Why I'm able to study 1,620 hours in 6 months (how to stay motivated)

[Music] what is up guys karma medic here and welcome back to another dose if you're new to the channel hi my name is nasser and i'm now a fourth year medical student studying at king's college london in today's video i'm going to tell you exactly how i was able to push myself and motivate myself daily in order to study 1620 hours over a six month period in preparation for a huge medical school exam i started studying for this exam in mid-february and i finished in middle of august and i was doing between eight to ten hours of studying a day the exam i took is called the usmle step one it's an eight hour long exam that covers four years of biomedical science material and the first three years of medical school so it has a ton of content so much to learn and so much to do and so that's why you have to study for it over such a long period of time throughout this study period my studying schedule was to wake up at 7 30 and study from 9 to 1 take a lunch break from 1 till 3 study from 3 till 7 take a dinner break till 8 30 and then study from 8 30 till 10 30 pm so 10 hours of studying a day really only taking breaks in order to eat and then at night time to relax and have a little bit of fun so how did i do it how did i study for eight to ten hours a day for 180 days in a row here's how the first thing that you need and honestly there is no way around this you need a very strict studying schedule i'm talking about a rigid studying schedule like this has to be made out of stainless steel if you've got thousands of pages of reading to do a couple thousand questions and hundreds of hours of videos to watch you have to be very efficient with your time and the best way to do this is to know exactly how your time is being spent and what you want to dedicate your time to i've spoken about my personal four hour study block method in previous videos but honestly it doesn't matter how you study or how you choose to break up your time throughout the day just have a set number of hours that you want to dedicate towards studying and towards learning and make sure that they get met the key to studying for such a huge exam or working on a project of this scale is consistency and having a studying schedule helps you maintain that consistency over long periods of time because there's no point in working really hard on one day and then doing nothing the next day or taking a long break you have to be able to do a good amount of work consistently so when you make a schedule no matter how you choose to make it you need to stick to it when that friend calls you and asks you to go for coffee you have to say no and when your friends hit you up on the group chat and want to play some warzone on the playstation sometimes you just have to say no if something comes up in the middle of the day during your studying time as best as you can put that aside put it in your to-do list and tell yourself when you're going to do that thing later but try and make sure that you actually do the things that you've set out for yourself for that day the less exceptions that you have or the less times that you let yourself break away from your stunning schedule the less likely you are to do that in the future at the end of the day all of this hard work that you're putting in and this studying you're not doing for anybody else you're doing it for you and so if you make a promise to yourself and stick to what you've told yourself then you won't let yourself down it's all about discipline discipline discipline set a goal plan out that goal and stick to it effectively the second thing that you absolutely have to do and i really encourage no exceptions to this rule is that you need to include something in your day or in your life that you actually find enjoyable something that you actually have fun doing because there's no point in sitting down and studying forever forever forever just hating yourself getting depressed feeling sad losing motivation you have to sprinkle in that studying and that hard work with other things that bring you joy and make you happy in your life whether that's hanging out with your friends playing video games drawing reading whatever it is that you enjoy doing make sure that you find time to actually do that and schedule it in just like you put in your schedule that you want to study for four hours you also want to put in one hour of free time one hour of happiness one hour of whatever i want me personally i would stop studying at 10 30 p.m and then i would have two hours from 10 30 to 12 30 to do all of these things i would edit and record youtube videos i would catch up with my friends via calls i would do my exercise like going for runs now if relaxing or having fun at 10 30 p.m doesn't work for you obviously that's perfectly fine you can schedule in those hours of having fun or doing what you enjoy at any point in your day as long as you stay on top of the studying that you've told yourself you're going to do you can use your free time or fun time and put it in wherever you want the third thing that i want to talk about and i can't stress this enough is exercise exercise is just it's such an incredible way of having a reset in your day of creating a blank slate in your mind of sort of getting all of that stress and tension that you have in your body and releasing it any way that you can physically exert yourself is gonna be a good way of relieving stress whether that's going on long runs or going to the gym or even something as simple as jogging or walking around your block any way that you can physically exert yourself and get yourself moving and sweating this is all scientifically proven to help improve your mental health help improve your mood and it will actually help you when you sit down to study because you'll be in a better headspace during this really long studying period i became very serious about running and i would run somewhere between seven and ten kilometers every two to three days or so and i can't state the positive impact that it had on my life that it had on my studying and i can honestly say that if i didn't do all of that running i don't think i would have been able to study for that long along with doing regular exercise comes healthy eating i'm not going to go into too much detail about that in this video i do have a couple of videos about cooking up on my channel if you would like to check them out healthy body healthy mind it's a very true statement okay now let's talk about managing your stress appropriately now i don't want to tell you guys how to manage your stress everybody is different and everybody manages their stress in their own way but the important part about this section is to learn how to identify when you're stressed and learn what works best for you in order to be able to cope and deal with that stress whether you deal with your stress more in an emotional way and you want to talk it out and call your friends or your family or you deal with it in a more practical way and you create to-do lists and you know plans on how you want to eliminate that source of stress in your life whatever it is that you do make sure that you identify it and you actually do it don't let stress build up for long periods of time and just bottle up inside you because one day it will all come out and because the studying process is so long it's important that you manage your stress throughout the whole time as opposed to in random bursts every couple of weeks or months so now let me tell you about my personal way of managing stress and what personally works for me so besides doing exercise as regularly as i can to sort of get rid of all of that stress and tension from my body physically whenever a stressor arises for me throughout the day i almost always deal with it as soon as it arises get rid of it get it out of my way because once it's off of my to-do list or off the forefront of my mind i can get back to what i was originally doing of course there's times when this isn't possible and if that's the case i make sure to write it down on my to-do list and i tell myself exactly when i'm going to deal with the stressor or exactly how i'm going to deal with the stressor in the future that way because i already know how i'm going to tackle this in the future i won't be sitting about it and thinking about it while i'm trying to study or do whatever is in front of me if i have any stressors throughout the day that are out of my control or i can't deal with at that time then i will physically envision taking that stressor in my head and moving it into my 10 minute box now my 10 minute box is this thing that i came up with probably when i started university and it's this idea that i take these stressors that are bothering me and i move them to a separate part of my brain and i close them off in a box so that i don't think about them at this current time at the end of each day i give myself exactly 10 minutes to think about these stressors process the emotions that are associated with them and figure out a plan for how i'm gonna eliminate them in my life and although this sounds kind of weird it's something that works for me and what i will usually do is actually set a 10 minute timer on my phone so i don't spend any longer than 10 minutes thinking about all these negative things in my life when those 10 minutes are over hopefully i have a plan for how i'm going to deal with that stress which i've probably written down on a to-do list or something like that and if not then i will just put them back in that box close up that box and deal with it tomorrow now the reason that i do this is because these types of stressors these really big overarching stressors are usually ones that are completely out of my control and i don't like to spend my time or waste my time thinking about things or stressing about things that are out of my control obviously because i can't change them even if i wanted to that's just what works for me and i encourage you guys to find whatever stress management plan works for you and use that as often as possible now moving on to something else that i think is really really important and is probably half the battle when it comes to tackling such a huge project or studying period like this is your mindset so your mindset is how you think about the task that you're actually doing your motivations your worries and sort of from what angle you approach what it is that you're doing so for example when i decided to write this exam about seven months ago now i knew for a fact that i was going to lose out on my summer i wasn't going to be able to do as many social activities as i wanted to and in fact i was going to be doing something every single day that is pretty high stress and is going to take a lot of energy from me and something that really helps me with that is sort of looking at the bigger picture what is it that i'm really doing here obviously i'm studying every single day in order to do this exam but the reason that i'm doing this exam is so that i can keep my options open in the future for where i would possibly want to practice medicine and if i know for a fact that that's something that i want to do and that is something that i'm okay with then it sort of makes everything that comes after it easy to follow and sort of automatic i like to think about these sort of big life decisions in a sort of like flowchart type of way so let's say at the very top of the flow chart you have do i want to have the option to practice medicine in multiple different countries yes or no and then everything else underneath it sort of just follows on from that and it becomes the obvious or logical next step i really find that any time you can take a small sliver of something positive out of a bad situation anytime you can look at something from a sort of happy or brighter perspective it helps so so so much for just your mood your mental health and generally tackling these really big projects i try and always look for the positive in whatever it is that i'm doing as long as i've already satisfied that higher order decision and i've told myself this is actually what i do want to do i feel like that might have been a little bit confusing and not made the most sense if you want anything clarified let me know in a comment down below alright and the last point that i want to mention in this video is about focusing on the task that is directly in front of you so when i think about this exam and i think about the fact that i have to study for six months that is super overwhelming when i think about the fact that then i had to get through both of these super dense and heavy books then i had to do thousands of practice questions listen to hundreds of hours of videos and make all kinds of long booklets of notes that is very very overwhelming and rightfully so it is a huge huge project to tackle so every single day when i woke up or every night before i went to sleep i made a plan of directly what i wanted to do over the next 24 hours or over the next 12 hours 6 hours 1 hour 30 minutes whatever it is i find that the best way to actually start doing something is to break it down into all of its smaller tasks into all of its smaller parts and then those small parts are so manageable they're so simple and easy for example if i want to do 20 pages of reading in a day i'll tell myself okay how about i complete the first five pages of reading in the next hour once i finish that hour i could say all right now let me complete five pages of reading in the next hour and that way i'm always focused on directly what i need to do in the next period of time that's ahead of me as opposed to thinking about the bigger picture which can sometimes really stress me out or cause me to you know think about everything and make me overwhelmed which i just didn't need at the time so for me i usually think about these smaller blocks in terms of four hour blocks but you can be as small and as specific as you want and the smaller and more specific you go the more manageable and easy or simple those tasks are to complete and every time you complete a task every time you do something that you told yourself you were going to do please please please take that off of some list physically taking off tasks that you need to do is such a good feeling you know if you cross out something you had on your to-do list this is genuinely a good feeling that helps motivate you helps you see how much work you have done and how much work is still ahead of you so i would encourage you however it is that you want to visualize the fact that you are doing work the fact that you are completing objectives that you've set for yourself just do it in some way staying motivated and studying so intensely for such a long period of time is something that honestly was very hard for me to do and i'm sure other students find it hard to do as well so i hope that this video has helped you in some way shape or form if you did like the video please do leave a like on it and also subscribe to my channel see more content from me in the future if you've got any questions for me you can leave them in a comment down below and i'll get back to you as soon as i can if there's any one of the topics that i discussed in this video which you'd like me to go into more detail in in the future please also let me know down below best of luck in whatever exam or project you're preparing for i hope you do really well and i will see you in the next one peace physically ticking off these tasks physically physically ticking these tips taking these discs that's the blooper for this video

Channel: Kharma Medic

Views: 636,174

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Id: P3CoYzBPWvU

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020