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

 I’m joined today by Dr. Lesley Cook as we tackle some listener questions around various topics. I think you'll find some useful tips in this episode!

Show Highlights:

• Tips for someone with no energy due to chronic illness: take care of the basics, conserve your energy, and use whatever hacks work for you

• Tips for someone who struggles to cook dinner every night: switch things up, identify your mountain, and realize that a bowl of cereal for dinner is OK!

• Tips for how to study when no one ever taught you: experience the information in different ways, make a memory game, and share the information back and forth with a study partner

• How to study when you don’t know what’s important to study

• How to use accommodations that are available to you

• How to ask a teacher or professor for study help

• How to take notes and encode the information in meaningful ways

• How fidget toys, drawing, and doodling can help you listen and learn

Resources:

Connect with KC: TikTok and Instagram

Get KC's Book, How to Keep House While Drowning

• Transcript

  KC Davis 0:05

  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.

  Lesley PsyD 0:26

  Thanks for having me. Again. I'm really excited for these.

  KC Davis 0:28

  Okay. So the first question, I'm just gonna dive right in, I had a review on the podcast where it was like, I love how KC Davis doesn't waste any time with small talk.

  Lesley PsyD 0:40

  It's one of my favorite parts, too. We just thought we want to get to the fun stuff.

  KC Davis 0:43

  Yeah, I'm kind of like that, too. Like, even on podcast where I really liked the people. And they're like, So how was your weekend? Like no, get right to the content. So we're gonna 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 gonna assume they may be mean in the context of like, self care around the house. So do you have any tips?

  Lesley PsyD 1:05

  So many? And this is a funny? Not a 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 am going to kind of shoot from the hip 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.

  KC Davis 1:46

  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. And 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 dustpan, 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 dustpan. So I bought a standing desk 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.

  Lesley PsyD 3:01

  I was just gonna add, I think we're also I have 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 to. So for me my chronic illness flare so I could feel good for a month and then be down. And dinnertime 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 than 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 uncrustables 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 FaceTime. And I 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, uncrustables and ice cream sandwiches.

  KC Davis 4:05

  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 you 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 Movie Night. We're all gonna make pallets on the floor and watch a movie and fall asleep in the living room and that now you don't have to deal with the 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 It's 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 dietitian 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, but they get up and cook and do and then like, you know, dinner is like your Grab and Go stuff. And I was like, Why? 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 berry 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 or whatever. But like, it's okay, if dinner is a bowl of cereal.

  Lesley PsyD 6:11

  Yes, sometimes a 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 Frosted 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 charcuterie tray, I'm just saying that we have something we called 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 charcuterie 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.

  KC Davis 7:28

  Yeah, that's good advice. So I wanted to kind of I wanted those questions to be quick, because I really wanted us to spend 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 gonna go over chapters one through three in class. And then there'll be a test on chapters one through three it 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 are actually good, who knows, right chicken and egg. But then they started doing this thing where they were like, Okay, we're gonna go over chapters one through three in class, then you're gonna 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.

  Lesley PsyD 9:01

  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 ended 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 of 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 saves 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.

  KC Davis 10:01

  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 you 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.

  Lesley PsyD 10:33

  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 field 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 the 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 styles 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 and all the ways.

  KC Davis 11:23

  Yeah, I remember being in grad school. And I was taking a church history class, I was in seminary, and there was this guy in class with me. And we had similar personalities, and that we were like, very outgoing. And the way that we ended up studying for classes together, because what we would do is we would sit down, and we would have like, our notes that we needed to like, memorize, and we would tell it to each other. But we would do it in this like over exaggerated, like bizarre banter. And like, people use the stairs in the coffee shop, because we'd be like, okay, Caesar, he'd be like, yes, Caesar go hit me. And I'd be like, he was like, I just got Yes, he lived in. In odd, he's like, monka, monka, monka, monka, multiple. And I'd like say it and so and then we would like tell the story back and forth. And that was how we, 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, but 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, like that was a little pattern that I would do with flashcards.

  Lesley PsyD 13:27

  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 anything about 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 are that one tick tock 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.

  KC Davis 14:23

  Do you have any thoughts on? So because I feel like both of those examples that that we've given? Are 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 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 You can really do that intuitively. Like, if you gave me a chapter and 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?

  Lesley PsyD 15:27

  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 are humanistic psychology. And Google will help you boil that information down.

  KC Davis 16:18

  Yeah, 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 aren't, what their definitions are, or what the 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 therapists 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 apiece. 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 with 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.

  Lesley PsyD 17:44

  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 a transcript of the minutes, so that you don't have to write if that's something that you're physically not able to do.

  KC Davis 18:24

  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're 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 will 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 chapter is fair game. Like I think if you approach them and say, no one ever taught me how to 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,

  Lesley PsyD 19:51

  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 us. 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. And that's exactly what they did. So she brought in her challenges and they said, Okay, we're gonna teach you how to learn this specific type of information. And that changed everything. And so ask, Can Can you see it? Esther? These are my notes from from a conference with Esther Perel. 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, there's some waves, they're incomplete. There's a world why is their 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 encode that information.

  KC Davis 21:00

  Whoo, I like that. I also am someone who I went to a fundraising 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 9am to 7pm every day. And I appreciate that. It's like, okay, we could have sent you somewhere for four weeks to do this. But we're gonna get it done in 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, then they said that no one can pay 100% attention to something. He 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 that you, like, startles you. And so they were like, those are the times when you've put 100% attention into something from an evolutionary standpoint, that's actually not helpful in surviving. And so you have this visual, this little like beacon, like going like around your head going to, like, look at 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, 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 3%, wandering attention and temperament, 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 that mean, there was no talk about ADHD or neuro types 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 wondering 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 a little story. They told us but it made sense to me and hot dog. They were right. That was when I realized I was in my like mid 20s. And I was already done with college. Nobody told me this before college that like, if I have something in my hands to play with to look at to get like sensory feedback from.

  Lesley PsyD 24:11

  I could listen to things for hours. Yeah. And that's why I think why we classify hyper fixation as a part of ADHD because it is an mis allocation of our intention, right? We can use that sometimes to do some really fun things like needlepoint or 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 have 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

  KC Davis 25:17  

  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 the I think when you say fidget toy, a lot of people picture 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 on 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 for my boards, like I never could have just sat down and listened to those CDs I had, but 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 a knit during lectures should just be said that sitting there knitting, I've seen people doodle during lectures. And and I think that's the last thing I want to say before we land the plane, 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 as an adult. And so I've started having to tell people like when I want 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 at the beginning of the class to the teacher, I am someone who has 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 and 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.

  Lesley PsyD 28:15  

  Yeah, our brains are made 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.

  KC Davis 28:49  

  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 learn best. So thank you all for listening. And thank you Leslie. Thanks for having me.