Farah Mahmood – Aug 28, 2019
^{Edited by Rabhia Shuja}

Ever wondered how beautiful the word ‘learning’ is? It basically means that despite our age, gender, racial, religious or cultural background we could learn a new set of beliefs, behaviors, attitudes and skills. It also means that we could unlearn some of the previously learned set of beliefs, behaviors, attitudes and skills that do not serve us anymore. It is amazing how truly powerful and unstoppable we can become if we truly believe in our human capacity to learn and grow! The good news here is that even if no one has ever told you that, you don’t have to stick with the old, unhelpful habitual ways that serve no purpose to you. Learning is a lifelong process in so many ways. Human development, including the cognitive, behavioral and emotional growth spans a lifetime, which typically means that each day is a new opportunity for us to learn new things! However in order to learn to our full potential, it is important that we overcome all of potential challenges that block and compromise our learning experiences.

Common learning challenges:

• When you are a perfectionist, you may come off as lazy. However researches explain that might not always be the case. Perfectionists typically take longer to get things done because they usually wait for the right time and right vibe to initiate and complete a task.
• Another common challenge with learning has been reported to be the short attention span. Some of us would usually leave the ending part for later because of a perceived sense of boredom.
• While some of us report to be struggling with time. We may go through our days completing our tasks and goals, meeting panic induced deadlines at school and work but that leaves no time to invest on self-learning.

Learning how to learn:.

1. The first tip is to give your brain the gift of physical exercise. As physical exercise generates new neural connections in the hippocampus, a brain area that is very important for learning new things and creativity

2. For the second most common learning challenge called short attention span, a learning technique called ‘Pomodoro’ is found to be very useful. With the 25-minute period of uninterrupted focus, people usually don’t outlet their neural discomfort before the 5 minutes break, which keeps them working on the task at hand.

3. Writing a brief list of weekly key tasks could be very helpful. Writing down your tasks the night before will keep your subconscious working on the problem solving around those tasks. The list will also produce a sense of responsibility to accomplish those tasks within the defined deadlines.

4. Practice makes it perfect. ‘Practice can repair, as well as train the brain’. It means that we could learn anything at any time by merely practicing.

Applying these tips to life: 

• First and the foremost thing that we should aim to apply to life is physical exercise. There is strong evidence that aerobic exercise physically remodels the brain for peak performance on all fronts.
• Using ‘Pomodoro’ on a daily basis to complete undesirable or boring tasks can be very helpful.
• When you are easily stressed out by jumbled up information, weekly planners and daily to-do lists are a great way to make sense out of things and enhance your learning and task accomplishment.
• Last but not the least, remembering that practice can always train the brain as well as repair missing patterns. So the next time you feel like giving up or feel like you are not good enough, question yourself, ‘have I practiced it?’.