How To Study Every Day And Why You Should Do It Too

Study Every Day

Why would I need to study every day when I already get good enough results even when I don’t study every day?

Imagine that you have a test the next day. You flip through the material, read some notes you made and decide to call it a day. The next day, you find the test easy and quickly finish it without much worry.

When the test results come out, you are pleased to see you got an A (as expected of you). Now you can stop imagining and come back to reality where you have a test tomorrow and need to spend 15 hours studying, while only taking breaks to eat something so you don’t starve to death.

While I did tell you to imagine the scenario above, such a thing is possible in real life too. If you learn how to study every day and be disciplined enough to actually study every day, you can achieve the same results.

To convince you that studying every single day is good for you, here is a list of benefits you get when you study every day:

• You build a habit of constant learning
• It will be easier to start when you don’t feel like it
• You will be better prepared for tests and exams
• If you have to study something for a longer period of time, you will have an easier time starting
• Your looks will improve by 10%

Okay, I made the last up (but you never know, it might be true), but you get the point, studying every day is good for you.

If you are still not convened, let me remind you that artificial intelligence is growing rapidly and the knowledge you have now may become useless in the future (hopefully that doesn’t happen, but if the previous statement doesn’t motivate you, I can only hope that this one scares you enough to start studying).

How to get started

The first thing you have to do is to decide how long you are going to study. Remember, you are aiming to study every day so something like 5 hours isn’t reasonable when you are just starting.

If you are just starting and the only way you previously studied was by cramming everything one day before the test, I recommend that you start with 15 minutes a day.

Isn’t that too short?

For now, it’s not. If you are not pressed for time and have no important tests/exams coming up, then 15 minutes is perfect. For starters, our goal is to build a habit. The most important part of building a habit is how many times you repeat an action, not for how long.

If the time you have to study is shorter, you are more likely to do it. However, 15 minutes is just the minimum amount of time you have to study. If you want to increase the time, go ahead.

Just remember what I told you before.

In the beginning, the most important thing is to build a habit of studying every day, and the way to do that is to repeat the habit as many times as possible.

Pick what to study

While it might seem trivial, picking what to study is one of the most important parts of this process when you are just starting. The reason is that you can’t study important material for your test every single day and expect to not get burned out.

Eventually, you will get fed up and decide to break your everyday streak. So to make sure that doesn’t happen you need to pick something else to study when you don’t feel like studying the material for the upcoming test.

You can pick anything you want. Do you want to learn something about astrology? Go for it. Maybe you wanted to learn how to do a backflip for a long time, so why not now? It can even be something others consider silly, like learning how to play your favorite game better.

And this is why it’s important to pick what you want to learn.

If you just think about how today is not the day you want to learn, and you don’t know what to learn, you could go and watch YouTube videos for 2 hours and say that you learned something.

If you watch videos and are not actively thinking about what you are listening to and have no interest in what you are watching are you really learning or just wasting your time?

Let me make this clear. If you want to watch videos on a topic that interests you (for example astrology), that’s fine. If you want to look at how others play your favorite game to learn how to play it better, that’s also fine.

The only thing you need to do is to make sure you are engaged in the content. If you are watching someone play a game just to watch then you won’t learn anything.

Instead, think about what they are doing something and why they are doing it. Think about what they could be thinking about.

Even though it might not seem like it, this is also considered learning and it will help you in your quest (see what I did there) to build a habit of studying every day.

Just a friendly reminder: You can learn anything you want on the days you don’t feel like learning the material for a test, but remember that your goal is to build a habit of studying every day. If you don’t study the important material, you are avoiding the most important part of the habit.

Switching what you are learning is a strategy you can use sometimes, but only when you are just starting to build a habit. The longer your everyday streak is, the less you need to rely on this strategy.

The effects of sleep on studying

This is the main reason why you should study every day. A good night’s sleep has great effects on studying, such as:

1. It clears the toxins out of our brain
2. It sorts the information that you learned that day
3. It stores that information in your brain

With fewer toxins in your brain, studying and remembering what you learned gets much easier. When you learn something new the information in your brain gets connected with your previous knowledge. This is how your brain sorts the information you learn.

Finally, sleeping helps you to store all of that information in your long-term memory.

This is what you can get with one good night’s sleep.

Now, imagine that you get all of these benefits every day. For that, you need two things:

1. You need to study every day
2. And have good sleeping habits

You only sort and store information during sleep when you learn something new. The more times you do it the stronger the connections you make. That is why it’s better to study 1h hour every single day, rather than 7 hours right before your exam.

You get more time to sort and store all of that information.

But just studying every single day isn’t enough to get these benefits. You need to learn how to get the right amount of sleep. And not just any sleep, but quality sleep. Without that, you won’t get the full benefits of what sleep has to offer.

To learn more about sleep and how to sleep better you can go here.

How to study every single day

If you decide to follow the tips mentioned above, you will have an easy time building your habit. However, following them every single day can be challenging and you may want to quit studying because you get so fed up with it (which, if you can’t tell, isn’t what we are aiming for).

To make sure this doesn’t happen we need to learn two things:

1. How to stay motivated
2. How to decrease the time we procrastinate

It’s much easier to study when you feel motivated to do so. But, even if you feel motivated, if you keep delaying when you are going to start you will end up with less time to study, which means you might just look over the material to finish it as fast as possible (which can hardly even count as studying).

Notice that the goal is to decrease the time we procrastinate, and not to eliminate it. As someone who tried everything to stop procrastinating, I can guarantee you that it will happen at some point. When it does, just try to minimize the time you procrastinate and get back to studying. That’s the best (more like only) thing you can do.

How to stay motivated

The best way to stay motivated and to study every day is to have intrinsic motivation. Having intrinsic motivation means that you are studying for your self-satisfaction and nothing else. It doesn’t matter what others think, or whether anyone else knows you are studying.

You study the material because you find it interesting and enjoy it.

After studying every day for some time, the hope is that you develop this kind of mindset.

What am I going to do if I don’t develop this mindset, am I doomed?

No, you’re not. Developing this mindset might take some time depending on what you study and how much you like it. There is a high chance that you stop studying every day before you reach that point, so relying on intrinsic motivation isn’t the best option in the beginning.

There is another way to motivate yourself – with identified motivation.

Having identified motivation means that you understand why you are studying every day and you understand how it helps you to achieve your goals. This way of motivating yourself is much easier to achieve when you are just starting.

When you pick the material to study, ask yourself what your goal is. Why are you studying that material and what do you want to achieve by learning it?

Write down your goal on a piece of paper and read it every single day if you have to.

You can’t motivate yourself once and expect it to last a lifetime. That is why it’s best that you write the reason you are studying somewhere where you can easily access it and read it when you need it (“read it when you need it”, I might have to give songwriting a try, look at those lines).

To learn more about motivation go here.

How to decrease the time you procrastinate

The next problem we have to deal with is procrastination. You might feel motivated to study, but what if you can’t bring yourself to start studying? The delay starts with a small amount of time, like “I will study in 5 minutes, I just need to finish watching this video”.

But, as time passes, you delay your starting time even more, something like “I can study later, I had a hard day and I just want to look at social media for a bit”. The more you do this, the bigger the chance that there will be something else that will get in the way of studying.

What if you delay the time you start studying, then when you finally start, your friends call you to go out and suddenly you are in a dilemma about what to do? None of this would have happened if you just started on time.

While dealing with procrastination is a complicated process that might take a 100,000-word article, there is one simple way that I found to be “the best”, the two-minute rule (if you want to learn more about how to beat procrastination you can go here).

The two-minute rule

When the time to study comes, rather than thinking about how long you have to study or how hard it’s going to be and how you would rather watch paint dry than start studying, try this one simple trick.

Instead of studying for a long period of time, sit down, and study for 2 minutes. When the 2 minutes are up you are free to go and do what you want.

What can I do with just 2 minutes of studying?

You don’t have to stop studying after 2 minutes. Usually, starting to study is the hardest part, but with this little trick, you can start much easier. After the two minutes are up you will most likely continue to study.

To feel the full effect of this method you will just have to try it for yourself.

This is just a mental trick to get me to study, I won’t fall for it!

If you think like this, how about you try and study for just 2 minutes. It doesn’t matter that you finally got yourself to study or that you feel like the material isn’t as hard as you thought, after 2 minutes you must stop.

How does that feel?

If you have a hard time starting and you finally manage to study, would you stop after 2 minutes? I bet the only way to stop you would be if the meteor hit the Earth and destroyed the whole planet (I know that there are plenty of ways to stop you, but for the sake of the argument, let’s just assume this is the only one).

The benefits

After you constantly study every day for a longer period of time, you will begin to see how easy some things that seem hard now are. For starters, starting to study is much easier and you will be able to do it constantly every single day, even when “you don’t feel like it”.

If you learn how to study properly, with the help of active recall and spaced repetition, you will be able to get even more out of these techniques if you use them every single day (especially spaced repetition).

If you have an important exam coming up, you won’t need to study 25 hours every single day for one week before the exams (let’s assume that you can study for more than 24 hours a day by bending the rules of time).

But, if you want to try harder and put more time in, to make sure you get an excellent grade, then you should.

However, this time, you won’t be learning new material, just solidifying what you already learned and making sure you understand what the material is really about.

And lastly, no matter how fast the technology keeps improving, you will be able to keep up if you study every single day.

Don’t get lazy

After you study every day for some time, you will find that it’s not that hard to study. At some point, you won’t even need to worry about the tests that seemed so hard before. You can just study to get a good grade and not worry about it too much.

But, if that happens your learning ability will stop improving.

Make sure that doesn’t happen. If you feel like it’s getting too easy to get good grades, challenge yourself. Whether it’s to get even better results or to start studying something alongside your main material, it doesn’t matter, just do something.

After you get good at studying, you will have more free time. Don’t get lazy and use that time for something useful.