What’s Up, Doc Cocktail
The What’s Up, Doc cocktail is a drink built with bourbon whiskey, fernet-Branca, carrot juice, ginger juice, and lemon juice!
Exams are a stressful environment, and it is common for students to have a few drinks the night before taking a test. However, is this a good decision when writing a test that could make or break your future? Exploring what drinking has to do with studying is essential to understand the full impact. If you're stressed with writing tasks, personal statement writing help is available through services like Ukwritings. They specialize in helping students craft compelling and unique statements for university applications, offering expert support to boost your chances of success.
One of the most immediate effects of drinking alcohol the night before an exam is the effect on sleep. Even moderate amounts of alcohol affect sleep. Alcohol reduces the time spent in REM sleep, the phase in the sleep cycle that promotes memory consolidation, and can make it more difficult to remember information during the test.
You might think that just a single drink will help you relax and allow you to fall asleep even faster, but the quality of this sleep will be diminished. The next day, you might wake up feeling foggy and mentally sluggish, hindering your ability to focus on the exam. When your brain is tired, accessing the information you studied becomes harder, leading to a lower exam grade. This is why some students opt for nursing essay writing services to ensure their assignments are well-written and avoid last-minute stress that could otherwise lead to poor choices like drinking the night before exams.
You know that drinking impairs your thought processes and ability to think and decide, solve problems, or concentrate. These are vital if you want to perform well in an examination. You won't think clearly if you drink, especially if you need to before an exam.
As your brain recovers, you'll still be dealing with alcohol's hangover effects post-bedtime – which can persist deep into the following day. And even if you don't feel any hangover yourself, you can still expect to perform worse cognitively. A reduced cognitive performance would mean that you'd have an increased risk of making slip-ups, misunderstanding questions, resisting the lure of salacious headlines and answering them, or you might be unable to handle the sort of complex problems that would not usually pose a challenge to you.
And there's a bit of literature to support the notion that drinking before exams can lead to worse grades: an online article from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reported that research showed that students who drank heavily the night before an exam averaged 10-12 percent lower scores than those who hadn't.
In another study, the American College Health Association reported that students who drank alcohol the night before they took a test were 30 percent less likely to meet their GPA expectations. The numbers do not lie.
Using drinking the night before an exam as an example, we can see how different study habits affect grades.
Activity Impact on Grades Sleep Quality Cognitive Performance
Drinking Alcohol - Decreased by 10-12% on average, Poor (disrupted REM sleep), Reduced (slower recall, impaired focus)
Studying and Sleeping Well - Increased (good retention of information), Good (restful, deep sleep), High (clear thinking, better memory)
Cramming Without Sleep - Mixed (sometimes helpful, but risky), Poor (little to no sleep), Reduced (brain fatigue)
Light Exercise and Relaxation - Improved (better focus and stress relief), Good (physical activity aids sleep), Enhanced (better focus, memory boost)
As in the diagram, it's clear that drinking the night before you sit an exam is terrible news for your chances of coming out with flying colors. However, another better strategy for your chances of doing well is sticking to your good sleeping habits and studying correctly.
Others may drink the night before an exam to take the edge off. After all, alcohol is known to lower levels of stress. While this is true in the short term, for students who worry about an upcoming test, this strategy can come back to haunt them. Alcohol interferes with neurotransmitters that regulate mood. As a consequence of this, the following day, students can experience a rebound in anxiety.
This increased anxiety, combined with the burden of having to take an exam, is a double whammy for your state of mind. Rather than helping you to calm down, alcohol can make you feel more anxious and unprepared while you are taking the test.
Two or three drinks would make you feel quite hungover—a severe handicap if you're taking an exam. A hangover is more than a headache and a stomach ache. It means dehydration, lethargy, and a fuzzy mind. That fuzzy mind is not well-suited to intently studying exam questions and developing test-worthy answers.
Having to take the test in an uncomfortable state due to both your drunkenness and physical discomfort is a double whammy in favor of sober students who are sharp and refreshed.
Getting tanked before exams doesn't just hurt your score on one test. If it's a regular thing, it can have a lasting effect on your academic success. Consistently drinking at times you should be studying, such as for exams, can cause a grade point average (GPA) drop overall, making it harder to reach academic goals, whether getting into a graduate program or scoring a hot job post-collegiate.
In the long run, even small decrements in performance can lead to a vicious cycle of failure, while being teetotal and learning how to cope with exam stress in healthy ways will buy you goodwill for future efforts.
It is easy to imagine that a night out drinking might help you to de-stress before an exam the following day. However, the evidence suggests that, on average, it does have an influence. It mediates this effect in a variety of ways, through poor sleep, blunted cognitive function, increased anxiety, and even mild hangovers.
For this reason, better ways to reduce stress the night before an exam are a good night's sleep, a little light exercise, or perhaps some meditation, which will leave you feeling refreshed and prepared to engage with the exam rather than inebriated fully. The night before an exam is the last opportunity for you to have some control over your destiny when it comes to an academic career, so it would be a shame to squander it.
