many seeds are plentiful. A key example is tryptophan: an amino acid our body cannot produce on its own. Yet, we require it for serotonin, melatonin, niacin and nicotinamide.⁶ 

   1. Note to self: Amino acid therapy is a thing - L-Tryptophan.

3. Consume healthy fats: nuts and avocados are a good bet. From personal experience, almonds and cashews are compact, and don’t require any shelling beyond what you get packaged. Slightly salted nuts also introduce sodium, an electrolyte, into your system. This is optimal, especially if you haven’t had time to eat much throughout the day). Focusing on almonds, they are high in fiber and protein. They are also high in magnesium - a water-soluble mineral that aids with blood sugar and pressure management.⁷ And as almonds are also high in protein, many of the benefits in the listing above also apply.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763418309175

2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11064-020-03163-3

3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30265-4

4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7662706/

5. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1013601.pdf

6. https://www.webmd.com/diet/foods-high-in-tryptophan

7. This news article has many scientific sources that provide evidence for the benefits of magnesium, which are far more intensive than outlined above. https://www.gambia.com/magnesium-lowers-hypertension-and-blood-sugar-enhances-liver-damage-and-aid-sleep/