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 exercise frequency.

I can say from our own personal experience that it doesn't just stop at exercise. Once we know the numbers associated with a habit, we can take small steps to improve them in the directions we want. For students who want to have better study habits, they may want to consider the Pomodoro technique, which I briefly talked about in my six time management tips video. Pomodoros help quantify the amount of studying a student does in a day.

Once you have this information, you can take educated steps to achieving the results you want. For example, let's consider a student who studies for four Pomodoros a day, which are each 30 minutes long. That means this student studies two hours total in a day. If they feel that they aren't studying enough and want to build a habit of studying longer, they can slowly increase their time. They can add one Pomodoro or one 30-minute studying block for the first week or month, bringing their total study time to two and a half hours. This is a small and manageable change.

After the first week or month, they can add another Pomodoro. They can repeat this cycle until they are studying as long as they feel is a good amount of time. In Gretchen Rubin's book "Better Than Before," she dedicates a whole chapter towards monitoring. Based on her findings, she claims that accurate monitoring helps determine whether a habit is worth the time, money, or energy it consumes. I would also add that it helps us make educated, small, and manageable changes to improve our habits.

The next step is convenience. The easier it is to do something, the more likely we are to do it. That's why it's important to make any habit that we want to keep as convenient as possible. In Rubin's book, she finds out her sister Elizabeth uses Jenny Craig to lose weight. When she discussed it with her sister, Elizabeth said that it was convenience that made it easy to stick to the diet. If you're not familiar with Jenny Craig, it's a dieting program in which all the meals are prepackaged for you, and all you have to do is warm up the food.

The reason it's so successful is because it creates a lot of convenience for dieting. The same rule applies to any other habit we want to keep. In order to make going to the gym easier, I pack my workout bag before I go to sleep and leave it by the front door. On my way to school the next morning, I grab the bag, throw it in my back seat, and then hit the gym on the way home from school. During stressful times, like exams, I find it easier to eat healthy when I cook my food in bulk and then store leftovers in the fridge to eat the next day. This way, I don't have to worry about cooking every day and can focus on studying.

Here are some quick convenience ideas: Want to be more social but busy with school? Make a study group or join a club on campus. Want to study more but distracted by technology like Netflix, video games, etc.? Disconnect all the relevant technology and give it to someone to hide from you. Make it more convenient to study and inconvenient to define and set up the technology. Want to read more but can't find the time? Use audiobooks and listen while you're brushing your teeth or driving to school or work.

The last step is smart rewarding. Before reading Rubin's book, I was under the assumption that rewards helped create strong habits. For example, I would say something like, "I've been eating healthy all week, so I deserve this cheat meal." According to Rubin's findings, and I quote, "This type of reward teaches me that I wouldn't do a particular activity for its own sake, but only to earn the reward. Therefore, I learned to associate the activity with an imposition, a deprivation, or a suffering."

The solution to this is to find a reward within the habit itself. It would be better for me to say something like, "I've been working out consistently for a year. I'm going to spend money on creating my own custom home gym." That's a pretty expensive reward, but it gets the idea across. The reward reinforces the habit. Ideally, a home gym would help me work out even more.

Another example would be, "I have been attending class and taking good notes so religiously, I'm going to invest in an iPad or Microsoft Surface so I can continue to do that easier." Again, the reward reinforces the habit. And there you have it, a simple starter's guide to creating good habits.

We start with planning a habit, followed by monitoring it, then making it convenient as possible, and lastly rewarding ourselves with something that reinforces the habit. Here's an example of everything put together: When I get home from school, I will finish six Pomodoros over the period of two weeks. I'll boost this number to eleven Pomodoros and stay there consistently.

To make this habit convenient, I'll clean my desk after every work session and have all necessary materials laid down and ready to go for the following day. If I study consistently for a month, I'll buy a new iPad to streamline my note-taking process, or a new app to make me more productive.

So, I got some good news, guys. I finally got a Facebook page and an Instagram page for this YouTube channel! On the Facebook page, I'm going to post my videos and make them easier to share with your friends. On the Instagram page, I'm actually gonna make one picture summaries of a video when I upload it. That way, even if you don't end up watching my videos for the week, you can take something valuable away from the photo.

So yeah, be sure to follow me on both of those. The links are on the video and in the description. Lastly, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for watching, guys, and I'll see you next time!