HOW TO BUILD GOOD STUDY HABITS
Hey guys, today's video is about building good study habits. I think this is a really important topic because lots of smart people do themselves a disservice by not building up good habits. I always hear people say that another person is lucky because they were born smart, but I don't believe that's true. In university, the differences in grades simply come down to who has the best study habits.
The steps I'm going to outline in this video will actually help with changing any sort of habit, but I'm going to talk about everything in the context of school. Let's start by talking a bit about habits in general. Our habits essentially make us who we are, so we have to choose them wisely. What we do every day will ultimately define whom we become. That's why it shouldn't come as a surprise that someone who studies and invests themselves in science every day will become a good scientist. Likewise, a good writer will write every day.
The thing is, habits take time and effort to change. Studies show that we actually have a limited amount of willpower when we make too many choices in a day. We actually exhaust our willpower, and this is known as ego depletion. For example, consider someone who has been resisting the temptation to eat junk food all day. As a result, they are diminishing their willpower. According to the theory of ego depletion, if this person was to tackle a difficult problem, they'll likely give up faster than someone who was not resisting that same temptation all day. This idea really highlights the importance of habits.
Habits are automatic behaviors that we don't really need to think about, and because of that, we exhaust less willpower in the day. Now I'll outline some simple steps for building good habits. The first step is planning. We need to carve out time in our schedules and really pinpoint a concrete place for the habit. According to a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, habits are best implemented alongside cues. For example, after dinner, I'll read for 30 minutes, or after breakfast, I'll go for a 30-minute walk. The basic structure is: If X happens, I will do Y.
A common example that most of us already follow is: when I wake up, I'll brush my teeth. The study found that the level of automaticity, which is how automatic an action feels, rose asymptotically as participants continually performed the action. There are two main implications of this. This means that the first few days to months of building a habit are the most important. During that time, you really don't want to break the chain because even one day makes a huge impact on how automatic a certain action or behavior feels.
Secondly, it also means that the more you perform an action, the less willpower will be required to perform it again. This means that the more you do an action, the easier it is to keep doing it and the harder it is to break it. This can be a good thing if the habits you create are good for us and a bad thing if the habits we create are bad for us.
It was also shown that the amount of time to form a habit varied for each individual, although the median time to form a habit was 66 days. Individual times fell between 18 days and 254 days. This is because complex habits take longer to form than simple habits. For most participants, missing a day of performing the habit after the first few months did not negatively contribute to forming the habit. However, other studies suggested that taking breaks as long as a week, maybe something like winter break or spring break, do negatively contribute to the formation of a habit.
I've included the study in the description for those who are interested in reading it. The next step is monitoring. In order to determine if a habit is changing for the better or for the worse, you need to have objective measurements that help us gauge our progress. We have to quantify the habit. For example, if we want to lose weight, we should be tracking the amount of calories we eat and the amount of exercise we perform. Studies have shown that there's a significant correlation between self-monitoring weight loss and...