Here’s a simple thing you can do to help you focus better and improve your study sessions . . .
Take regular exercise breaks.
A study titled Sweat so you don’t forget found that engaging in regular five minute exercise breaks reduced mind wandering, improved focus, and enhanced learning.
In this study the researchers wanted to know if engaging in short exercise breaks could help with learning.
They took a group of 75 psychology students and split them into three groups.
Group 1: Exercise breaks group
Group 2: Non-exercise breaks group
Group 3: No breaks group
All the students had to watch the same 50 minute psychology lecture. But the difference between the groups was this . . .
The exercise breaks group performed five minutes of exercise every 17 minutes. The non-exercise breaks group played a simple video game for five minutes every 17 minutes. The no breaks group had to watch the entire lecture without getting a single break.
The students in the exercise breaks group could focus better and they retained more information. They also found the lecturer easier to understand.
The researchers said:
“The exercise breaks buffered against declines in attention resulting in superior engagement during the latter part of the lecture compared to the other two groups.”
One would think they would show some improvements in attention and memory since they were getting breaks. But they didn’t show any significant improvements.
In fact, they performed just as well as the no breaks group in terms of attention and memory.
The researchers concluded:
“One possibility is that the computer game played during the non-exercise break may have acted as a second cognitive task as opposed to a cognitive break. Switching between two cognitive tasks can deplete attention and impair performance for both tasks.”
This shows the type of activity you engage in on a study break is really important. It pays to get out of your head and move your body!
It was a series of exercises performed for 50 seconds each followed by a rest break:
1) Jumping jacks (50 seconds) + Rest (10 seconds)
2) Heeltaps (50 seconds) + Rest (10 seconds)
3) High knees (50 seconds) + Rest (10 seconds)
4) Split jumps (50 seconds) + Rest (10 seconds)
5) Hamstring kickers (50 seconds) = The End
Since reading this study, I’ve started to incorporate more exercise breaks into my day and I’m noticing a big difference.
Personally, I’m not a fan of some of the exercises the researchers made the participants do in this study. So, I have replaced them with other cardio exercises I enjoy doing, such as punching a boxing bag and using a skipping rope.
I also find doing 50 seconds of non stop exercise pretty exhausting. For this reason, I’ve reduced my exercise time down to 40 seconds followed by a 20 second rest break. I find it helps to time my exercise sprints/rest breaks using an interval timer on my phone instead of a kitchen timer (which can feel a little clunky).
Feel free to experiment with different exercise/rest ratios. Make it work for you. As your fitness levels improve, you can increase the period of time you exercise for.
After working for 20 or 30 minutes, get up and take a five minute exercise break.
You don’t have to do jumping jacks or hamstring kickers. Select simple exercises you want to do.
Notice how you feel before and after your exercise break.
After experimenting with this simple strategy, I can say with confidence that I feel more energised and mentally sharper throughout the day. Try it and let me know how you go!
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Then another person told me he uses AI to read his email and tell him what he needs to do for the day.
I thought, “Why would you do that?”
Why have we stopped using our brains and completely outsourced our thinking to AI?
In a recent Guardian piece, author Dave Eggers shared what he advises young people when it comes to using AI:
“You’re one of one. You’re unprecedented in the entire line of human history. Only you have your brain. Only you can think of what you can think of. Only you can tell a story in a particular way. Why would you cede that to a machine?”
He went on to say:
“Once you have a machine think for you and write for you, you’re cooked as a species. That’s it. That’s the worse dystopian outcome there could ever be.”
As generative AI and tech force their way into almost every area of our lives, I’m finding that I want to use my hands more, and not in a typing-on-a-keyboard-into-ChatGPT kind of way.
I want to chop vegetables, roll out pizza dough, journal with pen and paper, cut things out with scissors and stick them down on paper, write letters to people, make mind maps, and read physical books.
These are small acts of resistance, but I believe they are vitally important to retaining our humanity and confidence. These acts signal to our brains, “You’re still in control”.
Generative AI may seem powerful, but let’s not forget the tremendous power that lies within our brains and bodies.
There is a freedom and confidence that comes from doing things yourself, whether that be with your hands, your brain, or a combination of the two.
That freedom and confidence are built through sustained practice and being able to push through discomfort. But research shows these things can be eroded very quickly by routine use and overuse of AI.
It’s easy to label those of us who are actively resisting using AI as old-fashioned, luddites or not keeping up with the times. But doing so overlooks some serious issues associated with AI.
When I first discovered ChatGPT, like most people, I was amazed. It had this mystical quality that pulled me in. But as I started to learn more about generative AI (specifically ChatGPT), the magic started to crumble away. I discovered generative AI had a dark side similar to social media. As investigative journalist Karen Hao writes in her brilliant book Empire of AI:
“…in the same way we once thought Facebook was merely a place for posting vacation pictures and connecting with long lost elementary school friends, or for sparking positive and transformative social movements, there is more to the sleek, entrancing exterior than meets the eye. Under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources.”
As I started to see red flags around the environmental and exploitative human impacts of AI (e.g., the data annotators in Kenya who train AI are paid less than $2 a day), I also became alarmed by the ways ChatGPT affected my confidence. These red flags were impossible to ignore.
I distinctly remember this one experience where I used ChatGPT to draft a question to ask at a public meeting. Almost immediately after asking the question, I regretted it. I felt like a kid who had cheated on a test. I felt bad that I had outsourced my thinking to a machine.
Since then, I’ve heard several people say, “Using AI isn’t cheating! Don’t feel bad!” but I think we need to be honest with ourselves. We need to look beyond the AI marketing spin and take a good look at what the research literature says.
A recent study involving 1,923 adult participants found that people who were overly reliant on AI experienced decreased confidence in their cognitive abilities and reported feeling less ownership of the ideas. However, people more likely to challenge or reject AI’s suggestions reported greater confidence in their thinking and a greater sense of ownership of their ideas.
Keep in mind that this study was conducted with adults, not students. Students are still developing their cognitive skills and therefore are not in a position to easily challenge or reject AI’s suggestions.
Whilst I believe we are all vulnerable to becoming dependent on AI and using it to avoid thinking, young people are especially vulnerable. AI conditions us to expect immediate answers, which is problematic in a learning environment where we often have to sit with discomfort and work through challenges.
In fact, another recent study found that people who relied on AI were less likely to persist with a task than those who did not rely on AI. What was most alarming was that it only took 10 minutes of using AI to induce these negative effects.
This should set off alarm bells for all of us. Why? Because persistence is a key part of learning and skill acquisition. It’s also one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.
Until we have guardrails in place, it’s best to challenge ourselves to use our brains without AI assistance as much as possible.
Yes, using your brain can feel scary and uncomfortable. But in my experience, it’s also incredibly satisfying (like lifting heavy weights or running up a steep hill).
I was reminded of this recently when I had to get up and speak at a public meeting. Due to having very little notice about this meeting (only 5 minutes), I had no time to scribble out ideas on what I was going to say. There was no time to practice and deliver a polished presentation. All I could do was get up and speak off the cuff about this issue I care deeply about.
And you know what? I surprised myself. I delivered a solid presentation.
I felt proud that I could rely on my brain to pull together a coherent speech on the spot. No notes. No ChatGPT. It was just me and my brain.
This experience gave me a natural high that lasted for several days!
For me, the AI-reliant experience leaves me feeling degraded as a human and doubting myself. The other experience (relying on my unique brain) leaves me feeling fully alive and powerful.
When you use AI, even for just 10 minutes at a time, you need to be aware that it can change you (and not necessarily for the better). Every task that is outsourced to AI makes you less likely to persist with solving a problem. And unless you’re actively challenging the glitchy AI slop, you’re also crippling your confidence and cognition.
Our tech overlords want to create a friction-free experience where we don’t have to think at all, but they’ve overlooked one key thing about life and learning: it’s a struggle. But that’s how we grow and become stronger.
Be brave. Refuse to take the path of least resistance. Embrace the struggle. Use your brain as much as you can. Remember Dave Eggers’ words of wisdom, “You’re one of one. You’re unprecedented in the entire line of human history. Only you have your brain”. So, use it.
For context, she was a sales manager who used a BlackBerry phone for work (a fancy, expensive device at the time).
Every minute of the interview, her phone pinged with a notification or she received an email alert on her laptop. She’d glance at one of her devices and, with a panicked look, say, “I need to answer this!”
It was an awkward and disjointed conversation, full of stops and starts. I have to admit, her behaviour annoyed me. I soon realised I wasn’t the only person feeling this way.
The sales manager mentioned that she had a 4-year-old daughter who would get upset with her.
She told me that her little girl would beg her to put her phone and computer away. She’d tug at her clothes and cry, “Mummy! Mummy! Put your phone away!”
I appreciated this woman’s honesty, especially when she said to me:
“On the weekend, I’m with my kids but not truly with them… if you know what I mean”.
I knew exactly what she meant.
That was over 10 years ago. Fast forward to today, and we’re all a bit like that sales manager. But things are a lot worse now.
Instead of being overwhelmed and distracted by phone calls and work emails, we’re dealing with powerful Big Tech companies that hijack our time, energy, and attention.
They’ve made us weak-willed and impulsive.
We’re now in a position where distraction is something we crave rather than put up with.
When we have a gap in our schedule or we have to wait in line, what do most of us do? We reach for our phones without even thinking.
Rather than be alone with our thoughts, we desperately try to fill the space with ‘phone snacks’.
When we feel confused, frustrated, or bored, we run to our devices to escape the discomfort and our brains reward us for doing so.
Every time we switch tasks, our brain releases a little shot of dopamine.
It’s these quick hits of dopamine that train us to crave checking our phones and, ultimately, multitasking.
In an environment of unrestricted tech use, my brain is like a wild monkey. It wants to run around, make a mess, and explore many different things all at once.
I can relate to Dr Nancy Colier when she writes in The Power of Off, the mind on technology is like a “wild, locked-up monkey that’s drunk two bottles of wine chased by a shot of Scotch and been stung by a whole swarm of bees”.
When I start multitasking (and it doesn’t take much to get me going), I feel amped up, frenzied, and agitated. My energy feels a little crazy.
Research shows that as we quickly switch from one task to another, we rapidly deplete our finite mental resources and put our brains under a lot of stress.
But it gets worse . . .
When we multitask, we also experience what researcher Sophie Leroy calls Attention Residue.
In a research paper called Why is it so hard to do my work? Leroy explains Attention Residue as the extent to which your attention is only partially focused on the current activity because a prior activity (the task you rapidly switched from) is still holding part of your attention.
Why does this matter?
Leroy’s research found that when you experience Attention Residue, your performance suffers.
It’s as if you’ve taken a big dollop of the previous task and put a thick slather of it all over the current task, thereby making a mess of the present moment.
The good news is we can stop messing with our precious moments by focusing on one task at a time.
In his excellent book Time Surfing, Zen Monk Paul Loomans encourages us to focus on one task at a time, with minimal interruptions, and do it until completion. He says if we do this, we will experience a sense of calm and pleasure in everything we do.
Even tasks we consider boring or mundane (e.g., peeling potatoes or cleaning your room) can be transformed into artistry when you are truly present.
Part of the problem is that we’re often in a rush to get to the next thing on our to-do lists. But as Loomans warns, “Rushing is like gulping down time. You’re not living for now but for later”.
To counter this frenetic urge to race ahead, Loomans suggests that we accept whatever we are doing as “the activity of the moment”. In other words, we view the task before us as the most important thing we can be doing in this moment and we forget the rest.
It’s a simple but powerful mental shift.
I’ve noticed that when I accept whatever I am doing as the thing I should be doing right now, I no longer feel the urge to work with such intense energy. I feel calmer. An added bonus is that when I slow down, I make fewer mistakes and tend to do a better job.
At the heart of it, doing one thing at a time means showing up to life and being present, to the good stuff but also the painful, boring bits.
If you find yourself reaching for your phone more than you’d like, ask yourself this question:
“Am I reaching for my phone to escape the present moment?”
For me, the answer is usually yes. I’m trying to avoid the discomfort of life. But life tends to be more meaningful and enjoyable when I stay fully present to what’s happening around me, with my phone out of sight.
Technology will dominate your life, and multitasking will be an issue unless you have strategies to protect your time, energy, and attention.
What motivates me to set limits on my tech use (specifically my phone) is a desire to feel calm, grounded, and focused. I also want to live a life of substance, not one in which I am constantly chasing instant gratification.
Here are the strategies that I am currently practising to help me decrease multitasking and cultivate calm:
When I’m with someone or working on an important task, I put my phone away and keep it out of sight. I want to be fully present with the person I’m with or the task at hand. Why?
Because attention is how we show others they matter.
When someone is checking their phone in a social situation, it communicates “I’m more interested in what’s happening on this screen than I am in you”.
When I think back to the interview with the sales manager, it would have been a better experience for everyone if she had put her phone on silent, left it in her bag, and closed her laptop.
There would have been fewer times saying “What was the question again?” and “Sorry, I can’t remember what we were talking about”.
We probably would have felt more connected, too.
Note: Even when my phone isn’t within arm’s reach, I can still catch myself rapidly switching between web browsers and tasks. However, I’ve noticed that my multitasking significantly increases when my phone is within arm’s reach.
You’ve probably heard of intermittent fasting, where you have a window for eating (e.g., 10am to 6pm). But have you heard of phone fasting?
Phone fasting is a period during the day when your phone is not within reach.
As TJ Power states in The Dose Effect:
“A phone fast enables your dopamine to replenish and creates the opportunity for connection and restoration.”
So, as an experiment, for 30 days, I phone fasted from 8pm until 12noon the next day (allowing myself to make urgent calls if needed). I discovered that this made a big difference to my ability to focus. I also experienced a sense of calm like never before.
At the start of the day, I create a ‘Wish List’ (another wonderful concept from Paul Looman’s Time Surfing book).
I write down all the things I’d like to do in the day, but there’s no pressure to do all of them. I then put the list away, and depending on how I feel, I listen to my intuition and trust myself to choose the right activity to begin with.
Before I start a work session, I also declare what I intend to do (e.g., “Chop vegetables for curry” or “Write for 45 minutes”). If possible, I also like to share what I plan to do with another human (I use an online coworking community called Cave Day to do this).
After every 25-30 minutes of work, I aim to take a short movement break (usually 2-5 minutes in duration). This helps me to stay energised and alert. But most importantly, it gives me a brain boost.
What I wish I had understood when I was younger is that you can’t focus for hours on end. It’s not humanly possible because your brain has a finite amount of attentional resources. This means as you focus on doing a task, your attentional resources get depleted (and if you multitask, you accelerate the depletion even more!).
However, research shows you can boost your attentional resources by taking short breaks or, as Paul Loomans likes to call them, ‘breathers’.
A ‘breather’ is any activity that allows you to get out of your head and grounded in your body.
Some of my favourite breather activities include going for a short walk, chopping vegetables, or riding my bike to pick up a package from the post office. These activities allow my brain and thoughts to roam free.
Although many of us default to checking our phones during breaks, resist the urge. The problem with using your phone on a break is that you’re still in your head. This means you’re churning through your attentional resources instead of replenishing them.
The sense of calm and pleasure I experience when I stop multitasking and focus on doing one thing at a time is second to none.
But in the age of the Attention Economy, with so many companies trying to hijack our attention, it takes discipline and practice to stay focused.
Without strategies in place to protect your focus, the default will be multitasking and its friends – chaos, stress, and fatigue.
We may not have a 4-year-old child tugging on our clothes when we’re using our phones. But perhaps we should all listen to the wisdom of that little girl and put our phones away.
But I’ve also had to learn to move to learn.
Does that makes sense? If not, let me explain myself.
Like most students, I was conditioned to sit still in a chair for hours each day. Even though I felt chained to my chair in school, there was one part of my body that I could move: my arms and hands.
I could gesture to express ideas.
Being half Italian, using my hands to gesticulate feels completely natural and normal. Growing up, I watched my Italian relatives gesture dramatically to stress a point and communicate ideas.
Having been exposed to this from a young age, I didn’t know how to behave any differently. It’s just what you did when you spoke: you used your hands.
However, my bold hand gestures weren’t always welcome, and they inevitably drew attention in the classroom.
People would comment, “Ha! Look at the way she uses her hands!” and “You’re so Italian!”.
My hand gestures were too over-the-top. I needed to tone things down.
When I was in Year 9, I tried to restrain my hand gestures. I alternated between sitting on my hands, folding them and cupping them in my lap.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but by suppressing my hands’ natural urge to move, I was doing my brain a disservice.
This study by Langhanns and Müller found that when students were asked to sit still while solving problems, their cognitive load increased and their overall success in solving problems decreased.
In other words, when you focus on being still and try to ignore your body’s natural urge to move, this consumes a lot of your brainpower.
Fortunately, I gave up trying to suppress my hand gestures. There was no point in trying. My hand gestures were like a wild horse. They would always break free.
All these years later, I can see that my ability to gesture naturally and effortlessly made me good at public speaking. While other robotic speakers had to be coached into adding a few hand gestures, I moved my hands with ease.
But that’s not all; by using my hands in class, I was also tapping into special learning superpowers.
Research shows physical movement, including the use of gestures, helps improve understanding and boosts memory.
I’m referring to an experimental study conducted by a husband and wife research team, Tony and Helga Noice. This couple spent many years studying actors and their ability to learn and recall lines.
Their research found that actors were able to accurately recall lines that had been accompanied by movements months after the final stage performance. However, these same actors struggled to remember lines that had been spoken when they remained in one place.
The Noices wanted to know if ordinary people (non-actors) could benefit from engaging in physical movement and using gestures when learning and retrieving dialogue.
They devised an experiment involving 23 university students. They split these students into three groups:
Group 1: Movement condition
Group 2: Verbal communication only condition
Group 3: Memorisation condition (Control)
In the movement condition, students were taught how to move in the scene (without reading their scripts). They were then given scripts and read their lines while moving their bodies.
In the verbal communication condition, these students sat on chairs and were told to read their lines out loud. They weren’t allowed to move.
Groups 1 and 2 were told not to memorise the dialogue but instead to focus on the meaning of what they were saying. They were instructed to adopt an actor’s approach to learning (i.e., to be fully present and mean what they were saying as they said it).
In contrast, Group 3 (the control group) was instructed to try to memorise their lines using whatever strategy they’d found successful in the past.
Students in each group were given only five minutes to learn their lines. They were then given a brief distractor task (“Write down five movies you saw recently”) before being tested on their ability to recall their lines.
The researchers found that the students in the movement condition remembered 76% of their lines compared with only 37% for the memorisation control group.
The researchers concluded:
“Students who actively experienced communicating the meaning of the material by using both words and movements recalled significantly more material than did either students who communicated using only words or students who deliberately memorized the same text.”
It’s important to note that the students in the movement condition weren’t just waving their arms around in the air. Their movements had meaning and were connected to what they were saying.
There are several ways you can utilise your body to learn.
If you’re trying to learn a new concept or memorise a presentation, don’t be afraid to use your hands and body. Think about what you’re saying. Can you apply a gesture or move your body to help you memorise an idea and improve your understanding?
As the authors of The Extended Mind In Action state:
“…the feel of our hands making a gesture reinforces our memory.”
This is why I also practice my presentations on my feet, using my hands and all my body to express ideas.
If you’re an online educator or teacher, it’s really important that students can see your arms and hands. Research shows that instructional videos that include people gesturing result in significantly more learning for people who watch them.
When I first started delivering online presentations, I made the mistake of only showing my head and shoulders.
After exploring the research in this area, I quickly adjusted my studio setup so that students could see my hands and arms as well. This small tweak made a huge difference in improving student learning.
I also encourage students to gesture back to check their understanding and reinforce key ideas. If you’re a teacher, I encourage you to try doing this with your students, too.
Besides using specific gestures and movements to learn concepts and dialogue, it’s also worth considering the benefits of engaging in light to moderate-intensity exercise before sitting down to study.
A fabulous research study called Sweat So You Don’t Forget found that when students engaged in five-minute exercise breaks every 17 minutes, they could focus better and remembered more than students who didn’t get any breaks or had a sedentary break (playing video games).
Annie Murphy Paul writes in her book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain:
“…we have it within our power to induce in ourselves a state that is ideal for learning, creating, and engaging in other kinds of complex cognition: by exercising briskly just before we do so.”
This is why, every morning, before I start my work, I run on my treadmill or ride my stationary bike for at least 20 minutes. This gives me a cognitive boost: it improves my focus, creativity, executive function and ability to learn.
The movement also helps to decrease anxiety by supplying my brain with a dose of BDNF (i.e. brain-derived neutrophic factor). Dr Jennifer Heisz, in her book Move the Body, Heal the Mind, explains that BDNF is like fertiliser for the brain. She writes:
“BDNF acts like a fertilizer that promotes the growth, function, and survival of brain cells, including those that turn off the stress response.”
She continues:
“Immediately after exercising, our brain cells are bathed in BDNF, which protects those cells against the toxic effects of high stress.”
As I think back to high stress times in my life, I have no doubt that movement (and regular doses of BDNF) are what got me through these periods.
Your body is a powerful tool to help you learn. The research is clear that moving your body enhances your ability to think and learn.
It’s time to move past the outdated idea that learning means sitting still and being serious. It costs us nothing to gesture with our hands while reading about a concept or to go for a walk outside before studying.
Movement benefits us in many ways, so why not include some in your study routine today?
