Why It's Good To Struggle

With just a few weeks left of school, every day feels harder and harder to get through. Final projects, tests, and assignments are piling up, and it's easy to want to stop working altogether and just be done. But, a little bit of a struggle is actually helpful to your learning and studying and gives your brain a boost. Here's how ⬇️

Hard work = reward

Sure, every teacher, parent, or counselor has told you this at some point or another. But, they wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. We are prone to only enjoying the things that we are good at, meaning learning about those things becomes smooth, fun, and easy. As a result, we shy away from challenges. Yet, those challenges can make the harder concepts easier in the long run. The more effort you put into learning them, the more likely they are to remain in your long-term memory. Whereas, for the smooth and easy concepts, less review means a smaller likelihood of remembering them later on.

Interactive learning

In 1994, psychologist Robert Bjork explained "desirable difficulties" as learning strategies intended to challenge the brain and make it work harder. They're the reason why you likely remember content from an interactive lesson better than from a boring lecture or why, by making one mistake on a test, you know you'll never make it again. When a piece of information feels difficult to grasp, it's a sign that your brain is hard at work, even if it seems like you'll never understand it.

How we're structured

From the largest scale possible, as humans, we weren't made to sit in classrooms and listen to presentations about things we don't care about. And, the perceived struggle to stay awake in that situation isn't a positive struggle at all, it's just pieces of information flying over your head and missing your brain entirely. Instead, our natural tendency to work for "survival of the fittest" makes us try new things, go outside of our comfort zones, and create challenges. Whether as hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago or as a student in school, unlocking situations of variability, pressure, and even chaos suits the human brain much better.

Finding the good struggle

So, now it's time to figure out how to actually achieve this struggle in a meaningful way. Here are a few of our ideas, particularly for studying:

• Spaced repetition - don't force yourself to learn or review everything all at once. Focus on a few concepts at a time, go do something else, and come back. Mix it up for your brain.

• Mix & match - while it may be tempting, don't study the same topic all at once. Spend some time doing math practice questions, and then switch over to history. Maybe throw in some science into the mix, and go back to math. While it may seem counterintuitive, having no rhyme or reason to the studying process challenges you to a high degree.

• Practice tests and questions - sitting and highlighting is the easiest way to lose information you just studied. Instead, take a practice test or answer a few questions, even if you don't feel fully confident in your knowledge of the material. The mental strain required to retrieve a memory is exactly what strengthens it.

It's easy to want to give up and it's even easier to gravitate towards things that don't challenge you. But, going over hurdles, finding the challenges in things, and putting in the work will leave your brain healthy and you happy. After all, our brain is wired to survive in unpredictable and random environments, not lecture halls. And, if you liked this, check out our other posts below or in the Blog page.