How to Force Your Brain to Study (when you don't feel like it)

there is a method of learning that I've been using for years to force my brain to study even when I don't feel like it especially on days where I am feeling tired and burnt out it's called the ladder method I use this method to study learning science while working as a doctor full-time while running a business I also use this for my full-time Masters again while I was working full-time and I managed to graduate at the top of my cohort it's probably one of the most used useful techniques that I use on a daily basis

anyone can use including you and I show you how it works on something like this beefy textbook but first we have to understand why we don't feel like learning in the first place and once you understand that the ladder method will make a lot of sense now there's a reason that we don't feel overwhelmed at the thought of tying our shoelaces or walking 20 steps but we might get overwhelmed at the thought of climing an entire Mountain even though walking a few steps and tying your shoes are the first steps of climbing a mountain what's

happening is that our brain is making a judgment on how hard something is going to be and how much effort and energy it's going to require our brain uses a lot of energy it's the most energy consuming organ in our body consuming 20% of our resting energy so it is incredibly efficient at avoiding unnecessary energy intake now when it comes to study in one of the most energy consuming things that your brain has to do and therefore doesn't want to do is to organize information it's a crucial part of forming memory and developing understanding so

here's how that works imagine these marbles represent new information each marble is a fact or concept that you need to learn and these cups represent how your brain is trying to organize it whenever you learn something new your brain has to look at it understand it analyze it and make a decision about which cup it belongs in it looks at how similar it is to what is already inside these cups and it groups this information based on similarities and all of this thinking takes energy and we feel that as mental effort our brain is working

and once it figures out where it belongs and then it organizes it then the mental effort goes down cuz it's stored away and this process repeats with the next piece of information it looks at makes a decision and then decides where we want to store it and then we repeat this process until our learning is complete so then what part of this makes our brain feel overwhelmed so that we don't feel like studying well imagine if I didn't have any cups at all now instead of picking up a piece of information looking at it and

asking ourselves which Cup Does It Go in we have to ask ourselves how many cups do I need which cup should I get what are the alternative options what else do I need to put into this hypothetical cup and then what am I meant to do if uh a few more pieces of information later I realize that that was wrong after all I don't know what other options there are because I've only got this one piece of information to work with and trying to figure out all of that takes much more effort and energy which

creates the I don't want to study feeling so there are three main ways that your brain uses lots of energy while learning first is to just understand what it is consuming reading listening to the second is to compare it with what you already know and then the third is to decide where it's going to put that information where does it belong based on how similar it is or how related it is to the things that you just compared it to and trying to do all three of these things at once while you're learning creates overwhelm

and is going to be very daunting so what do we do instead so let's say that I want to study this chapter in this textbook immediately I look through this and I feel like man there's a lot to cover I feel like this going going to require a lot of work I'm getting overwhelmed and now I don't want to study this is where the ladder method comes in based on the ladder method we are going to be breaking up this topic this chapter based on different rungs of effort and each rung on the ladder is

low effort so let me show you this here's what I'm doing during this I'm going through the textbook and I'm looking for the things that are low effort I'm saying what are the things that feel easy for me to understand that I can easy compare with the things that I already know and that I can easily think about and how the topic might be organized I'm also using some nonlinear note taking to track my thoughts which I talk about in some other videos I'm also highlighting the parts that I actually focused on just for you

to be able to see at the end of this I wouldn't normally highlight anything when I'm doing this just a nonlinear notes is fine you'll be able to see that but I'm just trying to show you what I am focusing on and what I am either skim reading or just compl completely skipping because I think it would take too much effort to try to understand or compare or to organize by the way don't worry this is an old ass textbook uh with highlighting all over the place already uh I'm not ruining a new book okay

so as you can see I have skipped basically you know like most things if you look at the parts that are highlighted most of it has been skipped you know it's pretty bare however I have managed to with just the parts that I focused on build a pretty decent scaffold for me to work off of and so this topic has become a little bit easier for me now than it would have been 10 15 minutes ago so if I'm really tired I can call that a day I can end on that rung or the ladder

and I can pick up the second rung another day or if I want to I can just do the second rung now and on the second rung I'm going to do exactly the same thing I'm going to look for the things that feel easier and feel lower effort I'm going to build on my scaffold and build up on my knowledge but the difference is that it's going to take a little bit longer each successive rung on the ladder takes a little bit longer because now more things make sense to us than they did before and

we're probably ready to go into a little bit more detail having said that it is still low effort because now I've established some of those major cups I need to fill so let's now do the second rung [Music] [Music] all righty and that was about 35 minutes that I spent on that so you can see the second rung took a little longer I was able to get through more detail what was surprising in a way is that the second rung when I went through it there wasn't a lot more stuff that I felt like I

was going through but it was more like I was just going through the same ideas but deeper and really figuring it out and you can see that a lot of the time was spent on just organizing the information so you can see of the ways that our brain can use energy before I was using a lot of that energy on just trying to understand things and put things together in a very general rough way again just figuring out maybe how many cups I need roughly and in the second rung I'm now refining that I'm spending

more of their energy not on just understanding but now really on just making sure those decisions and those compar are correct so same amount of effort just used in a different way depending on the rung now the third time I go through it should be enough to cover off this topic I'd be going through a little bit more of those details either adding them to my map or adding them to flash cards depending on the type of information most topics I find you generally can get through all of it in just three rungs of the

ladder and so here's the secret as to why this technique works so well it's because each rung takes the same effort as the last rung and I'm splitting all the work that I need to do for this topic into each rung it makes every study session easy cuz we're just not letting ourselves spend time on things that are hard but also it gets easier the more you do it even though with each rung we're covering more content and more detail it's easier to make sense of it because our cups and our structure and our foundations

are so strong the more you learn the easier it gets you can also the same approach for projects or assignments as well where you start with the easy high level planning first and you progressively get more and more detailed with each rung of the ladder now this is just one type of way that you can use the ladder method and there are so many other applications of this principle that I teach in my full guided program but for someone who has never tried studying like this it is a complete Game Changer by the way if

you are interested in my program you can check out the link in the description there's this technique and dozens of other techniques that you can learn once you start using this ladder method a couple of times your brain will realize hey studying isn't that bad and it will make you less likely to put things off and less likely to procrastinate and although this technique is amazing there is a lot more to learning than just the latter method so make sure to check out this video next which YouTube thinks you will like and as we all

know the YouTube algorithm knows us better than we know ourselves anyway thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one