What’s Your Study Playlist?

There are many components to the perfect study environment. How many people are there?  What is the temperature?  Are you wearing comfortable clothes?  Can you fall asleep in your study position?  Will you be hungry and need to move soon?  And lastly, what type of music do you want?  The answers to all of these questions will differ per person.  Some people like to study in groups and others alone.  It also depends on what a person is studying for on what type of environment they want.  

Most college students listen to something when they study; Whether that’s music, tv or something else.  The music that people listen to differs based on the subject and type of homework that they are doing.  The one thing that most people have in common is that they don’t want to have to sing along to the songs as they are studying because that easily distracts them.  This means that you need a different playlist for studying than for driving, where the whole goal is to perform a concert in your car.  People try to achieve this goal in different ways.  It’s hard to find a balance between music to listen to for fun and music to listen to for studying.  

This is because you don’t want to listen to music that you know and like to dance to when you should be concentrating on calculus.  Some people listen to music in another language so that they are not tempted to sing along and they just listen to it in the background.  Others listen to a different genre of music that they don’t know well so that they can’t be too distracted by it.  Another option is listening to instrumental music.

Once you figure out what type of words you want in your study music, you then have to decide how slow or fast you want the music to be.  Perhaps you want it fast to keep you awake when you are reading a particularly boring textbook, or you want it slow when you are trying to concentrate on a long specific problem.  You also need to choose if the music is relaxing or intense, or upbeat, slow, or somewhere in between.   All of these decisions depend on the type of work you are doing at the time and can also vary depending on your mood.  The seemingly simple task of choosing a playlist to study is actually much more complicated than you initially think.