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Introduction

Welcome to my Shinobi’s Guide to Learning inspired by Learning How to Learn MOOC by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski!

Here we’ll talk about how to make the most of our study sessions and other things related to them, such as the monster called procrastination and the incredible pomodoro technique.

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We all know how studying can be a daunting task at first. No one has it easy. Studying takes effort and most of the times we use the wrong strategies trying to get that good grade or learn just enough so we can actually accomplish something valuable using the acquired knowledge.

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And using a specific strategy can be a bad thing, as we’ll talk about cramming and procrastination… Or if we use the right ones, we can make things a lot easier on ourselves and be able to enjoy life again alongside studying, even enjoy studying again for those who are tired of failing classes.

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This being said, remember it’s always okay feeling down when it comes to start studying. Our brain usually wants to be comfortable. That’s where the Pomodoro Technique created by Francesco Cirillo comes in handy. Where you make a commitment of studying/working for 25 minutes, then you’ll reward yourself with 5 minutes of break and another reward you may feel you deserve.

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Pomodoro Technique

And why is the Pomodoro technique so good? Because you allow yourself to commit to a smaller task and tackle your procrastination only for 25 minutes. It feels easier than if you think about doing it for 5 hours straight.

It prevents overburdening yourself as well. Even if the break is only 5 minutes long, it allows your brain to rest just a little bit and your mind to wander. It’s essential. Otherwise, you risk losing all the willpower you possess. Willpower is a limited resource of energy that we don’t want to rely on all the time.

If you use it too much, chances are you won’t be able to build a habit of studying. Or any new habit at all. It doesn’t mean you should be comfortable all the time but stay out of your comfort zone just enough.

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This technique is great because when you haven’t gotten the habit of studying, the Pomodoro reminds you: “hey, it’s only for 25 minutes! It’ll be easy! You’ll get some rest after finishing it!”.

It makes a real difference. I’ve struggled with sitting down and studying for a long time, but when I started using Pomodoro (nowadays it’s almost always when I need to study something), it was almost like magic: I could sit down and study for even longer than I thought I could.

That’s because my main problem wasn’t actually studying, but sitting down. I procrastinated a lot, then said to myself “I’ll do it sometime later”, then later... And ended up never actually sitting down to get things done. And it was a huge problem for me.

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The Reward and why is it important

Well, everyone wants to be happy. Ask anyone around the world: no matter what it is, it ultimately leads to happiness. It’s a word, a concept that we always want to achieve in our lives.

No one wants to live without happiness all the time. We may feel bad when starting a study session, but after that, we want to experience pleasure. We want to feel rewarded. Why though? It’s because of our reward system: a system inside our brain that makes sure we do what is good for us.

But our brain can make mistakes just like us.

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Our brains want everything to be okay with us. But some things can fool its reward system and make it think we’re doing us a favor when in reality we’re doing the exact opposite: that’s how procrastination and addictions in general happen.

We’re lead to believe it’s good to procrastinate because we feel good watching cat clips on YouTube or browsing through the web to find this exact meme we love laughing at. But it hides the sad reality: if we’re doing it while we were supposed to be studying for that test, we’re going to fail inevitably.

And it’ll lead to sadness, but then, hey, let’s just do it again so we feel comfortable until another uncomfortable thing happens. And it builds a habit.

But why our brains do that? How could they betray us so badly?

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Building a Habit

Habits are built to make it a routine and keep us motivated to do an action that gives us some kind of advantage or pleasure. When you procrastinate, you’re giving yourself comfort and we like this. This gives us pleasure. 

It motivates us to do it again because it’s so much easier than studying, so we go away from something stressful to something good. That’s part of the job of our brain’s reward system as well.

Our brain is not ready for a society that has everything at hand all the time, so it creates this kind of “bad habits” because of it. It’s like our brains believe we might lose the disponibility of the cat’s clips on YouTube, so it makes us go back to it every time we’d rather procrastinate than study.

Worse than that, this kind of “pleasure” is easy to get, so it’s even easier for our brain to see it as a good thing because our brain likes to save energy.

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The same way our “zombie” mode, that is, the way our brain enters when it activates a habit and its subsequent actions can make us do bad things like procrastinating, we can make them work for us. They are there to help us after all, not the opposite, even though some people may feel like it.

As Barbara taught us in “Harnessing your zombies to help you”, habits are made of four essential parts:

Cue

Routine

Reward

Belief

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The Cue

The same way every time Guy meets Kakashi he wants to greet Kakashi and see if is everything alright with his mate, we have habits that start with a cue.

It might be going to your bedroom during the afternoon, might be turning on the cellphone or anything that can start a series of automated actions (that sometimes you don’t even realize).

It builds the desire to do an action, the routine.

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The Routine

The routine is a series of actions that are related to that cue that is related to the habit. Guy as much as greets Kakashi every time he sees him (a habit in itself) gets a building desire to compete against Kakashi in all sorts of ways.

It’s similar to how when we turn our phones on, look at the screen and get a desire to watch that cursed cat clip we love so much. Or send a message that friend we like so much. They are not inherently bad actions or routines, but when done at the wrong time, when you were supposed to be doing another thing, it may lead to problems in the long run, such as creating a habit of not studying when we need to.

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The Reward and the Belief

After the routine is done, we get the reward. Our reward system - dopamine being the neuromodulator related to this system -  makes sure our dopamine levels increase after a reward, that was anticipated by it, is received and it ultimately makes us feel good.

But why does the brain expect this specific reward? Because it’s a habit and our brain is already used to receive this after the routine - remember that!

Just like Guy and Kakashi feel good when they compete with each other and make their best at the same time of having fun. They’re friends after all. And after every competition, Guy and Kakashi treat each other friendly. They like hanging out together.

They believe they feel good hanging out together because they are friends. They trust each other.

The reward of watching that cat’s clip may be watching something cute and forgetting all the problems life throws at us.

The belief, in this case, may be believing you’ll feel good easily by watching the clip. It’s effortless fun.

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Using “Zombie Mode” in your favor 

We can make peace with our “zombie mode”. After all, we’re alive as a species thanks to that.

We need to identify the cue that starts our procrastination and focus our energy on changing how we react to it. After identifying the cue that usually leads to procrastination, you only need to spend your energy on one thing: the routine.

Remember: we have limited willpower. You don’t want to be on a tug of war against your brain all the time.

Using Pomodoro helps in it a lot. Every time you open the book, you want to turn the phone on. NO! Start the Pomodoro timer and do 25 minutes of work. After these 25 minutes of work, give yourself 5 minutes of phone-time.

If you finished all the work, give yourself that cursed cat clip. Your brain will start assimilating studying with getting this reward and it reinforces the habit of studying. You’ll see you’re in control of your Zombie Mode and not the opposite.

And every time you do this cue-routine-reward, it reinforces the pathways in your brain related to that and you’ll be able to study spending less energy and effort, enter the flow easily and feel no guilty playing your videogame.

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All the wrong ideas

At this point, you probably understood consistency is key when studying. It eases the difficulty of sitting down as your brain gets used to it. But lots of people don’t even realize it before it’s too late. I’m guilty of that. Failed lots of classes, tried using all the wrong ways to study because it used to work in school.

When I got into university, I got traumatized by how hard it was to keep up with the classes. Without consistency, I would say it’s nearly impossible. You can’t cram your way out of college.

Cramming is a bad habit I developed in a time it was best suited for the lazy student I was. I got really good grades and spent almost all the time playing videogames or doing other things I like. School times were like a dream for me.

For those who don’t really know what cramming is, it’s studying only when the tests are coming. It’s when you did not study for the first three months of classes and then in one week try to cram your way through the material. It may work for school, even though I don’t recommend.

But cramming comes with an underlying problem most people don’t realize: you do not learn properly. You may even be able to remember the material for the next few days, but after one week or one month, you won’t remember even the slightest detail well enough to actively say you’ve learned the subject.

Without consistency, you can’t learn, because your brain will understand as if it wasn’t important to keep it stored in your memory. I would say I learnt a lot in school because I loved looking like a smart person, even when I did not study a lot and the positive emotions I felt made my brain store information more easily.

That’s another important information to keep in mind when learning: even though boredom and other negative emotions are common when studying, try your best to keep it positive. It’ll help your brain understand it as something “important to your survival” as it releases dopamine.

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The best way to learn

According to “Strengthening the Student Toolbox”, we can use better ways of learning to make the most of our study session and actually store the information in our long-term memory.

There are some of the best strategies discussed there and we’ll talk about them.

But before we continue, it’s important as well that you let yourself make mistakes. I used to be pretty judgemental about my grades/study efficiency and when I did not do well, I punished myself sometimes even unconsciously.

Don’t fall for this trap. Children learn the best because they let themselves make mistakes and they learn from them. And being too judgemental about your learning process or progress is only going to feed negative emotions.

Now let’s talk about the best strategies to study:

Deliberate Practice

Interleaving

Spaced Repetition

Practice Testing

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Deliberate Practice

Deliberate Practice is basically not only practicing inside the comfort zone. You need to learn new concepts, even though they may feel difficult to grasp at first. It’s important to get out of your comfort zone, as it’ll make your brain more susceptible to learning in general.

When we’re learning only comfortable and familiar things, our brain turns on the automatic pilot and you do not really reinforce any information inside it.

That’s where interleaving works wonders.