How to Study Effectively | Jim Kwik

And remember this, questions are the answer.

They say sitting is the new smoking.

So it's obviously better to study in the room that you're gonna take the exam in because you're unconsciously gonna anchor that to the temperature, to the lighting, to the smells. All of that will get anchored to the information.

How do you study anything quickly? How do you cram correctly? And this episode is for students Students of all ages, or you're a student of life. You have to prepare for a meeting, a sales call. You need to absorb a lot of information in a very short period of time. So it's abbreviated. So how would I approach studying new material in a short period of time? Now we know that there's a difference between studying to remember and cramming to forget. If you've ever crammed information in your mind, you don't take any breaks, you pull an all-nighter, you don't sleep. When you take the test, you don't know if you know the answers or not. But when you're done, what happens for sure? All the information is gone, right? So how would I go about to be more efficient in my cramming or in my studying? Well, let's, let's go through some. I recommend if you're listening to this and you're able to, to take some notes. If you're not taking some notes, make sure you go to jimkwik.com/notes. One of the first keys to learning anything faster, any subject, is to really have a goal. And so when I sit down, I want to ask questions. I wanna have a target in mind. A lot of people don't learn something because they just don't know what they're looking for. They don't know when they're gonna be successful. And remember this, questions are the answer. Questions are the answer. So ask yourself numerous questions. You'll notice that in our Limitless book that all the chapters start with primer questions, right? Questions stimulate that part of your brain called the reticular activating system, RAS, Really direct your focus and your awareness. It gets you alert, and then you're like, oh, there's an answer, there's an answer, there's an answer. So first, prime yourself with questions. Now, I would also say, remember this as a reminder, as a quick reminder, that all learning is state-dependent. All learning is state-dependent, meaning that if you learn something in a bored state, you know, information by itself is forgettable, but information combined with emotion becomes unforgettable. Right, so you have to up the emotion. And so how can you add some fun into your studies? How can you add some, a little bit of more joy? How can you add a little bit more interest and excitement? You know, and part of it is different for different people. Some people, before they start studying, they'll play music in the background. You know, they have a soundtrack to their life. You know, I don't know if you have a song that puts you in the mood to get you focused, it gets you motivated, right? Gets you excited about something. Some people do some jumping jacks or some cartwheels. They do some rebounding, they move their body, Smile on their faces because you have to up your emotion. Because if you're in a bored, sedated state, the information will not be encoded very strong, and so you're not gonna be able to retrieve the information outside of your mind. So just remember that. Now, it's not just your internal environment. The next tip would be to really, really optimize your external environment. What do I mean by that? Your workspace. And I would highly recommend, if you could avoid it, do not work in a crowded office. On your bed. I see so many people of all ages working in their bed. Here's the thing, the environment that you're learning something in gets encoded with the information and, and the feelings and the emotion that come with that. And really, some people actually have sleep issues because they work in bed and they can't differentiate that between that and actually going to sleep. Or if you associate bed to going to sleep, you're not going to be very efficient in your studies. So either way, it's a lose-lose. Right. And so really, what's, what's an ideal environment? It's never going to be perfect. All right. There, there could be kids around, there could be distractions, there could be noise, but do the best you can. Some people are, are learning remotely or maybe they're working remotely. Do the best you can to have a dedicated environment so that when you go in that space, then you go into your, you're in, you're in the zone, right? This is where you're going to be studying, right? Every area of your home or your office should really be dedicated. If ideally to certain behaviors that when you go to do, you know, whether it's like, you know, watching something on your iPad, it just puts you in entertainment mode, right? Or you're going to the gym, you're just gonna work out. You're not on your phone doing social media, right? And whatever environment, it really puts— sets an internal environment to put you in a place where you're just really optimized for that spurt in behavior. Now, what I would recommend, so always studying in the same place ideally. Ideally, that you have good lighting. We've talked about this in previous podcast episodes, meaning you know the fluorescent light probably not the best because it has been shown to really make people tired. There's some eye strain there. Indirect sunlight is is optimal. Temperature find something that's not putting you to sleep that keeps you alert. Sometimes for most people, it's a little bit on the on the cool side also as well. Good airflow because oxygen is so so very important in the process. You're getting a good environment plus. Your environment, do the best you can to free yourself from what? The enemy of your focus, which is distractions, right? Tell your family that this is your study time. You know, lock the door, put a sign, you know, close by, you know, in your office cubicle saying, you know, do not disturb until this time. Turn off, close, turn off your phone, right? Put it on airplane mode, or even better yet, put it in your glove compartment of the car, put it in another room, because even if it's there, like, Even at the dinner table, you feel like you have to kind of check it, right? You know, out of, out of habit. Turn off all the alerts, maybe close different browsers, right? Just focus on that one thing. So that's your external environment. Now, when you take this break, what I'm looking to do when I'm studying, I'll study for 35 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes around there, never more than an hour. And I'll take my brain break. And what do I do with my brain break? Just like 3 or 4 things. In 5 minutes, right? What I do, I move. Very important because we're just sitting behind screens all the time. And when your body moves, your brain grooves, create brain-derived neurotrophic factors. You've heard me talk about this, which is like fertilizer for the human brain. Number 2, what I'm looking to do is to hydrate. Your brain is mostly water, and just staying hydrated can boost your reaction time, your thinking speed, you know, upwards of 15-30%. So stay hydrated. So get yourself some water. Another thing I do is I kind of flex my eyes. What does that mean? I just, if I'm looking at a screen or a book, you know, and I'm looking at something maybe 6 to 12 inches in front of me all the time, I like to just like go outside and just look off into this distance or look out a window and just look out in the horizon as far as I could go because that gives me some depth, right? Because if you're visually fatigued, you're gonna be mentally fatigued, right? Your visual focus really directs your mental focus. And so you wanna be able to move your eyes also as well, not just your body. And then finally, I mentioned going outside. If you can get some fresh air, if you want to do some deep breathing. A lot of times when you're studying, if you suffer from like brain fog, you know, the mental fatigue, you're getting more sedated and tired, part of it is we're not breathing. You know, our postures lots of times could collapse, and the lower 1/3 of your lungs absorbs 2/3 of the oxygen, and you're getting tired. Some people use reading, they're so— they use it to fall asleep late at night, and that's not a good association. So you could do Your breathing exercise, your fire breathing, your alpha breathing, your box breathing, right? Something simple. Inhale for 4, hold for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, and then repeat the process. That's the 4 sides of the box, right? Inhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, and then you can repeat. But anything that's just getting more oxygen into your body, because your brain is only 2% of your body mass, but it requires 20% of the nutrients, 20% approximately of the air and the oxygen. And so you wanna clear those cobwebs, make sure you are breathing. Ideally, you're breathing throughout your study session also as well. My final tip for you is really active retrieval. This is your retrieval practice. We know that studying the human brain and then adult learning, that brains don't always learn best just consuming information, right? It actually learns better through creativity, through creation or co-creation. Where it's not pushing information inside your mind, it's actually pulling information out, right? We've talked about memory a lot in our podcast, and many of you are part of our programs. You know there's 3 stages: you encode information, you store it, and you retrieve it. You encode it—you see it, you feel it, right? You store it. We use the location method or the peg method or chain linking, right? The pie method—all these methods we teach for storage—and then you retrieve it. Well, did you know when you start actively retrieving information, pulling information out, it actually helps you to learn it better? So simple things you could do at the end of a study session and the beginning of a study session is quiz yourself.

They say sitting is the new smoking, that the primary reason you have a brain is actually to control your movement. But did you know that as your body moves, you actually stimulate what they call brain-derived neurotrophic factors, which is like Fertilizer for your brain. It helps create new brain cells and new connections. You have to challenge yourself physically. I recommend people go for a walk and study for 25 minutes. We talk about in previous episodes of time management, the Pomodoro Technique, how your focus, it starts to wane after about 25 minutes. That's why every episode is 20 minutes or less. That's why we stay in your focus and your flow. That's by design because you're— You're busy.

So let's activate your quick student brain now with these advanced study tips. And when I say advanced, this is not typically what's taught in like school or online, like use a highlighter and rewrite your notes and make an outline and sit in the front of the class and use flashcards. All those are really good, but the things I'm gonna talk about here is based in neuroscience and brain science. And so I'm gonna share with you 4 things you need to stop immediately and 4 things you want to start. 4 things to stop and 4 things to start. Number 1, I want you to stop Multitasking. That's right. Stop multitasking. Many of you believe that you're doing two things at once or three things at once, and you're not actually multitasking because every single time you switch from one task to another, you have to regain your focus and your flow, and it could take anywhere from five minutes to twenty minutes. So the more accurate term is not multitasking; it's actually called task switching. But it takes more time, it's less productive, and there's more errors. There was a study done at University of London saying it could even lower your IQ multitasking. Or attempting to multitask can even lower your IQ, similar that if you stayed up all night. If you stayed up all night, it could actually drop up to 15 points. So I want you to do one single mental thing at a time. So stop multitasking. The second thing I'm gonna ask you to stop is I want you to stop and eliminate distractions. In order for you to soar to the head of your class, you must focus. So turn your phone off, put it on airplane mode, put it in another room if you will. You could also use self-control apps if you're gonna have your phone there, like Freedom or FocusMe to block certain websites like Facebook or Twitter. You could even block everything except for the sites you need for your work. And I would ask you to reference the episode we did on fast focus and productivity. That's something very important to re-listen to if you haven't listened to it yet. Number 3, I want you to stop cramming. Stop cramming. Many people don't study for days or weeks, and then they'll pull an all-nighter. They'll go 6 or 7 hours straight, which is really bad because you need sleep. That's That's where you consolidate short to long-term memory. But the big mistake that students are making, I see over and over again, is they study for too long a period without taking breaks. You heard me right. It's important to take breaks. We know you study better when you study in chunks. Your attention, your retention diminishes after about 25 or 30 minutes. There's a time management method called the Pomodoro Technique where you set a timer to break for your work into intervals, traditionally about 25 or 30 minutes. And then you take about a 2 to 3 or 4, maybe a 5-minute break. To stretch, to breathe, to hydrate, and so on. Remember, as your body moves, your brain grooves. Also takes advantage of 2 very important memory principles that we teach in Kwik Recall. It's called primacy and recency. Primacy says you tend to remember something in the beginning. Recency says you tend to remember stuff towards the end. Meaning that if I gave you a list of 30 words and you didn't have some of these memory techniques, you probably remember the words in the beginning— primacy— and the words towards the end which are more recent or recency. So what happens is if you study for 6 hours straight with no breaks, you remember the information towards the beginning and towards the end, but there's a huge dip in between for all that time. And the benefit of taking breaks every 30 minutes or 45 minutes, whatever you choose to break, is you create more beginnings and more ends so you can recover a lot of that information. The 4th thing I'm going to ask you to stop is to hack this thing called akrasia. Akrasia. And now this is the state of acting against your own best judgment. And Socrates was said to have asked precisely, how is it possible that if one judges action A to be the best course of action, why would anyone do anything other than A, right? You want to major in the major things and focusing on the 80/20 rule, right? Pareto's principle. Focus on the 20% of the things that give you 80% of the results or the rewards. The challenge is a lot of people can't stick with a course of behavior. So I would recommend apps like Stick and Or Beeminder, which helps you to keep your commitments. Also listen, if you haven't, to the episode on how to stop procrastinating, the earlier episode we did called How to Stop Procrastinating. That will give you a number of brain hacks to be able to do the things that are holding you back, do the things that you need to do that are holding you back. Now, now that we've gone through the 4 things you want to stop, I'm going to rapid-fire give you the 4 things that you want to start. You want to start these 4 things. So number 1, I want you to practice what we call active recall. Active recall. I actually don't recommend you reread textbook chapters over and over and over again. That's what most people do through rote repetition. Because you could delude yourself that you know the information that you're reading instead of really testing yourself. I'd rather you close the book and recall and recite all that you could remember because there's a difference between recognition and recollection. There's a big difference between recognition and recollection. Many times when you're rereading that chapter over again, you actually delude yourself thinking that you remember this information when you're really just recognizing it in front of you. Because recognizing requires a trigger for you to remember something, and you may not get that on a test. You probably very well, like, hey, look, you get that on test. So study actively with a focus on recollection and quiz yourself. Don't just glance over your notes, your highlighted notes. Number 2, I would say, is start doing spaced repetition. Spaced repetition. Basically what this is saying is you want to be able to space out your studying into intervals like you could your body when you're working it out. And separating the information, reviewing it through intervals, like maybe reviewing it an hour later, a day later, a week later, a few weeks later, helps to take it from your short-term to your long-term memory. And if you want software, many of you are very digital, that could help you accelerate that. There's a free software program called Anki. Anki. And it's like online flashcards, but they break it up into spaced repetition. So it makes it very straightforward on how to learn a language. Studying for medical or law exams, we use this kind of spaced repetition for memorizing people's names or faces, brushing up on your geography, mastering long poems word for word verbatim, even practicing musical instruments like guitar chords. It helps having spaced repetition. Number 3 thing to start is using your sense of smell. Using your sense of smell. Here's the thing, a lot of people don't realize that your environment gets anchored to the information that you're learning. And so you can't always bring the environment into the place. So it's obviously better to study in the room that you're going to take the exam in because you're unconsciously going to anchor that to the temperature, to the lighting, to the smells. All of that will get anchored to the information. But we can't always do that. So what you're going to do is you're going to take the environment in there with you. And one of the most powerful ways of doing that, actually most connected for your memory out of your senses, is your sense of smell, your olfactory sense. And so spraying an unfamiliar scent onto you, your body, maybe it could be an essential oil, a lip balm, a chewing gum, it's very unique flavor or scent. It could be a perfume or a cologne. While you're doing that, while you're studying, then you actually put it back on When you need to be able to basically spray it again, when you need to take an exam. And so the same thing could work with a different kind of unique kind of gum, will work the same way. Also, there are certain scents, for example, essential oils that actually stimulate and wake up the mind. Peppermint is very good for your focus of your senses to improve your memory. Rosemary is really good for your memory also as well. So try tapping into your sense of smell. And then finally, number 4 thing to start doing is to listen to music. And not music that would distract you, not Heavy metal, not rap. But research done at Stanford School of Medicine says that playing certain types of music, like classical music, especially from the Baroque era, it's 60 beats per minute, which also harmonizes with the resting heart rate. And that could actually help accelerate the students to engage parts of your brain to help you pay attention and make predictions. It puts you into what they call an alpha state, a brainwave state, alpha state, where you're relaxed and aware. Not to mention, listening to music can improve your mood and change your whole outlook in studying in general.