The Psychology of your 20s - 385. The best psychology hacks for studying

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Want to study smarter, not longer? Today, we're finally breaking down my psychology-backed guide to becoming the academic weapon you always dreamed of being. I’m sharing the exact study hacks I used to become high school valedictorian, maintain a near-perfect GPA at university, and actually enjoy the process of learning (and the Pomodoro method isn't mentioned once...) We talk about: How to make your brain care about what you’re learning The Note-Taking Manuscript Method Why personal relevance helps memory Using novelty to make concepts more memorable  Finding your peak productivity hours The effort paradox (why meaning follows effort, not motivation) How to hack your brain to focus longer and study better  If you want this academic year to be your best, you're in the right place! Listen now!  Watch on Netflix   Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [e-mail]    The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Gemma Spike and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello, everybody. welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s. Today, guys, I'm going back to uni. I'm going back to the time when I was a full-time student. I'm taking a trip down memory lane to talk about the academic and study tips that I absolutely swore by when I was a student that I would use again. if I was back there, or if I wanted straight A's, if I wanted to be valedictorian,

if I wanted my transcript to be the best it could be by the end of the year. I'm honestly surprised I've never done an episode like this because when I was still getting my degrees, I genuinely loved the art of studying. Also, I know there are so many of you who are getting their diplomas, getting their undergrad degrees, getting their masters. Some of you are even getting your PhDs and you are still trying to find the most time, cost effective and successful study tips to become the academic weapon you always dreamed of being. So this episode feels very necessary. These tips aren't going to be boring. I'm not going to tell you to use flashcards or to read the lecture notes or the Pomodora technique. We know that. Those are tried and

true, we are talking instead the really strange things I would do based on research because when you understand the psychology of how to study well, everything changes. You end up studying less, you have more time for you, you get better grades because you essentially understand how to tune your brain to absorb knowledge efficiently. If you just take notes in class and you highlight them and, you know, you repeat them to yourself, that's level one. I want to take you to level 10 of the study game using the science. So I have, I think, six tips for you today, things that, the exact things I did to be high school valedictorian to get a national merit scholarship to maintain a near perfect GPA when I was at uni. I know these work. I have the evidence

to back it up. So without further ado, let's get into the best. psychology hacks for studying. Stay with us. So when you're studying, whatever the subject is, the ultimate goal is to convert information from your short-term or working memory to your long-term memory. And then I always like to think of another layer of this, which is your application memory, not just being able to recite, but to integrate into everyday experiences. Seems like a simple formula, right? But getting it to that long-term application storage basically requires integrating the information in a significant way. And what I mean by a significant way is that you have to show your brain this information

is important and worth remembering either through repetition, recall, practical application, applying it to your personal circumstances or any number of techniques that you may have used in the past or still do use. Your brain receives hundreds of, of thousands, if not millions of pieces of information every day. So your brain needs a signal for what is important. And that signal is a deliberate behavior like study methods, like repetition, like any of those things that is saying to your brain, hey, this is something we care about. We want to learn this. The thing is, there is a hierarchy here. And the more personal significance, you can apply to new information the better. And the further up the hierarchy, the method will be,

basically. Recall, like, repetition is pretty low. But when you start to apply personal information to what you are learning, you start to move up the latter. In fact, a 2024 study from Rice University titled Why People Remember found that information that has emotional significance and personal significance has a longer, essentially like memory shelf life. And that makes sense. You don't forget, you don't forget your dog's name. You don't forget the girls who bullied you in the fifth grade or your favorite songs. You don't forget the lyrics to those because those memories are often encoded differently. This hack, the hack is encoding the information you're studying in the same way as that personally significant information so that you can recall it easier. Most people, again,

will do the following. They will take notes. They will read those notes. They will highlight those notes. they will repeat the information in the same form as much as possible, and they will hope that they will remember it, and they will probably get a nice 75 on the test. Here's the technique that I would use instead. First, obviously still take notes. But take notes as if you are writing the textbook yourself, with chapters, with headings, with formulas, with visuals,

and keep it all in the same document on your computer. Pretend you are literally the author. Someone is going to, your notes are going to be what informs the next cohort. So you want to make it look good. You want to make it very, not complex, but in depth. And you want to structure it so that it's coherent. When it comes time to study for an exam or a midterm, whatever it is, up the font size of that document to 16, double space the whole document,

print out those notes, staple them together, or buy. them as if they are a book. This is what I always did. I wish that I had like a picture of what this looks like. I just feel like it looks so much better visually so you can understand it. But your notes should almost look like a movie manuscript, like a big bound book. Now we're still going to use those tried and true recall or study methods. Step one, obviously like you have to go through and highlight. And I know I said that's not an effective method. I know. But it's just stage one of integration. You obviously just need to know what information is crucial. Stage two, I want you to go through and in those lines, because you've double-fonded it, in those margins, I want you to

write text, interesting tidbits, facts, underline, draw pictures around your notes, make them really personal. Step three, read through your notes again and tell yourself the story of what you're reading by applying it to something you see in your own life or in the world. For example, if you are studying, I don't know, psychopathology, and the section you are reviewing is on schizophrenia, write out the symptoms like you're describing a movie character, or you're telling the story of someone's behavior that you know, or somebody in the news, or somebody, yeah, or a character in a movie. If you're studying systems of voting or politics and you have a big chunk of notes that are all very theoretical about voting systems, imagine your friends as candidates in each of those voting systems. Any kind of personal association is going to work amazingly. The final step is to take your notes, take your research and do one of three things. Either explain it to someone else in your life.

life or prepare like essentially a small lecture on your topics. This is known as the Fenman technique. Research has shown it's one of the most effective study techniques you can use when you can teach it back to somebody else. You know it at a depth that is hard to come by because it asks you to almost be the expert. It asks you to adopt the skills and knowledge you'd need to be an expert. So teach it to somebody else to turn it into something creative. I used to do these big mind-mack. and like diagrams and doodles on it. I used to actually get like a massive poster board to remember psychology concepts back at uni

and I would make like this poster. In high school I would get a whiteboard marker and I would write my notes and I would like draw diagrams and all that stuff on my windows and on my mirrors. So process it creatively. Or write down your notes as personal questions and do at least 20 of them and answer them. So questions like,

If I had to choose the biology concept I knew the least about from this year, what would it be? And then describe that concept. Or like, what's another one? Like, what term did I find most interesting? What applies most to my life? What area am I most fascinated by? Like, make the questions personally relevant, then answer them. Again, all these methods work because we are trying to encode on a deeper, a more specific, personally relevant level. It's like when you do this, when you adopt one of those final three methods on top of those other methods, you are solidifying an idea in concrete, not in paper. Another element to this is to understand your learning style.

Research says there's eight learning stars. And each of these learning stars was adapted from Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. So basically he developed this idea back in the 80s to essentially argue that IQ is just one specific type of intelligence. It's a general intelligence, but real intelligence comes in many different forms, there's many different understandings, and your natural inclination for a specific form is what's going to help you excel in a certain area. Basically, people are smart at different things, people are good at different things, but these forms are visual or spatial. So some people have a visual or spatial learning type. That's a preference for things laid out in maps, laid out in graphs, laid out in charts. Auditory, like an auditory learning style.

So you like to absorb knowledge through sound, song, rhythm, beat, kinesthetic, learning through movement, having a, I guess, a natural intelligence for how your body moves and what it doesn't space and what it can do. verbal, the use of speech and speaking concepts or ideas allowed. This is my learning style. Obviously, no surprise. I run a podcast, but another one is logical. There are people who really enjoy learning or absorbing information by laying them down in a very mathematical and logical format. Interpersonal and intrapersonal.

Two different ones. Interpersonal, learning through collaboration, conversation, connection, intrapersonal, learning through reflection, alone time, deep devotion, solitude. And then finally, naturalistic, learning through the world by seeing patterns, by connecting things to one's surroundings. Hopefully you got all those, but there's eight. And the theory goes that this also aligns not just to how you best process information, but also what job might suit you best.

We don't have time to get into that because that theory is very wild and wacky. But I think, again, it's important to know your preference and tune into how you can better absorb information based on how your brain best sees information. And when you can do that, it becomes so much easier. I feel like it's like falling into a stream.

It's hard to explain. But when you start learning in a memory, absorbing information in your brains, one of your brain's preferred ways, there is just so much less cognitive friction. Here is how to figure out what yours is, because I feel like I gave you all of that, and I didn't give you the answer to how to find out. Four questions. When you have to explain something you care about to someone, how do you prefer doing it? Do you immediately grab a pen? Do you draw them a map? Do you connect it to a personal experience? Do you use your body?

Do you use your hands? Do you work through the logic with them? Question two. When someone explains a complex idea to you, what makes it click for you? Is it examples? Is it metaphors, discussion? Is it seeing it in action? Is it getting to just sit and just process it and wiki it and research it?

Third question, think back now to your school or uni days if you are not still in those places. what kind of classes felt easiest to stay engaged in, even when the content wasn't that interesting. That's another clue. And finally, if you had unlimited time to learn something purely for enjoyment, what would that learning environment look like? How would you want to learn about the thing you are choosing to learn about? Now, the thing to know, our style isn't always consistent,

and there's not just one for you, like there's often quite a few, or as in like they're interchangeable. I feel like I've been giving the impression there's like one specific one. You can have multiple and everybody can in some way learn through each of those things. There was a recent University of Michigan article that called into question

the legitimacy of learning styles altogether because the idea that we can only learn in one way is kind of preposterous but the psychology does provide heaps of evidence for this fact. When you enjoy the methods you are using to learn, learn, you engage more, you absorb more, therefore you develop an enjoyable method for studying and enjoy the studying in itself. Even if it looks weird, even if you feel like nobody understands

it, having a method that relates to you personally and that you enjoy is always going to be more effective than a traditional method that bores you or doesn't interest you. This kind of brings me to My next tip, which is use unconventional ways of learning because I guess the more novel, the more memorable. And the more likely you are to integrate the information. The one I loved the most, which I'm now thinking about and I'm realizing this has a lot to say about me, but I used to record my notes as a voice note on my laptop. and I would convert it into an MP3 file for my phone so I could listen to the concepts as a podcast.

How I did not realize this was going to be my career, I do not know. I cannot tell you. That was obviously a sign. But that was really effective for me. I'd also put classical music behind it sometimes. I used to play it to fall asleep because, and this has no evidence for it. Let me just say there's no evidence for this. but I used to be like, oh yeah, if I listen to it while I'm sleeping,

that's more time for it to be absorbed into my memory. Like overnight, it's going to like infuse into my mind. That didn't work. I can tell you that now. But novelty of any kind, any method, primes your brain to learn. There's evidence for this. There was a 2020 study done with a bunch of high school students in Argentina

that puts students either in a novel environment or their school environment and showed them a geometrical shape, a geometrical object, a really random object. And it asked them to memorize, well, the researchers asked them to memorize it. And then they asked them 45 days later, if they remembered it, they asked them to draw the shape. And those in the novel situations had much better recall. Study in new locations. Use different colored pens.

have a unique playlist for each subject, tie new concepts to a new flavor of gum. Anything that's, again, going to give a concept another dimension means it's going to be integrated differently and better, I guess. Okay, we are going to take a short break here before getting into my four final tips for studying effectively. Stay with us. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world.

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Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So this is a tip I wish, I wish I learned so not, but only kind of grasped. I would say in like my last two years of university, not all times are good times for studying. Your peak productivity hours may not be the same as others or the same as the, even the typical workday, which is based around what we are like a human circadian rhythm. Yes, we might all have the same circadian structure. but your peak productivity depends on your individual biology and it depends on your individual

rhythm. When I was in like the early days of university, I remember going to this, I don't know what it was, like a module or like a lecture. It was like on studying effectively. And in it the lecture or like the person leading it was like, your best study time is 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. I don't know where she got that from and I tried to stick with that for ages. I'd be like, no, I need to study 9 a.m. I got to be at the library until I realized like I was not getting a single thing done during that whole time. Like I'm a night out. I like working. I like studying. I like writing, creating after 7 p.m. I can focus for hours. I know my mom is the same. And we were actually having this conversation recently where I was like, how did you get so much work done when we

were kids, like she had three kids, and she was working like multiple jobs. And she was telling me how her peak performance hours were always for her like 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. So she would be working when we were asleep. And I was like, huh, that's where I get it. But there's another name for a person like this, obviously a night owl in comparison to those like 5 a.m. club early birds. And I just feel like if I tried to do those 5 a.m. wake-ups, I could never. never get anything done. That's not how I am programmed. You have to figure out how you are programmed. Researchers in 2021 tested participants on this with a series of cognitive tasks and they found that learning, memory, attention, they were all significantly better when people worked during their

preferred time of day. A separate meta-analysis looked at over 7,000 evening people and morning people and they also looked at what they called their diurnal preferences. And a diurnal preference is basically when you prefer to be awake versus asleep. And what they found was that when they let people naturally work during their preferred time, their cognitive ability, their academic achievement, their memory, their problem solving, all improved. Even in school children, even in little tiny school children. This study even actually, it has a self-report questionnaire. you can take, what is the study called?

I think it's called chronotype cognitive abilities and academic achievement from 2011, if you want to look it up. And in like the appendix, they'll have this. So you can figure out what your diurnal preference is, when the best time a day is for you. I think you probably already know. I think it's the time when you feel least tired doing work, whether that is 1 a.m. or 1 p.m. I think a crucial step to this is also being okay with not being

productive when everyone else is being. A lot of studying, at least I found, was sometimes like appearance base, especially when you're like in a big college or in a big high school or in a big uni. And so sometimes like that there was pressure to sort of appear like you were busy even if you weren't getting anything done. So again, with this like body clock method, if you know you can get seven hours of work done in four hours if you start at 1 a.m. You don't need to be starting at 9 a.m. Take the morning off. Remember, efficiency is personal. It's not externally dictated. It's incredibly individualized. And if your goal is to get great grades, do it when it suits you best. Here's another reason why I loved working and I love studying late. And I guess it kind of makes up

Tim number five. It's because it was romantic. And I believe, like the more romantic or sentimental you make studying, the better you are at it. You have to romanticise study. You have to make it glamorous. You have to make it charming. I don't know what other episode I spoke about this and I'm pretty sure I did, but I loved working late and I loved thinking about like all the other great, all the other. I just like thinking about like the great thinkers and writers who I admired who'd be like up by the candlelight who'd be like diligently working back in the day and like that was so I don't know I love the intimacy of it and how dedicated it felt and I think it's important to find an image a mental image of studying that is

attractive to you and embody it when you are studying some other examples like I know people who like to imagine themselves as scholars, intellectuals, founders who are like working, like, that's a common one, who like to imagine themselves as an artist when they're up early in the morning. Whatever it takes to make you fall in love with the process of studying, not just the outcome, you've got to do it. And that's another psychology hack for you. It's actually called the effort paradox. Fall in love with working hard. A lot of psychology will say we avoid effort because it's costly. and we want to choose the path of least resistance. But the more you pursue effort, the more it feels innately valuable.

And the more it actually increases the value of the thing that you are working towards. People may value a goal more when they work really hard for it. That's why we like IKEA furniture. It's why we, because we have to work hard for it. Because there's a personal investment. The things we put effort into, yeah, like furniture. we assemble, or like a cake we make ourselves, you know, it feels more meaningful and valuable than an identical thing that requires no effort. Effort creates meaning, which is more powerful

than motivation. You don't start studying because you love it. You start studying because you're, because you've invested effort and because that feels important. And so then the meaning follows. The meaning and the motivation follows effort, not the other way around. Does that make sense? you can read the paper I think it's a just called the effort paradox from 2018 if you want to understand this better but effort creates

meaning not motivation it's one of the best things I read when I was studying when I was at university it's basically another way of saying again like fall in love with hard work and pursue consistency basically it's another way

of saying consistency matters and consistency works, but it's just saying that in a different way, I guess. Let me move on to tip number seven. I think this was my most unhinged study tip. I used to pay myself to study. I'm going to explain this, but I knew from high school psychology that our brains respond to reward and regular positive enforcement. So when I would get paid or specifically when I would get tips when I was working at the Hawaiian bar or when I was working at the steak restaurant, I would have these envelopes in my drawer, like in my university death's drawer, and I would put like $20 bills, $5 bills, $10 bills in these envelopes, and I wouldn't label them.

I wouldn't know which had which. And every time I went to study, I would bring a single envelope with me. And only when I'd done a certain number of hours would I be allowed to open it. And I would be allowed to spend whatever money was in there or like add it to my wallet. because I didn't know how much money was in there, it kind of also tapped into principles of intermittent reinforcement or random reinforcement as well. And let me just say, like, it worked. It truly, truly worked so, so well. Like, I was basically bribing myself. Normally by like the time I think I'd done, I think I would give it to me myself like after three hours. Normally after,

like, I would have done two hours and I'd be really hungry or really bored and I'd want a snack and my university had this like little basic grocery store. And at two hours, I'd be like, I'm ready, but I would force myself to do that other hour because then I would get the reward. And obviously it was my money. Like I could open it at any time, but it would like really motivate me to just like push to that third hour. And I would obviously have breaks in between, like I'd go to the bathroom. I wasn't like sitting there with like those metal prongs, like opening my eyes. Like I would let myself get up and go around, but I wasn't allowed to leave the library or I wasn't allowed to go back to my dorm before those three hours were done or the next

three hours after that because I couldn't open the envelope, which again, super strange. Tell me if you do this. I don't know anybody else who does this, but it worked. Okay, I don't know what tip we are up to here. But next, another big psychology hack that's very simple but very necessary is a limit. all distractions. Do not believe that you can study if your phone is right next to you. I used to use this self-control website blocker. I think I literally still have it on my computer. I would also give my, me and my friends were like we would give each other our phones and like

put them in our bags so they couldn't access them and like give them back when we were kind of ready to go. Anything to keep a distraction away from your desk or away from your study space is crucial. I cannot stress enough how much you need to be doing this, no matter how good you think your discipline is. We really do like to believe that discipline is like a personality trait, that some people are just more motivated or motivated enough to be able to sit there with their phone face down and not touch it and just simply not do anything with it. But psychology says, that's not true. Your brain is not designed to coexist peaceful. with distraction. Every notification, every open tab, every buzzing phone noise triggers what is called

attention or capture. Even if you don't consciously check it, a part of you is still, oh, aware that something's going on. Just knowing your phone is nearby is actually enough to reduce your working memory and cognitive capacity. There is literal research showing that performance improves simply by putting your phone in another room. Simply by giving it to to somebody else, not putting it on silent, not putting it face down, gone, putting it away. This is why externalizing self-control works so well. Website blockers, app limits, a friend. That's not a sign that you have weak discipline, like they're signs of psychological intelligence. You are removing the need for constant decision-making and constantly needing to stop your brain

from doing what it wants to most, which is to take the quick dopamine, which is, to take the destruction. Finally, and I should have said this one earlier when I was talking about my money envelope reward scheme, but study with other people as a reward. Now, I wouldn't do this all the time, only when I was really serious in like a real crunch period. But I knew that as much as money was a fantastic treat as an extrovert, as a social butterfly, especially at university. Being around other people and having a little chit-chat, that was a much greater reward for me. So I manipulated that. I manipulated that desire to force myself to work harder. There is a powerful doponogenic reward loop at play.

when you're studying alone, followed by letting yourself study with other people as a treat, your brain begins to associate effort with anticipated connection, making the initial work feel more tolerable, maybe even motivating. If I knew I'd get to go sit with my friends at the end or like go and annoy them or hang out with them, it just made me want to work harder to get through the, the time. That's the whole point of having, of having that reward. So those are my tips. Those are my study tips that I swore by. I'm going to quickly summarize them for you now. Firstly, the biggest thing you should be doing, if you're not doing anything else on this list,

encode information with personal significance. Use my note-taking manuscript method. Figure out your preferred learning style. Not your exact learning style. We know there's not a single one, but your preferred. Utilize novelty in whatever form. Study during your most productive hours, not, even if they're not necessarily the socially applauded hours. Romanticized studying, romanticized studying to activate that effort paradox that we were talking about. Pay yourself to study. Eliminate distractions. Use social study as a reward. And one final, one final one final one. as much as you can, integrate the information into your conversations. Teach other people, teach your parents, slip it into like calls with clients or like when you're

serving somebody coffee. Anyone, anything, anyone who wants to listen, get them involved in your learning. This is literally in a small way how this podcast started. I wanted to talk more about psychology to integrate my understanding. And I wanted to talk about it in reference to my friends' lives and my family's lives. And that's, this is how we're here. Look how that turned out. So thank you so much for listening. I hope these tips are helpful. Let me know if you use any of them and if they are useful. If you have made it this far, great attentional skills. Thank you. Leave a comment down below. What is your most unhinged weird study hack? I want the weird ones. and if you pay yourself to study like I did, I want to know it because I think I've only,

I think I know like one other person who did that and I'm pretty sure when she said she was paying herself. It was her parents. So I want to know if you do that and if it works for you. I guess people don't really use cash anymore. But yeah, those are the good times. I miss it. I really miss studying you guys. Like if you're still studying at the moment as well, like don't take it for granted. There was something so fun about like your only job for the evening being just like, to sit with your friends or just to like sit and learn like genuinely dream job dream job so thank you again for listening i hope you enjoyed the episode make sure that you are following us wherever you are listening right now that you are subscribed or that you have notifications turned on so you know when

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