Tips for getting decent sleep before my exam?

Question 🤔🤔

Does anyone have some tips for getting decent sleep before my test? I've been able to adjust my circadian rhythm to sleep around 10pm and wake up at 6am, but it's super unnatural for me as I've always been a huge night owl so it's hard to be consistent. More importantly, I just can't control my anxiety about this test whenever I try and sleep. I'm currently 2 days out from the exam and last night I went to bed at 10pm and literally just sat there all night unable to fall asleep, and ended up getting dead 0 sleep all night. Every time I got tired enough to drift off, it would just not happen because my heart rate was high and my mind felt too alert. And my sleep for the past week in general has been pretty bad because something similar keeps happening, although last night was definitely the worst. It's also been a bit of a positive feedback loop where I get bad sleep from worrying, then the next day I'm tired all day and don't get much studying done, which then in turn makes me more worried about the exam, which keeps me up the next night, etc.

I'm worried that something similar is going to happen the night before my real exam and I'm hoping there are some decent ways to try and prevent it at least somewhat. The only solution I could really come up with is to just severely limit the amount of studying I do for these last two days, to just give myself time to recharge and to hopefully get my mind off the test, but I don't know if that's actually gonna work if I'm well aware that I have the test the following morning. I'm also going to reduce the amount of caffeine I take, although I decided I probably shouldn't completely quit cold turkey right now cause apparently caffeine withdrawals can peak 24-48 hours after the last drink, which would be right on queue for when I write the exam. Other than this though, I feel like I've tried every trick in the book and nothing seems to really work for me.

Posted Jul 30, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

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