A Five Minute Guide to Effective Learning Habits

Knowing how to learn effectively is the single most valuable skill you can develop in life. Effective learning habits reshape the way you see the world, allowing you to learn and grow at a much faster rate than you otherwise could.

Of course, we’d all love to learn more efficiently, but how can you do it in practice? And why do so many people struggle to develop these habits?

1. Be Realistic About Your Attention Span

There are many common misconceptions about learning, not least of which is that, if you want to learn effectively, then you have to cram in as many hours as possible. Research has shown time and time again that human beings cannot focus effectively for long periods of time.

In an eight hour work day, most people whose jobs require active concentration will admit to only “working” for about four of those hours with many interspersed coffee breaks, toilet trips, and tasks that ride the line between procrastination and outright slacking off. Employers might find this concerning but the truth is that this is just a normal working pattern. 

If you want to concentrate effectively, then sometimes you need to let your brain do its thing – even if that means occasionally losing yourself in a daydream.

2. Train Your Brain

That said, there’s another misconception many people also fall for which can be just as dangerous. Many people think that their attention span is something entirely outside their control but this isn’t true either. In fact, studies show that attention span is highly connected to training and habits.

It’s no secret that social media has had a poor role to play in this regard. While the occasional five minutes on TikTok won’t turn you into a zombie overnight, constant exposure to short-form content does create negative reinforcement, teaching your brain to expect small rewards at a regular interval.

So what’s the takeaway from all this? Should you give up social media and become a monk?

There’s no one solution to mastering your attention span, but just as you are what you eat, you are also what you do. The more you feed your brain on a diet of junk activities the more you’ll come to depend upon it. That’s why we recommend setting real limits around how you use social media and minimising distractions during the hours when you’re meant to be studying.

The rules you set in place are up to you, but if you want to keep your brain in shape, then a little discipline is no bad thing.

3. Revision is Repetition

Memory loves repetition. Mountains of evidence support the theory that your ability to remember something is directly related to how often you’ve heard it repeated and at what intervals.

This is why regular revision is a far more effective study habit than cramming alone. Your brain wants to take things in bite sized chunks, refreshing those chunks once every week or two until they settle down into your long term memory.

By hurling a bunch of information in at once, you’re likely to overload yourself. The practical upshot is that you learn less and it sticks around for a shorter period of time.

4. Be Active, Not Passive

Brains are lazy. On some level, even the most hard working person who has ever lived had a lazy brain.

This isn’t a bad thing. Being lazy is what allows your brain to be so incredible at what it does. In your day to day life, your brain is constantly looking for shortcuts so that it doesn’t have to use up your precious attention span.

Whenever you type on a keyboard, or drive your car, or even just walk down the street, your body’s motions happen on autopilot, freeing your brain up to think about the words you’re typing, the rules of the road, or what you’re about to eat for lunch.

All of this to say that, whenever it can, your internal autopilot will take over. This is great for getting to work every morning but not so good for learning important information.

As such, effective study habits are generally those that force you to concentrate before you can progress. They require interaction from you, kicking your brain into gear so that you can’t progress without actually focusing on the task at hand.

5. Don’t Compare Yourself To Others

It would be unreasonable to expect a five year old to complete the same amount of work as a PHD student in the same amount of time. Why is it any more reasonable to expect yourself to become a master of self-discipline overnight.

Effective learning habits aren’t just a few quick fixes that will turn your life around. They’re things you practise over the course of many years, tweaking and improving until they’re right for you.

If you’re someone who struggles to learn effectively, then that’s not a mistake you’ve made, it’s a problem you need to overcome. You won’t get past that by beating yourself up and feeling bad because you can’t compare to someone who’s doing better than you.

You’ll overcome it by practising every day, learning more about your own psychology, and using every trick in the book to cheat your brain into becoming the best version of you.