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Join my Learning Drops newsletter (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/newsletter-deunlearningIn this video, I explain why unlearning old habits is harder than l…
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00:00 Learning a new skill can take a lot of time and effort. But most of that time and effort is because we don’t focus enough on unlearning. Unlearning is the process of replacing an old habit with the new habit or the skill that you’re trying to develop. And as a learning coach who spent the past 14 years teaching thousands of people how to learn new skills quickly, I’ve realized a couple of things. First of all, the unlearning strategies and processes are different to the processes of learning a new skill. And it is in the unlearning that most people will struggle or eventually give up. And so in this video, I’m going to teach you what unlearning is, why it’s more important than the learning part, and then what you can do to be more efficient at unlearning so you can acquire new skills more quickly. So start with what is unlearning? Like I mentioned, it’s the process of actively rewriting your old habits. It is not the same thing as forgetting. Forgetting is a passive process where something you used to know fades away and disappears. It’s basically your brain pruning away unnecessary things. Unlearning is an 01:12 entirely separate process. And to understand what it is fully and also why it’s so important for acquiring new skills, we need to go into a little bit of the science around skill acquisition itself. Let’s say that you’re learning a skill and you’re learning it off like a YouTube video. So you’ve got the YouTube video. This video is going to provide you information. Basically, this is a theory. And so your first step as a learner is you need to understand this theory right conceptually. Now there’s obviously a difference between conceptually understanding how to do something and being able to actually do it and then being able to do it fluently and quickly by turning it into a habit. So that’s our final goal. We want to turn this skill into a habit because once it is a habit, it is fast, it is efficient, we can use this on autopilot. We tend to also be quite accurate at doing it. But there’s this gap in the middle. And one of the biggest parts about this going from understanding to turning it into a habit is that we have to build a model, a mental model. We have to figure out the 02:28 pattern of how to execute the skill accurately. So if you think about learning a new skill in the beginning, you do not know what to focus on. You don’t know what is important. You don’t know what doing the skill correctly even really looks like. And so it’s very hard for your brain to figure that out. And the part of the brain that does this is called the preffrontal cortex. The preffrontal cortex. So if I just draw a quick picture of the brain here, that’s what medical school will do for you is being able to draw a 2D replica of the brain. Okay? So this front part, this is the preffrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex is bigger in humans than in other species. And it is this area of the brain that is involved in uh basically problem solving, executive thinking, uh critical reasoning. And so the prefrontal cortex when it comes to learning new skills is the part of the brain that is doing the heavy lifting and thinking about what is worth focusing on. How do I do this correctly? What is the series of neural pathways I have to activate in which order following what pattern to do this skill 03:38 properly? And after you practice and you make a few mistakes and you experiment with this eventually you figure out how to do this. Once you get to that point, we then want to turn that into a habit. And so this requires consistent repeated signals to another area of the brain which is called the basil ganglia. I’ll write that out fully for you. Basil ganglia. And this is actually in a separate part of the brain. It’s a little hard to show on this diagram, but it’s basically inside. So if you were to sort of cut open the brain, you’d see it deeper to the surface. that’s inside the brain. This is called the basil ganglia and it’s involved in automatic processes. It’s involved in uh executing on habits. So in order for something that you’ve learned to become a habit, it needs to go from the prefrontal cortex and then be integrated into this basil ganglia. And that requires the signal that’s sent from your prefrontal cortex to the basil ganglia to be consistent and repeated. So this means this pattern needs to be stable. So until you figure out the right way to do something, you’re not 04:50 turning that into a habit yet. And so this part of going from learning a skill to turning into a habit takes a long time. Can take months, maybe years. And this is the part that we all know takes a long time. And so objectively speaking, technically this is the part that takes the longest amount of time. However, this is not the part that in reality takes the longest amount of time. And this is where unlearning comes in because what I’ve just explained to you right now is an incomplete picture. To complete the picture, let me give you an example with something like learning to learn. Let’s say that we’re in school. we are learning from this book and we’re going to be tested on our knowledge uh based on how well we can recall these facts or or describe these concepts. And so we may realize at this young age that we can use certain strategies like memorization, uh just writing lots of repetitive notes or just sort of passively rereading things that we’re going to be able to do this test and do good enough in a short term. And so what happens is that we use these 06:07 strategies and that allows us to achieve our goal. And so we feel a reward. we feel good about this. And that good is basically a little hit of dopamine. And that dopamine is reinforcing these strategies. It’s saying when you use these strategies, we get something good. And this combination is what turns this into a habit. this situation where we use a certain set of strategies and that is reinforced hundreds upon hundreds of times throughout the years and years of schooling that we do. Now fast forward let’s say another 10 plus years. We’re no longer being tested on just our ability to recall isolated facts. So let’s say we now need to use our knowledge uh in a way where the test maybe it’s for work maybe it’s for university but either way we have to use our knowledge in a deeper level we need to use it for more complex types of problems our retention needs to be more long-term. So these strategies that were fine for us before are no longer going to serve us. So this is now a big no. However, 07:26 this habit still exists and this is where learning new skills starts becoming really complicated and really challenging because now your brain cannot focus on figuring out this new pattern correctly anymore because every time you are confronted with the same trigger, the need to read through this material, the first thing that kicks in is your old habit. And this is because your basil ganglia is designed to operate very quickly and very efficiently, which means it uses a low amount of energy. Using habits to solve your problems is much faster and quicker and easier than engaging your prefrontal cortex, which is a very effortful, cognitively really heavy process. And so if you’re trying to learn a new method of learning to replace these previous strategies that are no longer working for you and maybe you watch one of my other videos where I teach you a more effective way of learning or maybe you read about it in my free weekly newsletter where I distill these techniques and these strategies that help you to learn more efficiently and I send them to you in 08:44 your inbox every single week. Or maybe you’re not in my newsletter but you think that’d be really interesting and you’re wondering where do I sign up to that? Well, the answer to that is in the description below. But anyway, let’s say that you’re trying to learn some new strategies. It doesn’t matter if you understand that strategy because what turns that into a skill is your ability to walk through this pathway. Remember, so what actually ends up happening is that you are aware of a new strategy you need to use. But as soon as this trigger arrives, the habit kicks in instead. So this is the bad habit taking over. And now your preffrontal cortex, its job is to challenge this bad habit. Your brain now needs to basically police itself so that it doesn’t go back to what was previously comfortable. And this does actually work every time you try to do something and then a old habit comes in and then your prefrontal cortex is aware of it and it stops it and it says, “Hey, are we sure this is the right process to be using?” And it challenges that automatic behavior. We enter into something that’s 09:59 called memory destabilization. which sounds like a bad thing, but it’s actually a good thing. Memory destabilization is when the connections in your brain start becoming a little bit looser and easier to change. This is basically how you rewire your brain and learn new things. So every time your prefrontal cortex challenges that old habit that’s no longer serving you, it enters into destabilization which gives you the opportunity to rewrite that neural pathway with the new skill or the new habit that you want to develop. And what happens is that over time with enough of these destabilization opportunities and enough of this rewriting this old habit is replaced with the new habit. And that is in a nutshell the process of unlearning. But if it were that simple, I wouldn’t be making an entire video about it. This process is really, really hard. And there are two main reasons for this. The first thing is that your preffrontal cortex that’s trying to build the new habit is fighting a losing battle. And this comes back to the fact that your habits are very efficient and low 11:14 energy. Your basil ganglia can shoot off these habits forever. It is so energy efficient. Your prefrontal cortex is not that energy efficient. It uses up a lot more energy. And so this prefrontal cortex will actually fatigue much faster than your basil ganglia. What this looks like is that you’ll try to apply a new skill. You’ll be doing this for maybe an hour, constantly policing your own thoughts and your own processes. And eventually, you get tired. Your prefrontal cortex doesn’t have it in it anymore to keep policing it. And now your habits are just left rampant. You can’t control it anymore. And now, because now your habit is just taking over and you’re executing using the same old bad habit, you’re actually reinforcing that habit again cuz that signal is just getting sent through. And this can be an incredibly demotivating experience because you are intending to rewrite this old habit. You’re trying to do something new. You are trying to change and you’re spending time and you’re spending a lot of effort on doing this, but it seems like you’re not making any progress. In a way, it’s 12:28 actually true. Your prefrontal cortex didn’t have the opportunity to send through the correct signals through to the basil ganglia because it was too busy on just policing the old bad habit and it spent all of its energy on this. It didn’t have time for any of this. But that’s not all. It gets worse. Remember I said there are two main reasons why unlearning is so difficult. This was only the first one. The fact that your basil ganglia basically outlasts your prefrontal cortex. The second reason is that we are not even aware that our old habits are harming us. And the reason this happens is that when we have an old bad habit that’s no longer serving us, we don’t just have the habit, we also have alongside it a reward system that is also not serving us. Let me explain. If we use that example from before where you’re using these really ineffective learning strategies, we also start recognizing other outcomes and other measures that we start thinking are productive. So for example, if your main strategy was just rereading notes, then you would realize that you are able to cover a lot of content very quickly. you are able to flip through pages 13:54 very quickly. If you’re writing a lot of notes, you may realize that you increase the amount of notes very quickly. And so we start thinking that these are all measures of success. We make the conclusion that because when I use these strategies, I get the reward and every time I use these strategies, I notice these things. This must be an indicator of doing something well. And even 10 plus years later when it’s no longer serving us, we actually don’t challenge these measures. And so, one of the most common things that I see is that I’ll teach someone a more effective strategy. Let’s say that involves just thinking more deeply about what they’re learning. And they notice that they’re not able to cover pages as quickly. They’re not flipping through the pages as quickly. They’re not writing as many notes as they used to, which for them is an alarm bell. That indicates that this learning method is not working even though it may be producing better quality memory, deeper understanding, more complex problem solving ability, all the things that actually truly matter, it may be ticking off. But because we 15:11 haven’t trained ourselves to look at these measures as success, and we’re used to thinking about these measures as success, it creates this unproductive double whammy where not only is it easier and faster to use the bad habit, but hey, when you use the bad habit, it feels like you’re progressing and you’re succeeding so much more quickly and so much more easily. And so not only do we become blind to the fact that it’s not helping us because we think it is helping us, it actually creates a reward mechanism that drives this even deeper and deeper as a habit. And so when we think about the timeline of learning a new skill, I can teach the same method to two people. For one person, they might learn that new skill in just two months. For another person, it might take them two or three years. And 2.99 of those 3 years is just on unlearning and letting go of that old habit. Trying to learn a new especially complex skill without being good at unlearning is like trying to climb a mountain when you’re chained to a boulder and you’re wondering why it’s so heavy. Now, some of you might be listening to this and thinking, Justin, I don’t feel like I’ve 16:28 got that many bad habits that are holding me back too much. You know, I’m a pretty self-aware person. And I think I can figure that out. And I’m not saying you’re not a self-aware person, but let me provide you a perspective that I think a lot of people miss. Bad old habits are not just procedural. They’re not just executional. They’re not just technical. They can also be beliefs and perspectives. Two classic examples are the bad habits we might have around perfectionism and hard work. back when you were younger, maybe facing uh easier challenges with less competition, you can get very far by doing your hardest to produce high quality work. And so we form the habit that when I put in more effort and do my best quality, that leads to good results. But again, fast forward 10 years, maybe now we’re operating at a level where it’s not enough just to work hard. And in a lot of cases, perfectionism reduces our overall productivity. And so, we may understand that we need to work hard conceptually. And we may understand conceptually that a perfectionist tendency is going to hold us back. But it becomes very 17:40 difficult to change that behavior because every time we’re met with the trigger of trying to reach a certain goal, the habit of okay, I need to work hard. I need to always be perfect comes in first. And that’s another example where you can deliberately focus on unlearning those previous beliefs and perspectives which is going to allow you to change your behavior and adopt a more productive uh probably healthier mindset. But regardless of what your old habit is, let’s go now into some strategies that you can apply to unlearn more efficiently and allow you to acquire these skills with a little less friction. And there are five steps to this. The first step, and I think the most important, the one that I see people tripping up on the most, is recalibrating our reward system. What you feel rewarded by is how you decide whether you should keep doing something or not. And if you’re rewarded, even if you know that you shouldn’t do something, that it’s a bad thing to do, it’s difficult to change that behavior. This is why addiction occurs. And so, the first thing that we need to do is engage in something that’s 18:50 called extinction. Extinction in psychology refers to when you take away all the rewards for a certain behavior. So, let’s say every time your toddler wants attention, they uh kick and scream and and and make a big fuss about it. And then every time they do that, you give them attention. You say, “Oh, what is it? What do you want?” This is giving them attention. And so, because you have rewarded the behavior, that is going to reinforce the behavior. And so, with extinction, what you do is that you just would not react. The toddler is kicking and screaming, and you just do not give them the attention. you do not reward the behavior. And what the research shows consistently is that this is the most effective way to reduce a undesirable behavior because why would you do something that is essentially pointless? It’s not getting you what you want. In fact, extinction is more effective more consistently than punishing the behavior. With something like learning to learn, what the recalibration of reward would look like is saying we have an old method, old habits 20:00 that make us feel good because they are comfortable. They are easy to use because they’re habits. They tend to be low effort and we also through using this may you know find that we are able to you know like these these measures that I mentioned we are able to cover content very quickly right cover content or you know write lots of notes. So we see that our notes are accumulating that makes us feel really good makes us feel really proud about our progress in this example. this feeling of comfort and ease and this feeling of productivity by seeing these these markers and these indicators going up. This is the positive reinforcement. This is the reward. And so to replace this old habit, we need to make sure that this habit isn’t being continually reinforced. So we need to cut this loop from happening. And the way that you do this is just by refraraming what success means. It’s about understanding that feeling comfortable and feeling that learning is easy and low effort are not good things. These are indicators that your learning is passive and therefore not effective. 21:19 It is understanding that just because you covered content and you wrote lots of notes, these things do not help you to achieve the outcomes that really matter. And it’s about implementing new ways of measuring our success that are related to the outcomes that matter. So for example, actually testing our knowledge at the level and at the depth that we need to use it. If you spend 2 hours writing a bunch of notes, reading through a 100 pages of a book, feeling great about yourself, but you still can’t actually use that to solve problems and make decisions accurately at the level you need to. That was a waste of time. And you have to feel that. And ultimately by doing this when we use this old method and the old habits come back we no longer feel that it’s reinforcing us and we are extincting that behavior. We have cut that habit loop and now we’ve given ourselves the opportunity to replace it with something that’s better. And so now we can move on to the second part. The second thing is to identify the old habit. In the previous example, I kind of simplified it by having old methods as 22:31 this single box. But usually we don’t really have a clear understanding about what we are doing, the exact processes we’re using. For example, with something like studying. If I said, hey, take this book, study it for a few hours. That involves a lot of different microprocesses. The way that you’re thinking, the way that you’re reading, the way that you’re writing notes, the way that you’re thinking about what you’re writing, there are lots of things going on there, and not all of it is going to be a waste of time. And so in the first step with recalibrating the reward, what we’re doing is just generally understanding that this overall cluster of behaviors and processes is not serving us anymore. And in the second step, it’s about being a bit more specific. Okay, let’s break down this cluster of behaviors into the specific processes that we’re using. And the best way to do this is by understanding the trigger and the desired outcome. In the previous example, the trigger might have been anytime you need to read a long passage of text, we have this habit of reading it and thinking about it in a certain 23:30 way. And that leads to the process of passive consumption and passive note takingaking for example. And then we recognize that these are not good. These are undesirable. And so by actually making this explicit and identifying that it’s this combination here, this trigger leading to this process which is problematic. This bundle is what creates the problem. And so next time you engage in this skill, try to reflect on that. Figure out what the triggers are and what the processes are and then document them down. Once you’ve got them written down, we can move on to the next part. Step three, which is to create a pattern interrupt. We basically want to uh as soon as this old habit comes up and we start recognizing it, we want to be able to immediately mobilize our prefrontal cortex to stop it, to block it, and then give it that opportunity during memory destabilization to rewrite that with a better alternative. And one of the best ways that you can do this is by giving yourself a script. 24:53 A script is a predefined set of actions that tell you exactly what you need to do as soon as the situation arises. So this would look something like this. If X happens, then I will do Y. Or it could be if X happens, I will never do Y. So for example with with learning if the trigger for you is that every time you start reading through a dense piece of of text you enter into this sort of habitual passive reading mode. It could be that if I am reading a dense passage I will make sure to summarize every paragraph or I will always try to think about how this is connected to my overall goal or create an analogy out of what I’ve just learned. All of those things would be perfectly fine. All of those things would encourage uh deeper thinking and then better learning and they’re more likely to help you achieve the the real outcomes that matter to you. So that would be an example where we’ve said if I am doing the trigger I will always do the thing that is better for me. The alternative is if I am doing the trigger I will never do the thing that’s bad for me. So if I am reading, I will never read continuously for more than two paragraphs without pausing. Or 26:11 if you’re big on highlighting uh or you know, one of the things that I used to do in uni is just like highlighting stuff and just like making all sorts of little annotations on the side of things. It doesn’t really help. So that would be if I am learning something, I will never start with highlighting. And of course, uh these can be paired, right? You can have I will never do something and instead I will do something else. But it’s about predefining these rules. And the reason that we want to do this upfront is that it massively reduces the energy requirement on your prefrontal cortex at the time because it doesn’t have to make a decision about what to do. It doesn’t have to think about what type of trigger and then what am I going to do next? What I have to be careful about. It has a predefined set of rules that it’s just simply looking for. And as a result, because your prefrontal cortex is now not going to get tired so quickly and easily, it extends that window where your prefrontal cortex can keep overriding that behavior and developing the new habit. Remember, once your prefrontal cortex gets too tired, your 27:16 window of really retraining that habit has ended. You need to rest uh before you do your next round of practice. just continuing to push through that is not going to be very effective. So with these strategies so far, we have recalibrated the reward, which means that the old habit no longer has the incentive to keep looping. We’ve then figured out which process and which trigger we need to act on, and we’ve given ourselves a predefined set of behaviors to to execute on. So now your prefrontal cortex knows what to respond to and what to do to rewrite that habit effectively. At this stage, we now need to reinforce that so that eventually this actually truly does become a new habit. And there are two simple strategies that we can use to accelerate how fast we can reinforce the new habit. This is strategy number four, which is reflection. And then strategy number five, which is constraint drilling. Reflection is very simple. This basically says that after you have a practice session which will start with you trying to initiate a certain skill 28:25 and will end when your prefrontal cortex gets too tired to continue or you just run out of time. What you want to do is afterwards maybe take a short break. Reflect on how that session went. And there are two main questions that you can focus on. The first one is how did the old habit show up today? This helps with your pattern and cue recognition so that it’s easier for you to spot the triggers and for your prefrontal cortex to jump in and interrupt that pattern in the future. The next question is, how did the new method improve things? This helps bring your attention towards new systems of reward that you can use. For example, when I first transitioned from being a really passive learner, which I was like almost fully back when I was in high school, uh, to being more active and using more deep learning strategies, the discomfort and that effort that I felt at some point, I started looking forward to it when I was learning and I felt overwhelmed. I 29:37 started feeling a little bit excited at that feeling of overwhelm because I recognize that when I use certain techniques, I’m able to organize my thoughts really clearly. And it felt really good to be able to organize my thoughts to be able to go from feeling overwhelmed to feeling like it all really makes sense is really satisfying. And so by reflecting on that impact, it allowed me to be more motivated to continue developing that new path of behavior. And we can then combine that with the fifth strategy, which is constraint drilling, which speeds things up even more. Constraint drilling, I think, originally comes from sport science, which is why, at least that’s where I first saw it, is the idea that you can have one big complex movement, but there could be a specific part of that movement that is is holding you back. For example, like if you’re trying to squat a heavy weight, but every time you push up, your knees start caving in. Well, that could be the thing that’s stopping you from progressing up overall in your ability to squat. And so you might do a constraint drill, which is tying some bands around your knees and 30:38 then forcing your bands to push out at the point where they tend to collapse inwards. That would be an example of a constraint drill. But this principle now is applied in in all sorts of different fields outside of sports and especially is useful for cognitive skills uh like learning to learn as well. So you might find that in step two you identified a specific trigger like whenever you feel overwhelmed you tend to just write lots of notes uh very verbatim. So that’s the old habit that’s not serving you anymore. Now it could be a lot of time and a lot of you know mental effort to go through an entire round of deep learning and studying to encounter that specific issue that is currently your bottleneck. And so you can speed that up by not doing an entire big session. You can just start by giving yourself a trigger that is overwhelming and just practicing the step of when I feel overwhelmed instead of writing verbatim lots of notes I am going to do one to two sentence summaries and think of an analogy instead. And the good thing is that you can actually just practice this outside of the domain that you’re working in. You could just go to an AI 31:53 and say, “Explain to me in very high level of depth something that is technically very complicated and don’t try to make it easy for me.” And it will just give you an incredibly confusing, very long explanation on something. And as soon as you start reading it, you’re going to feel overwhelmed. That is an opportunity for you to practice right there. And so what we’re doing is we’re using that precious time and prefrontal cortex energy more strategically, just drilling in on those specific processes that we struggle with. And then as those bottlenecks change, we can change the constraint to a different type of drill, focusing on our new bottleneck. One of the good things about this is that you can also start making more incremental micro levels of progress towards changing that old habit. For example, let’s say that you’re trying to cut down the amount of notes that you’re writing. You don’t have to go from writing three pages of notes down to a single paragraph in one go. You can do a single constraint drill where your objective is to go from one page down to 3/4 of a page or half a page. Even if it isn’t the full scope of where you’re trying to 32:58 get to, just practicing that key process means that that will translate through when you’re doing longer sessions and you have more time to practice. And so by using these five strategies, we’re able to systematically and scientifically dismantle our old habits, allowing the path to be clear for us to learn the new skill and develop new habits. Normally achieving what each of these five strategies typically achieves takes months, even years, but it doesn’t have to. And hopefully now you can see how you can be a lot more proactive in your unlearning. So I hope you found that helpful. If there’s any particular step that you want me to go deeper into, let me know. I’ve really condensed down uh quite a complicated topic here. Each of these points that I’ve mentioned today, I could probably make an entire video about because it does get uh quite complicated. So, if there’s something that you want me to dive into, let me know in the comments. If one of the new habits and skills you’re trying to develop is learning to learn uh and you’re trying to figure out what are the triggers to look out for and what am I 33:59 meant to be doing instead to replace that then I think you should check out this video where I have uh gone through what learning well actually looks like so you know what the new habit you’re trying to form should be. So make sure to check that out. Thank you so much for watching. I hope this video was helpful and I will see you in the next one.