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Avoid Summer Brain Drain and Stay Motivated!

By Jenna Moede

For everyone that has opted to take a break this summer, relax and take it easy on this summer vacation but also engage your brain in fun ways.

I’ve heard it said that we have to work the brain like any other muscle in order to keep it strong, but that feels so impossible when I’d rather enjoy the sunshine or some thoughtless entertainment over the summer.

I never took advantage of breaks during my undergrad years, but I remember how they felt while in high school, and I struggled with motivation.

I’ve had a break now between my undergraduate degree and my graduate degree. I will pick back up with school in the fall of this year, and I’ll work on a certificate this summer. Yikes!

I’ve wracked my brain trying to figure out how to set my mind in the direction of focused learning, and since these strategies have helped me even when I didn’t want to do anything but not think, I plan to whip them back out!  

First I plan to read at least a little bit every day. It seems like a million genres exist so I will pick different types of material like novels, nonfiction, personal development, magazines and the news so that I never feel bored with the topics.

Luckily, I have always loved books so I don’t have to retrain myself to do this one, but I hope that making a habit of reading more regularly will help me find time to read long sections of textbooks when classes start.

With any luck, I might even enjoy the textbook reading when school starts in the fall!

Next, learning new activities or developing old ones helped me overcome losing too many facts over summer vacations in high school so I hope it will work again!  

I like to practice old skills, like playing piano, and work on new ones that have interested me in the past.

This year, I made the most awesome discovery that our local library has not only a free online library, but also free language software for pretty much any language I could ever want to learn. I had to try it out so I have started learning a foreign language.

I practice daily on the new language, and I also use it to brush up on the Spanish that I learned throughout high school and college. I love learning a skill that could come in handy someday and having fun at the same time.

I have such a good time practicing that it doesn’t even bother me when my husband pops his head in the door of my office looking concerned because of my awkward sound repetition.

Moving on, who doesn’t love a good board game or card game? I enjoy gathering my friends or family and hosting game nights. Not only have I met new people this way, but I use different parts of my brain without even noticing.

We play games that range from Jenga to Pinochle. If we feel particularly daring we’ll try to play an entire game of Monopoly without anyone flicking a hotel or two off the board during a heated discussion about the rent on Boardwalk.

I also play two player games with my husband like Mancala. Every once in a while I turn to jigsaw puzzles or word and number puzzles that I can do on my own.

I try to find whatever interests me in the moment and go for it.

Lastly, sometimes I feel super motivated over small breaks, and in those cases, I revisit notes from previous semesters.

I plan to do this moving forward even more than I have in the past because I know I need a steady foundation to build on in grad school, and I don’t want to risk chipping at that foundation by forgetting important facts.

I don’t think I’ve ever really spent enough time reviewing in the past, and I swear if I ever remember science information I’ll have to mark it on the calendar and request a cake. I have figured out that the topics that interest me the least, like science, fall out of my brain space the fastest.

Since not every topic in my undergrad studies thrilled me, and I can expect that to happen again with my graduate degree, I know I’ll really have to focus on the classes that bore me when I re-read notes.

I hope to apply myself more than I ever have before and come out having more applicable knowledge than I have before.

I will desperately try not to fall into a mindless summer. I worry that if I let myself stop thinking, it will take too much time to whip my brain back into shape.

These activities will give plenty of brain activity and entertainment so that I can not only enjoy the summer, but also retain old facts and learn new information.

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