High schoolers need life hacks! We need any kind of trick and shortcut to help increase productivity and efficiency. It’s not like we have time to look and smell the roses and still have time to maintain grades, a healthy lifestyle and healthy relationships. Life hacks are vital for high school survival, it’s your guide.

Sometimes in class we tend to get hungry. If you are trying to eat healthier, it’s hard to find healthy snacks that are easy to eat in class. The best option is to cut some apples and eat them as a healthy alternative to chips or candy, but once apples oxidize they turn brown and don’t look as appetizing. This leads us into our first hack…putting lemon juice on apples. This works because the oxygen will react with the ascorbic acid from the lemon before it will effect the apple. Causing the apple to keep it’s original interior white color.

Snack time isn’t the only time to incorporate life hacks. The most important meal of the day is breakfast, and you need to eat it in order to function properly in school. If you love pancakes, but don’t feel like making perfect circles you could put the pancake mix into a ketchup bottle. It’s a faster way to make the perfect breakfast quickly.

If you don’t have time to make breakfast you might find yourself falling asleep during class, to keep yourself awake you can chew cinnamon flavored gum. The smell and the action of chewing the gum will help to keep you awake.

If the gum doesn’t seem to help you, it’s probably because you don’t get good enough rest at night. Your lack of sleep may be due to the massive amounts of homework your teachers give you, or it may be because of your pillows. They are probably too flat and you aren’t able to get comfortable at night. If you set your pillows outside in the sun for thirty minutes, it will make them plump again. This may not be very helpful since you don’t get much sleep at night because of all of the studying you have to do.

All of this studying will make you hungry for leftover pizza, but you hate the chewy texture that the crust has after you microwave it. An easy fix to this problem is to put a small amount of water in a glass when you microwave the pizza.

Eating this unhealthy delectable treat will unbalance your diet and may cause you to break out. Everyone knows that you can use toothpaste or pimple cream to shrink a huge zit. I bet you didn’t know that you could use listerine to help shrink the zit in JUST MINUTES! The alcohol from the listerine will dry it up and cause it to fade.

 Huge zits and sleep aren’t the only thing we have to worry about when we get home. We have to do homework. Many homework assignments require you to type word documents onto the computer. It’s difficult to look down at a paper and type it onto the computer. An easy solution to this common problem among high school students is to take a plastic pants hanger and clip on side to your paper and the other to your computer. This will have the paper hanging so all you have to do is look  to the side of your computer to know what to type. It’s like the side by side view option on the computer.

     You know as well as I do, that using the, “I’m writing an essay,” excuse to your mom will not get you out of doing chores. If she asks you to go outside and wash the car, you know you will need to put water into a bucket, but the bucket won’t fit in the sink! What will you do then you may ask? You don’t have to go over to the spiderweb infested water hose. All you have to do is get a clean dust pan and use it to guide the water out of the sink into your bucket. This is an ingenious idea, that is so simple you couldn’t even think of it. While you are outside cleaning the car, you realize the headlights are a little hazy. A very inexpensive way to clean them is to use something that everyone has in their home, well I would hope you have it. TOOTHPASTE! This won’t work well if you have a lot of scratches on your headlights, but you will still be able to see a huge difference.

     This last life hack is for the athletes, it’s probably my favorite too. With all the long hours of practice you have a week, you may be sore after new drills or workouts. No one likes ice packs because of all of the condensation it releases when it begins to melt. If you take a clean saturated sponge and put it in the freezer. Once you take it out and place it on the area you wish to ice, it won’t drip! Due to the fact that sponges have the ability to absorb large amounts of liquids.

     At least one of these hacks cater to you, in someway or another. Try them out and let us know how they worked for you.