Name: How To Boost Your Learning By 89% (explained in 4 minutes)
Uploaded: 2025-04-26T11:21:39.000Z
Duration: 4 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey, I'm Dr. Justin Sung, and over the last decade, I've coached over 25,000 learners.

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And what I've realized is that many students and learners waste 90% of their time studying and learning because of something called passive learning.

And in this video, I want to share with you a simple but powerful method called cognitive load regulation, which will help you to delete this passive learning and save thousands of hours throughout your life.

Use cognitive load to delete passive learning.

Cognitive load is the fancy term for mental effort.

Effective learning always involves mental effort.

Passive learning is the type of learning that does not involve high mental effort.

And in fact, it's not really even learning.

So rewriting notes is fairly passive if you're just writing it again word for word.

And different techniques on that spectrum of how much studying turns into learning have different levels of mental effort associated with them.

So, for example, creating summary pages is more effective, and then turning those summary pages into something that's non-linear and relational takes a little bit more effort.

And then teaching it to a 10-year-old and simplifying those relationships and groups that takes even more effort.

And this is simply just because the learning is what happens in your brain.

And now, not everything that has high cognitive load makes it effective.

Like, for example, if all you wanted to do was max out your cognitive load, you can stand on like a stand on one foot while you're juggling and someone's slapping you in the face with a fish while you read a textbook.

Your cognitive load is going to be through the roof, but it's not going to make a difference to your learning.

And so not all high cognitive load is effective learning, but all effective learning involves higher cognitive load.

But whenever your cognitive load is low, you can know for sure that you're not engaging in effective learning.

And so you want to be able to train yourself to be aware when you are studying, what's the level of mental exertion, cognitive load that I'm feeling.

And if it's high, okay, that's fine, right?

If it's low, there's a high, high, high likelihood that you're doing passive learning.

And those need to be massive red flags that you look at and optimize or just completely remove that out of your learning system.

And in fact, you can even do a quick test.

Have a study session for like one or two days, and then identify the techniques and the methods that you use where you feel that your brain is entering into that passive state.

It's feeling boring, it's feeling tedious, it's feeling monotonous, you're kind of falling asleep and getting drowsy, those are areas where your brain's basically falling asleep.

Just try studying a topic without doing any of that stuff.

Just literally remove it from your system, and you know what, you will probably find that there is no real difference to how much you learn.

And some of you will do this and be like, well, man, that's like 90% of all my studying feels like that.

You know, surely my learning has gone down.

Nope, it just means that 90% of the time you spent on studying was kind of a waste of time.

And I'm saying that from the position where that used to be me, so much of my learning was passive, and it took me a very long time, longer than hopefully it will take you with my videos, to fix that and make it more active.

If you want more of these tips, then check out the full video here where I break down 13 years of studying advice into a single video.