How to Study Effectively | Jim Kwik

and remember this questions are the answer they say sitting is the new smoking so it's all obviously better to study in the room that you're going to take the exam then 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 [Music] how do you study anything quickly how do you cram correctly and this episode is for 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 a 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 it all nighter you don't sleep when you take the test you don't know if you know the answers or not and 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 jim quick.com forward slash 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 want to 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 going to be successful and remember this questions are the answer questions are the answers so ask yourself in 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 to really direct your focus and your awareness and get you alert and then you're like oh there's an answer there's an answer there's answers 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 board 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 to focus it gets you motivated right get you excited about something some people do some some jumping jacks or some card wheels they they do some rebounding they move their body they put smile on their faces because you have to up your emotion because if you're in a board sedated state the information will not be encoded very strong so you're not going to 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 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 study 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 uh behaviors that when you go to do you know whether it's like you know watching something on your ipad is just put you in entertainment mode right where you're going to the gym you're just going to work out you're not on your phone doing social media right in whatever environment it really puts sets an internal environment to put you in a place where you're just really optimized for that spurt and behavior now what i would recommend so always studying 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's been shown to really make people tired there's some eye strain there indirect sunlight 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 air flow because oxygen is so so very important in the process so you're getting a good environment plus your environment do the best you can to free yourself from what the enemy or 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 and you know until this time um turn off clothes turn off your phone right i put it on airplane mode or even better yet put it in your 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 that 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 three or four things in five 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 like fertilizer for the human brain number two what i'm looking to do is to hydrate your brain is mostly water and just staying hydrated could boost your reaction time your thinking speed you know upwards of fifteen thirty 30 so stay hydrated so get yourself some water another thing i do is i 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 six to 12 inches in front of me all the time i'd 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 some depth right because if you're visually fatigued you're going to be mentally fatigued right your visual focus really directs your mental focus and so you want to 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 have 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 can collapse and uh the lower one-third of your lungs absorbs two-thirds 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 your your alpha breathing your box breathing right something simple inhale for four hold for a count of four exhale for a count of four hold for a count of four and then repeat the process that's the four sides of the box right inhale for a count of four hold for a count of four exhale for a count of four hold for count of four and then you can repeat but anything that's just getting more oxygen into your body because your your brain is only two percent of your body mass but it requires twenty percent of the nutrients twenty percent of approximately of the of the air and the oxygen and so you wanna clear those cog wells 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 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 three 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 pi method all these methods we teach are 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 in 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 neurotropic factors which is like fertilizer for your brain it helps create new brain cells and new connections so you have to challenge yourself physically so i recommend people go for a walk and study for 25 minutes you know 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 and that's why we stay in your focus and your flow and 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 flash cards all those are really good but the things i'm going to talk about here is based in neuroscience and brain science and so i'm going to share with you four things you need to stop immediately and four things you want to start four things to stop and four things to start number one 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 can take anywhere from five minutes to 20 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 is a study done at university of london saying you can even lower your iq multitasking or attempting to multitask can even lower your iq similar that if you stayed up to 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 going to 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 in another room if you will you could also use self-control apps if you're gonna have your phone there like freedom or focus me to block certain websites like facebook or twitter or you can even block this everything except for the sites you need for your work and i would actually 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 three 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 six or seven hours straight which is really bad because you need sleep 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 two to three or four maybe a five minute break to stretch debris dehydrate and so on remember as your body moves your brain grooves also takes advantage of two a very important memory principles that we teach in quick 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 six 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 fourth thing i'm going to ask you to stop is to hack this thing called acrasia acrasia and now this is the state of acting against your own better 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 prince principle focus on the twenty percent of the things that give you eighty percent of the results or the rewards the challenge is a lot of people can't stick with uh course of behavior so i would recommend apps like stick or be minder 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 four things you want to stop i'm going to rapid fire give you the four things that you want to start you want to start these four things so number one i want you to practice what we call active recall active recall i actually don't recommend you reread text book chapters over and over and over again that's what most people do through wrote 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 re-reading that chapter over again you 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 okay look you get the hunt test so study actively with the focus on recollection and quiz yourself don't just glance over your notes your highlighted notes number two 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 flash cards but there's they break it up into space repetition so it makes it very straightforward on how to learn a language uh studying for medical or law exams we use this kind of space repetition for memorizing people's names or fin faces brushing up under geography mastering long poems word for word verbatim even practicing musical instruments like guitar chords it helps having space repetition number three 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 all obviously better to study in the room that you're going to take the exam then 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 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 four 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 is 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 listen to music can improve your mood and change your whole outlook and studying in general

Channel: Jim Kwik

Views: 158,765

Keywords: how to study effectively, study tips, study tips and tricks, jim kwik, jim quick, how to study, how to. study for exams, how to study smart, how to study with full concentration, how to study effectively without distraction, how to study smart but not hard, kwik brain, jim kwik podcast, jim kwik memory

Id: Egnpm7kXbUg

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022