11: Q&A: How to Study (When No One Taught You)

[music] Hello you sentient balls of Stardust. Welcome to Struggle Care, the podcast where I will never tell you to journal or meditate. If that works for you that's great but that's never going to be my prescription personally on this podcast. I'm here today with Dr. Leslie Cook and we have got some listener questions. Hi Leslie thank you for being here. Thanks for having me again. I'm really excited for these. Okay so the first question I'm just going to dive right in. I had a review on the podcast where it was like I love how Casey Davis doesn't waste any time with small talk. So one of my favorite parts too we just but we want to get to the fun stuff. Yeah I'm kind of like that too like even on podcasts where I really like the people and they're like so how was your week? I'm like no get right to the content. So we're going to get right to the content. Okay this one says do you have any tips for someone with no energy because of chronic illness and I'm going to assume they maybe mean in the context of like self-care around the house. So do you have any tips? So many and this is a funny not as funny but it's an interesting question because there are so many ways that I deal with my own chronic illness and my energy fluctuation that I I'm going to kind of shoot from the hip and and give you some things that I don't know if people would be necessarily expecting. The biggest one is lower your standards and focus on the things that help you survive. So eating, drinking, going to the bathroom and sleep our energy needs to be allocated to those first and then connection. So connection to the people and places and activities that help you but generally just lowering your standards for what is acceptable in your environment. Yeah and all those are good and I'll add also like a couple of little hacks that I don't have a chronic illness but I definitely have times where you know I'm sick or my kids are sick or you know I'm having back pain or something and I think like thinking outside the box about the kinds of like tools you use so things like getting a shower chair and even if you're not thinking to yourself like oh but I'm not tired right now I don't need it right now it's like no but you might need energy later that you will have spent standing up in the shower so things like a shower chair one of those like long handed grabbers I recently bought a standing dust pan and I can't believe that like for all of these years the reason why I hate sweeping things up is because I hate bending over to put them in the dust pan so I bought a standing dust pan I had somebody write in one time and say that they have an office like a doctor's stool like a wheelie stool and they just like wheel around their house to get things done I love that but I do think like bringing in some of those types of accommodations right so you have like the mindset change that you talked about and then maybe some physical accommodations and being willing to sort of conserve energy early on even if you don't feel tired yet because you may need that later that's a good one oh just gonna add I think we're also I've so much more but we'll just do this a little bit more I think we're also pressured to allocate energy to things that we have just internalized are like the right things to allocate energy too so for me my chronic illness flare so I could feel good for a month and then be down and dinner time is an incredibly important time for me it's always been grounding for me I was lucky enough to have parents that mostly ate at the dinner table but what is more important in that time for my energy that I've cooked the food or that I'm spending the 10 minutes I get with the teenager and the preteen so if I'm feeling bad it may be a hey go grab whatever you want we're having ice cream sandwiches and on crustables tonight that sounds amazing and then let's gather on the couch where I have not moved and we'll have our same 20 minutes of face time and I'll feel like I've connected to my kids again it's using far less energy but I'm getting the same thing that actually fills me up if I had cooked I'd be exhausted yeah the uncrestables and ice cream sandwiches I love that it reminds me of one time when someone asked like you know I know that I need to be resting and giving myself a break but like I physically can't because I think they were a single parent and they're like you know I work jobs on these many hours and then I have to take care of my kids and like I don't have the luxury of like taking an afternoon off to just do nothing and my sort of suggestion to her was think about one evening that you can just you know tell your kids they can have whatever right your order pizza and you eat on paper plates they're just like so it's not a conventional sort of night off but if you don't have to cook and you don't have to do dishes right and then tell them that it's moving night we're all gonna make palettes on the floor and watch a movie and fall asleep in the living room and now you don't have to deal with a stress of bedtime it's like you there's little ways that you can kind of like tweak those things to kind of let yourself off the hook I love that okay next question speaking of dinner cooking dinner after work paralyzes me and I live alone how do you cope with dinner it's my mountain I can't seem to climb I was so excited to get this question because I met with a dietician recently like recently as in like this year and one of the things she said to me that kind of blew my mind as she was like asking me what my eating patterns were was she was like okay so it sounds like you're just not somebody that like desires or like it makes sense for you to make dinner like your big meal like you know you don't have to do that right like some people would rather make breakfast their big meal that they get up and cook and do and then like you know dinner is like your grab and go stuff and I was like what because I'm so indoctrinated to think that like breakfast is your grab and go bowl cereal a bagel and then like dinner has to be this big thing that you cooked right so I'm thinking for this person like can you switch it like maybe you get up early and you make omelets with toast and you fry up some bacon and you make your very smoothie like that's where you're getting that sort of like nutrient dense you know different types of foods or maybe that's lunch for you whatever but like it's okay if dinner is a bowl of cereal yes sometimes bowl of cereal dinner is wonderful and nourishing and also gives you a chance to feed the inner kid that would have loved to have profit flakes for dinner I think something that I do a lot with my clients who come in and have questions like this in my office is they want to jump to like how do I fix this dinner is a mountain how do I climb the mountain and I might say like well you can't climb the mountain from the bottom there's base camps right you have to hit the camps and hang out for a little bit before we get to the top and the first base camp is why is it a mountain in the first place what is it about dinner that may not be the same for everyone for some people it's because I'm exhausted for some people it's the planning so figure out what it is about dinner and then that's where your attention can go so if it's exhausting for you if you're tired then yeah flip it or do you know you can call anything a sharkootary tray I'm just saying that we have something we call "try new foods night" in my house because I have a lot of picky eaters and that's where everyone goes to the fridge in the pantry and grabs random foods that are seemingly unrelated and puts them on a tray and that is now a sharkootary tray and we eat from there and that's a helpful thing but I think you need to know what your mountain is before you jump into trying to solve it yeah that's good advice so I wanted to kind of I wanted to do those questions to be quick because I really wanted to suspend some time on this question it says how to study literally no idea how to do it nobody ever bothered to dig deeper than my quote behavior issues and let me tell you before we even get into solutions can I just like commiserate with this commenter because this is the story of my life I was the kid that would listen in class and then I would do the classwork and take the tests and I would get hundreds but I never did homework and I never studied for tests but I could just by listening to the lectures like understand enough to then ace the tests and that was fine up until high school because you know your fifth grade teacher is like we're going to go over chapters one through three in class and then they'll be a test on chapters one through three I was like great I'll have to do is listen and then I got into high school and I did also have like a drug addiction high school so I'm sure that contributed or actually who knows right chicken and egg but then they started doing this thing where they were like okay we're going to go over chapters one through three in class then you're going to go home and read chapters four through six and then the test will be over all of those chapters and I started flunking tests because I did not know how to study I didn't even really know how to do homework and I like almost failed out of high school I had to teach myself how to study in college yeah this is going to be an interesting conversation because I had the entirely opposite experience I was a very slow learner I did not learn by listening if I tried to learn by listening I would end up falling out of my chair because I was trying to do that cool thing where you can bounce it on the back times and I had an education major as a mother and I had a lot of other adverse parts in my life but my two parents were not that so they did teach me like really out of textbooks of educational psychology how to study and that saved me because I almost flunked out of college because my brain just doesn't retain information easily it has to do these other things and so I've got some interesting things to share about some ways to study but this is a really good illustration right here of how you can have any pathway to learning and achievement that you have we have completely radically different styles of gaining information and we both ended up here in this moment. Yeah, if I can sit in an environment, a live environment, and listen to an engaging teacher, you only have to teach me something once, and I'll remember it forever. And then I'll apply it in 19 different ways, particularly if I can interact, if I can ask questions. I'm someone that knows that I need to talk about the theory, and then I need you to give me several examples, and then I need to ask questions and get those questions answered, and then I'll know it forever. But I was not someone that had any idea how to teach myself things out of a book. And we've got some good science on this too, that all learners benefit from hitting on all of the ways of learning when they're learning a particular topic. So if I had to give a specific tip to start with, it would be, you need to listen to it, look at it, move your body, and feel it back and forth. One of the things that I did with my own father, and then with my children is I would rehearse information that was particularly hard by throwing a ball back and forth. So I would just do the question and the answer, the question and the answer. The ball has nothing to do with the learning. It's just moving your body in concert with the information. The learning style's myth is a true myth. It's been debunked for a long time, but people do have learning preferences. Like you may prefer it this way, but you still benefit from hearing it in all the ways. Yeah, I remember being in grad school and I was taking a church history class, because in seminary, and there was this guy in class with me. And we had similar personalities in that we were like very outgoing. And the way that we would, we ended up studying for classes together because what we would do is we would sit down and we would have our notes that we needed to memorize. And we would tell it to each other, but we would do it in this over exaggerated, bizarre banter. And people used to stare at us in the coffee shop because we'd be like, "Okay, Caesar." And he'd be like, "Yes, Caesar, go hit me." And I'd be like, "He was a guy. He was a guy. Yes." He lived in in Adi's like, "Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on." And I'd like to say it. And so, and we would like tell the story back and forth. And that was how we would like solidify those narratives. And so for history, for understanding concepts like that, I would get with someone who was like that and we would talk it out back and forth. And it was funny, and it was fun, and it was energizing. And like, that is actually how we learned by teaching it to each other. And then I learned in college, and undergrad to be a flashcards girl. And I have a good flashcard set. And I really do think that if you are someone who is able to handwrite, there is something about handwriting that has a lot of benefits over typing for some things. And so I would make flashcards, just like question and answer, question and answer. And I would make two piles. And so I would just go through them quickly. And any of them that I got right, I would put on one pile to the right. And any of them I got wrong, I'd put on one pile to the left. And then when I was done, I would go through just the pile on the left again. And then like every time I was able to get a couple more, a couple more. And I would just continue to go through it until there was nothing in that pile. And then I go through the whole pile again. So like that was a little pattern that I would do with flashcards. And that would be the exact sequence that I would have suggested. And there's a really strong support in the educational literature for that pattern. You can also make a memory game. And I'm not just talking about children. We're talking about adults. Like if you're studying for your learner's permit, do it this way. You can have the question or the word and the definition and play memory with yourself. But I don't know if people know what that game is still, but you put the cards in an array and you just flip two cards and try to match them. You can play go fish with another person. So do you have chemical something? I don't know, I think that chemistry, I'm trying to make that up on the fly. But you see all these things are really designed to engage something other than the material. Some other sense, some other movement. One of the best examples of this or that one TikTok where the guy's like explaining the wizard of Oz. And he's like, wait, wait, her sister was a witch. Like he was dumping all this information that he had learned. But in a way that was so dynamic, he's not likely to forget it. Do you have any thoughts on? So because I feel like both of those examples that that we've given or all of those examples work really well when you know what information you should be committing to memory. I find that what some people struggle with is not. And it's really nice when you have a teacher that tells you what are the concepts that that are going to be on, right? But sometimes you have a teacher that doesn't do that, where like you're expected to read a chapter and pick out what are the sort of salient important points. And I found that for whatever reason, I can really do that intuitively. Like if you gave me a chapter in a highlighter, I could intuitively pick out the points that are important, the points that are likely to be on a test. But I know that's not true of everyone because like I've seen, I remember looking over at people who are highlighting like entire pages and thinking like that's not how you're supposed to use a highlighter. So I've always struggled with how do I help someone understand what they're supposed to be picking out of importance when it seems to be kind of intuitive for me. Yeah, I would agree. And I think that that is a little easier for me as well. One of the suggestions I give to like high school students that I work with is look for nouns and key terms. Don't highlight their definitions necessarily. Highlight the term itself because that's going to direct your eye. If you highlight the term and then all of its definition, then it's going to be a blob on your page. And when you study, you're just going to reread. The other thing that I really recommend people do is switch up your highlighter. So if you can have three different highlighters or three different pens to underline and you do find a paragraph that you need to underline, that's fine. But then the next thing you do needs to be something else. You can also just Google important things to know about cellular biology or photosynthesis or humanistic psychology. And Google will help you boil that information down. Yeah, and as tedious as it is, I feel like writing the information is can be really key. So like I can highlight it in my book, but then just reading it in the book over and over doesn't do as much for me as then say let's say I've highlighted all my terms, then getting like a spiral notebook and writing out like in bullet points. What the terms are and what their definitions are or what key dates are. There's something about that sort of like brain hand connection that you process more information that way. If you have teachers or professors that allow you to audio tape the lectures so that you can listen back to them, the way that I studied for my boards for my LPC for my therapist license was that I actually purchased this guy's like study pack and it was old school. It was like CDs. So it was like five CDs of him talking for like three hours a piece. And I was driving to see my sister on like a 13 hour drive and I just listened to it the entire way. And so some people that really works for them listening to it back. And some professors or teachers are kind of like won't like that. And I find that if you are someone who can get accommodations, that is absolutely an appropriate accommodation to ask for the ability to tape record the lessons or videotape the lessons so that you can listen back to them later. And I think that also brings up this idea that some of the things we're talking about are things for you to do, like to do more of do this new strategy, try this new thing. But sometimes it's also doing less. So if you are dyslexic, then it can be very challenging to be listening and referencing with your eyes and writing. So maybe this solution is not to do a new strategy. It's to have an accommodation. So have that audio recorded, have them provide you with copies of notes. Anyone with a learning disorder can typically request even in workplaces can request the transcript of the minutes so that you don't have to write. If that's something that you're physically not able to do. And that's huge. Like I don't think people know that getting notes from the professor is an accommodation that you can ask for so that you're not taking your own notes because if you don't have a brain that is able to listen and take things in and write and do all of those things like you need more processing time or you've got something else going on, you can absolutely request through whatever, you know, accommodation office services you have that the professor provide you with notes. And that's a really good way of kind of knowing what the key points are as well. I also find that for the most part, if you approach a teacher or a professor and you are just vulnerable with them and say no one has ever taught me to study and I'm having difficulty knowing when I read the chapters, what are the terms or concepts that I should be focusing on? Can you help me understand what like there really are few that'll just be like figure it out, you know what I mean? So I want to encourage people, you know, to ask also if they are a teacher that isn't giving you a lot of, you know, reviews or they're not really tipping their hand on like what's going to, one of those, you know, what's going to be on the test? Everything in the chapters, fair game. Like I think if you approach them and say, no one ever taught me on a study and I really want to do well, can I know that you don't typically point out where to focus, but, you know, short of committing all of these chapters to memory, I'm really going to need some more help. Yeah, and I think there's a lot of, you know, even with me in the field that I'm in with a background in education, I didn't realize how much there is available for especially college-age students. My oldest daughter is dyslexic and brilliant and she doesn't mind me talking about her because of ass. And she found out that for her calculus class there was like free tutoring up to 10 hours a week of free tutoring. That's a shame that we wouldn't have known about it and that's exactly what they did. So she brought in her challenges and they said, okay, we're going to teach you how to learn this specific type of information and that changed everything. And so ask, can you see it? Esther, these are my notes from a conference with Esther Perral. So this is just an example of like your notes don't have to be fancy, right? They can be like, I'm drawing squiggles and making ridiculous like boxes and there are some waves. They're incomplete. There's a world. Why is there a world? I have no, oh, because I was talking about worlds, right? So that gave me a visual. You don't have to write down every single word of a definition because you can always go to Google and get that stuff later. You want to create a sensory experience that will help and code that information. Ooh, I like that. I also am someone who I went to a the fun raising like boot camp one time. It was seven days and they're like, we're going to teach you how to raise money and we're going to teach you the psychology of why people give money and how you can approach people and how to keep track of your contacts and all this kind of stuff. And they said, you know, but this is like boot camp like you will be sitting in this room from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. And I appreciate that because it's like, okay, we could have sent you somewhere for four weeks to do this, but we're going to get it done on a week. And we walked in and all of the tables were covered in fidget toys. And they said, listen, like we know we're asking a lot of you. And they gave this explanation to this day. I have no idea if it has any truth to it at all, but it made sense. And they said that no one can pay a hundred percent attention to something. They said, from an evolutionary standpoint, we were built to be able to give the majority of your attention to something, but we were made so that there's always a percentage of your attention that is wandering. And the reason for that is because if you get so engrossed in the bird that you're eating that you don't notice the bear coming up behind you, you're dead. And if you think about it, think about the times you've been like so engrossed in something you didn't hear someone come in the room or you didn't realize somebody had even said anything. And then someone says something and you go, it like startles you. And so they were like, those are the times when you've put a hundred percent attention into something. And from an evolutionary standpoint, that's actually not helpful in surviving. And so you have this visual of this little like beacon, like going like around your head going, like, like, scanning the environment to pick up on dangers and threats and things like that. And they said the problem is is that you come into a classroom environment. And there are not, well, there's not going to be anything in here that's going to harm you. But you still have that wandering attention. And so you'll be trying to listen, but the more tired you got, the hungry you get, the more you're wandering attention, that like three percent wandering attention or 10 percent wandering attention. If it picks up on anything in the environment, all of a sudden you're distracted. And so they said, we want all of you, I mean, there was no talk about ADHD or neurotypes or any of this. They just said the reason that we have so many fidget toys out on here is because a fidget toy gives your wandering attention something to engage. And if you're wandering, if that small percentage of wandering attention is engaged with this little slinky or this little sand putty or this little whatever, it allows you to maintain the majority attention on the topic that's being talked about and you won't get distracted and you can focus. And again, I have zero idea if there's any truth to that. That was just the story they told us, but it made sense to me and hot dog. They were right. That was when I realized and I was in my like mid 20s and I was already done with college. I was like, I don't know if anybody told me this before college, but like if I have something in my hands to play with, to look at, to get like sensory feedback from, I could listen to things for hours. Yeah. And that's why I think why we classify hyperfixation as a part of ADHD because it is a misallocation of our attention, right? We can use that sometimes to do some really fun things like needle pointer, whatever, but it's not really advantageous to focus on only one thing. I also think what you're bringing up also brings up something else that many people who say, I'm not really good at learning. I don't really know how to learn. It's probably because, well, one of the reasons might be that they're sitting down with their book and they're like, okay, I'm going to do the good learning, which is reading this page 500 times. And everyone else, I'm sure does this really well because that's what I've learned, right? Is that you just buckle down and focus yourself. And so when they don't internalize the information, they assume that's because they did something wrong. So that's what the movement is about is giving your brain enough stimulation to focus your attention on obtaining this information, but also satisfy that little bouncy part of you that also needs to be stimulated. Yeah, there's a lot of science. I have an Amazon storefront that has a whole like part, I don't know how to describe it, like the storefront has a whole category of ADHD, like things. And a lot of them are not just that, I think when you say fidget toy, a lot of people pictured the things with their hands, but there's a lot more than that. So there's a lot of ones for your feet, either to roll on your feet or there's kinds that like are like foot hammocks for your feet to kind of bounce. There are seat cushions so that your whole body can kind of wobble back and forth. And you know, it's just you can't relax in it. So you're engaging your core. And so even that is sort of giving you something to do. I have found that if I want to kind of get information into my head walking around is helpful. So I think when we say fidget toys, some people might just be picturing, you know, something in their hands, but it's so much more than that. And I really think that even when I was learning stuff from my boards, like I never could have just sat down and listened to those CDs. I have the fact that I was driving and there was something else to focus on. That's what I found. Like I am someone who I'm not a huge podcast listener because I actually find it very difficult to just sit down and listen to a podcast. I can't do it. I have to have something else to do. I have to be cleaning something, doing laundry, putting things away, organizing something. Like there's just certain types of information that I can't focus on unless I have something else to do. And I'll never forget being in college and seeing a girl like knit during lectures. She just be sitting there knitting. I've seen people doodle during lectures. And I think that's the last thing I want to say before we land the plan, which is that sometimes I think that professors and teachers maybe who are old school are still believing that if you're not looking at them, you're not paying attention. And that's not true for everyone. Some people actually can't pay attention if they're being forced to look at you. And I have found that I'm like that. So I have found that sometimes in lectures, instead of just focusing on writing notes, if I will draw and color in a coloring book, I can actually focus on what's being said and take it in. And I wish I would have learned that in college, but I learned it as an adult. And so I've started having to tell people, like when I, the few sort of like continuing education things I've done that are live and there's like a small number of us, I will say in the beginning of the class to the teacher, I am someone who is a hard time focusing when I am sitting down and making eye contact. So if you see me looking down drawing or even getting up and walking around, that is not because I'm not paying attention. It's because I am trying to pay attention. And just explaining that to people at the beginning is really, really helpful I found in being able to kind of do what I know I need to do to stay paying attention. Because half of studying is just paying enough attention. Yeah, our brains are main to learn. So aside from things like learning disorders where there's really something concrete getting in the way, I think you're bringing it home to the message that I always like to give, which is when you're trying to figure out why you can't do something or it's hard to do something, imagine the scenarios where you are able to do it. What do you learn well? When do you obtain information smoothly? Do you know everything about this topic area? Why? What were you doing that allowed you to do that and then apply that information? It's also just affirming to realize that all of us learn all the time. We just need to apply it. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. This was great. And if you're listening and you are someone who thinks that they are not a good learner, I hope that you know that that's not true. And whoever told you that you were stupid or that you couldn't learn, they were wrong. And there's a lot of people that have had that experience. And it never should have happened to you because we're all learners. And if you were not able to learn in school, it's just because there wasn't somebody who knew what they were doing to help you figure out how you learned best. So thank you all for listening and thank you, Leslie. Thanks for having me. [BLANK_AUDIO]