Why I'm able to study 70+ hours a week and not burn out (how to stay efficient)

Why I'm able to study 70+ hours a week and not burn out (how to stay efficient)

i never pull all nighters ,I never miss the gym

even if the most important test of my life is tomorrow.

And I always study at the same seat at my desk

every single day.

Why don't I do these things?

Well in this video I'm gonna give you four evidence-based

tips on how to actually prepare best for a heavy day

of studying.

Studying the right

way is important,

but what about what we do before we start studying,

after we start studying?

Just like bodybuilders and big weightlifters can maximize

their gains from the gym, by eating a certain diet

and sleeping a certain amount of time,

we can maximize our gains from a heavy day of studying

by how we do certain things after and before we study.

These aren't gonna be tips

or techniques for how to study.

I'll be making a video on that in the near future.

These are just gonna be tips and techniques

for what to do when you're not studying.

What you can do when you're not studying to maximize

that information sticking in your brain

and actually for your brain to start creating new

connections even while you sleep.

So let's start with sleep.

There was this really cool experiment where

researchers took participants and had them complete

the tower of Hanoi task.

If you've never seen the tower of Hanoi task

it's just this kind of test where you have to move rings

onto different poles.

So what happened to these subjects?

Well, they got to try the tower of Hanoi challenge once

then they were retested.

But they were retested in different kinds of scenarios.

Amazingly, when they were retested on the tower

of Hanoi test a week later,

without any practice in between,

their performance improved by 40%.

However, if you let them try this tower of Hanoi task

the next day right after doing it the day before,

but you mess with their REM sleep,

no such improvement is seen.

So that sounds to me like sleep is probably important

for learning right?

Well, I'll give you one better.

In another experiment,

subjects were taught an algorithm for solving

a kind of complicated

math problem.

But there was actually a better way

and easier way to solve this math problem,

that if you thought about it enough, you could figure out.

This was a secret technique that the researchers

didn't tell the participants about.

During the experiment none of the participants kind of

figured out this secret technique.

They waited 12 hours during the day.

So they tested them in the morning and then test them later

in the night, this was before any sleep would happen

and wanted to see if anyone could figure out this new way

of solving it.

Some did figure out kind of later on,

12 hours later kind of how to solve this.

But what if you tested a set of people again,

you gave them 12 hours in between tests

but instead of 12 hours in the day,

so morning to night,

you gave them night to morning.

So you let them have a full night of sleep

before retrying this complicated math problem

which there is a secret, easier way to solve.

Remember, both of these subjects get 12 hours of time

in between their first test and their second test.

But one group of people got that time during the day

and the other group of people got that time

during the night.

So guess what?

The people that slept on it or slept on the problem,

the rate of the discovery of this easier solution

more than doubled.

Super cool to me.

I don't know, it kind of shows to me how important sleep is.

Not only overnight is the sleep locking in our memories

but judging from this last experiment,

it seems that our brain is also trying to figure out

better ways to connect pieces of information

inside our head.

Our brain is coming up with new solutions and answers

to problems while we're floating away in dreamland.

And even though we don't remember our dreams

and don't remember what happened during the night,

we wake up usually with a better understanding

of what we learned the previous day.

One of the biggest handicaps you can actually put

on yourself before a test,

is not getting a good night's sleep.

Sleep is a huge topic and it's one that's really interesting

to me.

If you wanna learn more about it, I suggest you check

out a book called "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker.

He says kind of many things about this topic

but the one thing that stood out to me,

he said once you start to drop

below seven hours of sleep, you start to see detriments

in health and performance.

The quality of your sleep is also important

so here are just some quick things he suggests.

He suggests increasing bright light exposure during the day

reduce blue light exposure in the evening.

I always have my Mac go to night shift mode and turn

as far to red as possible.

Avoid caffeine in the evening.

Caffeine has a pretty long half-life.

So even though you drink it and you may feel the effects

kind of for only four hours it actually sticks around

your system for another four hours after that

and another four hours after that.

Try and go to bed and wake up at consistent times.

Avoid alcohol especially before bed.

Keep your bedroom as dark as you can

and colder than you think.

It's recommended from a couple sources to keep it around

65 degrees Fahrenheit.

Again, this differs person to person

but you wanna keep it colder than you think.

Personally, also I have found that showering

or taking a bath before bed really helps me go to sleep.

And I've almost classically conditioned myself to get tired

after I take a shower at nighttime

because after I take a shower, I go straight to bed.

So bottom line aim for eight hours of quality sleep.

The number two tip out of four,

for how to best kind of prepare for studying when you're not

actually studying is exercise.

I actually maybe discovered this on my kind of long study

times alone.

I found that if I sit at a desk for a long, long time

I get kind of fidgety.

And if I just do some pushups or do some sit-ups

or just get up and get out of my desk and do

some kind of exercise,

when I sit back down I actually feel better

and can usually focus better.

Exercise seems to play a role

in how well our memory works.

In one study,

two bouts of three minutes of intense treadmill running,

so that's running on the treadmill for three minutes

pretty hard times two, before doing vocabulary tasks

increased peripheral concentrations of

catecholamines indicated in memory

such as dopamine and epinephrin

and accelerated the rate of learning by 20%.

I'm gonna push even a little bit more here.

One meta analysis looked at 21 studies and the effect

of acute and longterm cardiovascular intervention

or exercise,

on human memory.

Acute exercise improves memory in a time dependent fashion

by priming the molecular process involved in the encoding

and consolidation of newly acquired information.

So again, I'm not giving any medical advice.

Again, I don't know anything about medicine yet,

I'm still only a second year medical student.

But these are just the recommendations that I've seen

from these journals.

How do we take advantage of this information,

these kinds of reports that exercising helps memory

work better?

Well, we exercise and we do whatever exercise you like.

This could be playing soccer, going for a run,

lifting weights.

And I think it's better,

it seems like the research most supports

either exercising kind of before you study or mid study,

as opposed to after you're done studying,

is because it seems the evidence is kind of less emphatic

on exercising after studying.

So bottom line, I would say exercise before

or in-between studying.

(soft music)

Tip number three is your environment.

Where are you studying?

How are you gonna be like learning these things?

Take advantage of classical conditioning here.

Every time I sit at a certain spot on my desk

or in a seat at my desk, I know it's study time.

If it's play time or if I wanna do some random things

on the internet, or even if I wanna do YouTube stuff,

I like to just sit on a different side of the table

or I'll sit at a different kind of place in my apartment.

Just because I want to condition myself

'cause I know in this place I'm gonna be working

on med school stuff and studying.

In this place I'm gonna be chilling out

and in this place I'm gonna be doing YouTube stuff.

That's why I never ever do any work in my bed

because my bed is kind of just for sleeping.

So I'm only gonna go in my bed when I wanna sleep

and not when I wanna work.

And if the location that you're at right now isn't working

and you have the option, try a new location.

Maybe this is the library.

Maybe this is a hopefully quiet coffee shop.

Maybe this is a friend who's really nice

and will let you study with them,

who hopefully isn't too distracting.

Find a nice quiet workplace where you can focus

and maintain that same workplace every day you study.

'Cause everyday you study in that same workplace,

everyday you work hard in that same workplace,

you're gonna condition yourself to remember

that in this place, I will work hard and I will study hard.

Next, I would say clean your workplace.

In my high school psychology class,

I think this was about 10 years ago,

I remember I did an experiment with my friend.

And our experiment was okay, we're gonna have people try

and memorize this list of terms,

but we're gonna put them in three different situations.

The first situation is completely quiet,

memorize as many of these terms as you can

and then we'll test you afterwards.

The second scenario is we're gonna play some annoying noise,

so a buzzing noise or distracting beat

kind of in the background while they're memorizing

these terms.

The third situation is we're gonna put distracting imagery

on the screen and play things and show things

to kind of distract the people.

So distracting them visually, distracting them auditorily.

What did we learn from our experiment

in that psychology class?

Well, we actually saw that it seemed that people

were able to remember 25% more information

when there was complete quiet.

When there was no kind of distracting noises

or there was no distracting visual thing.

Now, of course we shouldn't put complete faith

in 16 year-old Zach's high school psychology experiment

but I think we can put some faith

in these peer reviewed journals.

And what does the research say?

Well, it kind of says a similar thing.

Distracting environment or distracting noise

will kind of harm your retention of information.

This doesn't necessarily apply to sounds that drown

out other noises.

So if you're in a city or if you're in your house

where there's a lot of noise on, but you can put on

noise reducing headphones with rain sounds or ambient noise

or something like that, that will help you drown

out the background noise, that may actually help you

as opposed to hurt you retain information.

Finally, I just wanna give a shout out to an amazing book,

"The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" by Marie Kondo.

I hope I said that name right.

This is a quote from the book.

It is not our memories, but the person we have become

of those past experiences we should treasure.

This is the lesson that these keepsakes teach us when

we sort them.

The space in which we live should be for the person

we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.

And maybe this is a bit deep for kind of a studying video

but I think it's a really good point.

Some kind of use your space as an indication

of who you want to become as opposed to what you were

in the past.

So bottom line, what should you do?

Set a consistent place for studying that is clean,

quiet and yours.

My final tip is this tip about your mindset when you study.

One major shift in my mind that I've started to do

before I start studying,

or when I'm doing something that I feel like I have to do,

instead of framing it as I have to study, I have to work,

frame it as I get to do this thing.

I get to study.

I get to learn these amazing things.

I get to work with these amazing teachers and professors.

This change of mindset has improved my motivation

and kind of happiness while I'm studying for long, long

times.

Side note, this can also be applied to other things

you have to do.

But yeah, I'm in medical school.

Isn't that amazing?

I've tried so hard to get here,

it took me so long to get here and I'm finally here.

I finally get to learn about the human body,

I finally get to be in the hospital,

I finally get to do the things I've dreamed

of doing for as long as I can remember.

The other major change in mindset that I've had

is from a book that I read recently called

"How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" by Dale Carnegie.

My favorite thing I learned from this book

is to live in day type compartments.

What does that mean?

Well, only focus on the thing you're gonna be completing

that day.

Yes you have a big test coming up in a week.

Yes you have to study all these things.

But hopefully you've made a plan before

so you know what you're gonna study in that day.

Don't think about where you're gonna study tomorrow

or the next day or the day after that.

Just focus on what you're gonna be studying that day.

What are you doing right now?

Just focus on that.

A quote from the book is,

if you want to avoid worry, do what sir. William Osler did.

Live in day-tight compartments.

Don't stew about the future, just live each day

until bedtime.

And my last mindset tip is to know specifically

what you are going to be studying that day.

Because if you don't set what you're gonna be studying

that day, how are you gonna live in a day-tight compartment?

And the specifics of what you'll be studying that day

should be specific, right?

It shouldn't be today I'm going to study biology.

No, it should be today I'm gonna study chapter two

of biology, chapter three of biology.

I'm gonna do 20 practice questions

and I'm gonna review a hundred flashcards.

Or something like that.

It really just needs to be something that you know

exactly what to do so you can get down and do it.

I have other videos about this,

but I personally make my day for day exam strategy

nine days before my exam.

And I make my week strategy during kind of a regular week

of studying Friday before the next week.

Bottom line change your mindset from you have to do this,

to you get to do this.

Only focus at the task at hand.

Live in day-tight compartments.

And know specifically what you will be studying,

exactly what you will be studying

before you actually get started.

These are things that I've kept to consistently

that I think have made the biggest difference

in my studying outside of actual studying.

But that is it.