Gotta love stop days.

Including the preceding or ensuing weekend, stop days give every college student a chance to catch his or her breath and relax for at least a few days before final exams begin.

But just like normal school days, in which you are often scrambling to complete 10 different activities while still finding time to study, there is an art to maximizing your stop days.

So without further ado, here are five suggestions to keep in mind as you near those glorious few open dates on the calendar.

1. Don't study for at least two days. This one is self explanatory. You miss out on the whole idea of stop days if you plow through them buried in a textbook. Don't worry – you'll still have time to get your required amount of studying in before your first test. Cramming four days before the test is the first indication of Laymen's Acute Memory Evaporation, or LAME for short.

2. Sleep in. I know what you're thinking. If you get up at 9 a.m. and study for five hours, you then have the entire afternoon and evening free. Don't do it. Trust me, if you set your alarm for 9 a.m., one of two things will happen: You wake up in a terrible mood or you reset your alarm for noon. Sleep in now so you can pull late nighters in the future without suffering during the following day's test.

3. Go on a mini adventure. Face it: In the not-so-distant future, you will be spending ten hours a day studying, four hours a day wasting time while trying to get your mind off studying, and at least another two hours doing what you think is studying but is really nothing more than skillful daydreaming. Take advantage of stop days and go do something adventurous to escape the campus bubble. You'll be more productive as a result once you hit the books.

4. Exercise. I don't know exactly how you'll feel after your finals are over, but I do know how you won't feel – fit. Work out during stop days so that once you become the academic version of a couch potato you don't start to resemble an actual one.

5. Utilize Cramster. Eventually you will have to hit the books. Just make sure it's near the end of stop days. Running through practice problems here allows you to see the logic behind the complicated language and equations. But you knew that already.

Any tips I left out? How do you best utilize your stop days?