Study Techniques that I used — Part 1

Ayyub Imtiaz
Nov 2 · 6 min read
copyright free image that looks cool

My goal with this post is not necessarily to tell you which resources are good and which ones aren’t, what exact study methods to use, how to use them, how many hours you should spend studying, how many reviews of the note you should do, etc. I’m going to leave that for you to figure out for yourself. What works for me may not to work for you. However, there are some things that can be beneficial for a lot of people, and that is my goal; to share. I have broken these study techniques and tips into two different parts. One is on ‘subconscious reprogramming’ and the other is on actual habits that you can carry out.

This post will be talking about subconscious programming and the next one will talk about habits.

The six-word method.

I remember reading a book a long time ago (uff mashallah Ayyub you read a book). It was a book talking about many of the different ways we can reprogram our subconscious mind. One of them that I thoroughly enjoyed was called the six-word method. Allow me to elaborate exactly what this means. I really want you to understand some of the possible processes behind this so that it doesn’t sound like foo-foo science (the process mentioned here is my opinion/understanding of this. Please note, this may be false. It is just how I would like to explain it in this article). This requires me going off in a little tangent.

no one asked for your opinion Merriam-Webster

We have to first understand what hypnosis is. A lot of people have a misconception of what clinical hypnosis can do. They think that I can subjugate you against her will, that I can make you do things you don’t want to do, that I can change your personality or perhaps figure out deep hidden memories. None of that is true.

First of all, think of hypnosis as a heightened state of suggestiveness. It does not mean a hyper aware state, in fact quite the opposite. It means a state of mind that is more willing to accept information.

Secondly, clinical hypnosis is never done by someone else. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. A hypnotist can help guide you through the process, but you have to do it yourself (and that may take some time in training to figure out). There are ways to do it to yourself, and the 6-word method is one way.

Let us figure out when would be a time in which your brain is very open to suggestions. We all have a gate in the brain that prevents unnecessary signals and inputs from coming up. When we are sitting down we block away all the thousands of inputs coming from our bum that says “Hello! There is pressure on me. I am on sitting.” We ignore all the inputs coming in from our extremities from when our skin hairs rub against our shirts. If you wear glasses, you forget the fact that there are glasses on your face. This gating mechanism is all carried out by the reticular formation. Another function of the reticular formation is to be able to control your consciousness; it is one of the parts that helps regulate sleep.

Now you can imagine how these 2 functions are interconnected. The formation can either exert energy on filtering and staying awake, or start to shut down and allow you to sleep, and open the gating mechanism. Think of the times when you were sleeping but weren’t fully ‘asleep’. That is essentially the state we want to achieve. This occurs naturally every night when we sleep, so let us use this to our advantage.

Think of a six word phrase, although you can plus or minus a couple words. The whole point of it being six words is to not make something super long. You don’t want to come up with a fifteen word sentence for reasons you will see a bit. Something short and sweet. You come up with that phrase and when you go to night, close your eyes, lay down and just start repeating that in your head over and over and over again. Repeat that phrase as if it was a lullaby until you actually go to sleep, and what happens is you will be repeating it during the suggestible time. You will start to subconsciously input that information and process it.

An example of a phrase I used in the past (I highly recommend you come up with your own depending on what aspect you want to improve for the next 2–3 months, whether its memory, dedication, focus etc) was:

“I will remember everything I read”

It worked like a charm for me, especially during 4th year.

It may be confirmation bias. It may honestly just to be that, but the end goal is that it works. It did for me and for a lot of other people I have explained this to. So it’s worth a shot nonetheless because it doesn’t take any extra time from your day.

Anchoring/Conditioning.

Everyone has heard of Skinners rats and Pavlov’s dogs when learning about operant and classical conditioning. In NLP, we have a very similar concept called anchoring. If you are unsure what these are, a quick google search will help. Other people can explain this much better than I can.

What do you want to do is link a specific emotional state to a certain action, object, or place which you can constantly reuse again and again. It’s basically a habit. There are a lot of things that people like to do before they sleep or when they wake up, and it feels weird when they don’t do that because they’ve built that habit. They’ve conditioned themselves to be that way. I know some people who just have to take a shower before they sleep. They cannot sleep for without taking a shower at night. Some people have to be using their phones at night. Some have to be reading a book. That is why sometimes even if it’s afternoon, and you start reading a book, if that is your association to sleep, you will feel sleepy. Likewise, for studying there are specific emotional states that are very productive like when we are focused, when we are determined, when we are well rested and concentrating, when we’re not hungry.

If we can target or condition specific actions, object or places to those kinds of emotional states, then every time we actually come sit down to study, we are able to jump straight into or speed up the progress into a full focused state. This saves a lot of initial introductory study time as well as maximizing your efficiency, which is what I call the time period in which you are actually doing proper steady work.

My personal anchored item is a ring. Whenever I am in work mode, whether it’s studying, research or some other project of mine requiring focus and concentration, I wear the ring. Slowly but surely, I associated a heightened state of mind with that specific ring. This takes some time to maximize the full potential of this method, but I think this is what works better in the long run since you will want to switch your words every few months to focus on different aspects of improvement.

Part of the “Advice from a Procrastinator” series.

Ayyub Imtiaz

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The single greatest mystery to the modern man, is himself. Stay Human.

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