How Health Can Affect Your Performance on an Exam

Researchers have long speculated a positive association between health and exam performance. A healthy brain can better prepare for exams and recall learned information on exam day. A healthy brain can also process information faster, directly improving exam performance.

The positive effects of health on exam performance mostly come from better sleep quality. However, this is only true for exams that require memory. Studies have shown that for standardized tests such as the DCAS exams, all aspects of health play a role.

So how exactly does health affect your ability to prepare for an exam? Here’s how.

Health and Exam Performance

1. Forget To Sleep And Forget It All You Will

Proper sleep is undeniably important for exam performance or anything that requires high-order thinking, for that matter. If you’ve ever skipped sleep for an entire night, we don’t have to tell you why you can’t prepare for an exam like that. However, even half an hour of sleep deprivation can affect your ability to prepare.

Sleep has countless functions in the body, many of which probably haven’t even been discovered. However, one thing that’s clear is sleep’s role in memory. When you go to bed, your brain cycles through two phases of sleep: the Rapid Eye Movement sleep and the Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep (scientists aren’t very creative at naming things). Both of these phases play dedicated roles in memory.

Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep is a state of your brain where it sorts your memories. The brain scans all the memories you made the day before and transfers all the information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. This makes everything you learned that day available for recollection in the future. This also frees up space in your short-term memory so you can learn new things the next day.

Your brain goes through cycles of NREM and REM sleep throughout the night. If you sleep at your regular time, your brain first goes through NREM sleep which lasts about an hour. However, if you forget to sleep on time and sleep a bit later, the NREM sleep still switches to REM sleep at the regular time, and you get less NREM sleep overall. As a result, your brain has less time to permanently store the memories of the day, and it’s left with no choice but to forget some of them.

2. An Interpretation of Dreams

REM sleep also plays a vital role in memory. During REM sleep, your brain pulls up your thoughts and memories of the day and attempts to find deeper connections in the facts. This post-processing of memories takes place four to five times every night in short intervals between NREM sleep.

During REM sleep, your brain creates a simulation with different pieces of your recent memories and looks at the facts from different angles. This helps you get more insight into what’s going on in your life—or in our case, what’s going on in your NYC Sanitation Exam prep classes.

We experience these simulations as dreams. When we dream and look around in a dream, our eyes move more rapidly. Hence the convenient name, Rapid Eye Movement sleep. This unconscious learning is the reason it helps to sleep on a problem. Your brain analyzes all the facts and finds a solution for you. Even Einstein is said to have strategically used sleep to inspire creativity from dreams.

You get short periods of REM throughout the night after you fall asleep. However, you get most of your REM sleep in the last hour or so before you wake up. This means that if you wake up earlier than your circadian rhythm induces wakefulness on its own, you miss some REM sleep. You don’t get to gain deeper insight into your lessons. For exams that purely measure your cognitive abilities, such as the FDNY Exam, you really need proper REM sleep.

Interesting fact: There’s a reason your brain goes through cycles of NREM and REM sleep instead of getting all the NREM sleep before all the REM sleep. The cycles ensure that if you have to wake up in the middle of the night, you have received the benefits of at least some of both REM and NREM sleep.

3. You Are What You Eat

An extensive report by CDC titled “Health and Academic Achievement” shows how healthy diets can improve learning and exam performance.  One of the most beneficial dietary factors for performance in DCAS exams on dietary fiber.

The modern American diet is mostly made up of foods high in simple carbs. These short chains of carbohydrates are easier and quicker to digest than more complex carbohydrates. Conversely, complex carbohydrates are harder to eat and digest. Fiber is made up of even longer chains of carbohydrates that the human body can’t digest. These dietary elements are removed from foods during refinery because they make food harder to eat.

However, complex carbs and fiber are essential for health. Simple carbs spike blood sugar levels and trigger the release of insulin. On the other hand, complex carbs stay in the digestive tract for longer and give a more constant supply of energy. Stable blood glucose levels improve learning and allow better performance on the exam.

Physical exercise also improves the ability to learn with its positive effects on the brain. Many DCAS exams, such as the upcoming DCAS Sanitation Exam 2060 and the Suffolk Police exam, also directly test your physical performance. Even 20 minutes of moderate exercise can go a long way.

At Civil Service Success, we host preparation classes for DCAS exams that give you specific guidelines on how to give your best on each part of the recruitment process. We’re soon starting our classes for the NYC Sanitation Exam.

Looking forward to your career in the Federal Government? Get enrolled in classes now!