Homework overload

Challenge

Find yourself suffering sleepless nights working on (and worrying about) homework or exams?

Pressure to do well

During school life, especially in the run up to exams, teenagers can face a massive amount of pressure to do well. This can be from parents, teachers, or even themselves!

Studying late

You may be studying late into the night due to a busy lifestyle and find yourself in danger of pulling an all-nighter.

If you want to catch up with your friends but haven’t yet finished your homework, it can be tempting to delay your studies until the early hours.

You may also decide to wait and chat to your friends after you’ve completed your homework, which again leaves no time to wind down, making falling asleep even harder.

As we mentioned earlier, the biological functions performed during sleep are a necessary for us to be able to learn and retain information, as well as be able to recall it again when we need to.

If you sacrifice sleep in the name of homework or revision thinking that you will learn more, you might actually be doing the opposite, accidentally causing yourself to learn less and be less able to remember the information in class or exams later on.

Your homework may also be at a lower quality given what we learned earlier about how sleep improves performance.

Strategies

Schedule down-time

It’s important that we schedule in and protect down-time.

Creating a schedule that factors in time for doing homework (with rest-breaks), time for you to catch up with friends and family, and time to wind down and relax before bed is important.

Writing this schedule down can help us to stick to it.

Ask for support

If the homework overload feels too large to think this is possible, it might be time to talk with school to think about how to help your homework feel more manageable.

We recommend asking a trusted teacher and/or your school senco for a time to meet and discuss what’s feeling difficult.

If it helps you feel more confident, you might want to ask a parent, carer, guardian or support worker to help you to set up this meeting and attend it with you.

In our experience, being proactive and asking for support around your workload is seen as a positive action by school staff – and much more likely to get you the support you need than just not handing in homework, doing it badly, or only explaining the difficulties after the deadline has passed.

Sometimes it’s anxiety or low mood getting in the way of this feeling manageable. We’ll talk more about strategies to support these kinds of difficulties later in the guidance.

My plans to help my homework overload

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Page last reviewed: 7 February, 2024