Staying Focused and Healthy During Your GMAT Prep

Mental and physical health can prove crucial to effective GMAT prep.

If you’re getting ready to kick off your GMAT study plan, your life is about to undergo some temporary upheaval.

Odds are, your professors, parents, and peers have already been sharing studying tips to coach you through the two to three months of recommended GMAT prep you’ll need. You’ve probably thought about some of the adjustments you’re going to have to make to your schedule and your lifestyle: adding a study session every day, scaling back on social plans, lugging around books, and spending lots of time on your cell phone—not texting, but playing with a GMAT app.

Of course, prep is important, but staying focused and keeping healthy while studying for the GMAT is just as crucial. How much change to your everyday life is too much? Where do you draw the line?

Staying focused in your GMAT prep

Has this ever happened to you? You’re driving along one evening looking for the street address of a new place where you’re supposed to have dinner with some friends. You slow down to a crawl, turn down the radio, stop talking, and examine each sign. Why is that? Neither the radio nor talking affects your vision. Or do they?

Steven Yantis, a former professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, explains the similar challenge of staying focused while driving on the phone:

“Directing attention to listening effectively ‘turns down the volume’ on input to the visual parts of the brain. The evidence we have right now strongly suggests that attention is strictly limited—a zero-sum game. When attention is deployed to one modality—say, in this case, talking on a cell phone—it necessarily extracts a cost on another modality—in this case, the visual task of driving.”

Yantis is talking about divided attention, the ability to multitask and pay attention to two things at once. Divided attention is generally much more difficult than focused attention. The factors that come into play are your attentional capacity and the processing required by the stimulus—essentially how much of which areas of your brain are needed to process the input.

Your attentional capacity can be diminished by tuning out distractions, dividing your attention across multiple things, or even fixing your attention on one topic. Fatigue takes a big toll on staying focused. If you’re tired, it’s harder to concentrate. You may have already experienced this during a late-night GMAT study session.

These studies go on to show that you don’t want to take up your attentional capacity by introducing distracting changes—such as drastically changing your diet, caffeine use, or sleep schedule—in the weeks before Test Day. As you are studying for the GMAT, your brain is already coping with all the new content, methods, and strategies you’re learning. No need to distract it by giving it other changes to grasp—this could actually negatively impact all the good work you’ve built up studying.

Keeping healthy while studying

Introduce healthy habits as early as possible into your GMAT prep—and even before you begin studying for the GMAT, if possible. You can begin to make these changes while you are still researching your business school options and developing your application timeline. Get enough sleep, eat well, and exercise.

Physical exercise has been shown to generate new neuron growth in the adult brain. Following a series of experiments, researchers from the Gage Laboratory at UCSD concluded that exercise leads to the production of new brain cells in the dentate gyrus—a strip of grey matter in the hippocampus that has been shown to play a role in the forming of new memories.

So, bear in mind that keeping healthy and maintaining regular physical activity can be every bit as useful as your more traditional GMAT study tools, tips, and tests.

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