 So if you're feeling stressed out of medical school, this video is going to help you learn how to become more relaxed as well as do better in your classes. Let's get into it. Hi guys, welcome to the MD journey. A channel completely dedicated to helping you succeed on your medical journey with lots of stress. My name is Locke from an internal medicine physician. And if you're new to the channel, consider hitting that like and subscribe button. But today I really want to take you to a step by step approach of how to make overwhelming challenge, which is medical school and how to make it a little bit more approachable, a little bit more doable, doing it with lots of stress. Let's get into it. If you get all the resources I mentioned in the video linked down below, so make sure you check those out. In this video, I really do want to give you a step by step approach. If I was to go back into day number one of medical school, what would I tell myself how to make the overwhelming challenge of medical school become a little bit easier? And the first thing I would tell you as well as myself as a medical student act like you only had a limited amount of time to learn your new piece of information. 20 minutes is the number I'll give you now to take a step back. The biggest challenge, the biggest obstacle that we have in medical school is the sheer amount of information that you're faced with, as well as this overwhelming experience that you have that you feel like you need to learn everything. You know, it's easy when you have a PowerPoint slide that's 60 slides or a syllabus lecture that's 30 pages and you have multiple lectures a day, multiple lectures in an exam to become overwhelmed. The first step to do is to take a step back and say, okay, we have a lecture tomorrow morning about hypertension. Now I could spend a lot of time reading this lecture and spending an hour and not really getting very much of it, or I can say, okay, what if I only had 20 minutes to learn about hypertension? How would I learn differently? And you realize that your approach to changes from what you are doing to what you should be doing. A good example is if you realize they're reading a syllabus and 20 minutes is not going to be able to teach you about hypertension, it's probably not the thing to do. Instead, if you said, well, maybe instead I can watch a YouTube video where somebody has taken the time to take all the information about hypertension and put only the high yield information into one small five minute to 10 minute video. There are plenty of examples of YouTube channels and resources on the internet where people have been able to take very complex and high yield medical topics and put them into five to 10 minute videos. So why not start watching that? Simply watching one or two of those videos in the span of 20 to 30 minutes, you'll be able to get a good understanding of all of the topics. Essentially, you'll be able to understand the forest from the trees. Now, if you can spend 20 minutes the day before a lecture understanding the high yield topics of hypertension by watching a video on like osmosis or online meta, you'll be able to then go into lecture and being able to decipher. What did I hear in those lectures that are truly high yield and what type of material am I now also hearing from a professor that should be considered to be important. Now you're already finding yourself in just a short 20 minute review session as well as lecture to be able to highlight the most important things that you can now focus on. So if you choose to go back to reading the syllabus or reviewing your PowerPoint slides or using a different resource altogether, you can now get the biggest parts of hypertension that you should grasp if you were to do an initial approach of reading your syllabus. And so a pro tip or a pro strategy that I like to teach to a lot of my students in my courses as well as the Metalita Academy and I'll link that down below is to spend your like first 10, 20 minutes when you need to learn a new piece of information and actually go to a really high yield resource. I love videos because they're short or easy and you tend to remember a little bit more than reading a piece of text. If you had, for example, 20 minutes, I would use those 20 minutes to watch maybe two, maybe three YouTube videos from your favorite channels about different medical topics. And I would be writing scratch pieces of notes on a piece of paper. Now, after I watched those three lectures, I want to see how much of hypertension or whatever lecture I was learning about, can I summarize on one page without any reference? So you could use, for example, the back of that piece of paper you were taking notes on and try to see can you create a high yield lecture about hypertension in maybe five or 10 minutes. And this doesn't have to be good handwriting or to be your reference for hypertension, but instead it's a quiz. It's a test to see how much of a high yield information that you learned over the last five to 15 minutes can you now put on a piece of paper and basically reciprocate. And it's a very effective form of learning and active recall that you can do immediately after learning a new piece of material. And if you compare that to the typical style of learning where we read the syllabus, spend an hour of doing it and realize it really understands very much, it's just so much more effective. And so to summarize this tip, pretend like you only have a very limited amount of time to learn something. 20 minutes is a great example and this can be for your class for the next day or for a rotation. Then focus that time on going to a very high yield resource like a video or high yield text. And then finally ending that session with some form of review like we talked about of trying to reciprocate the high yield information on a blank piece of paper. Now if you start using this approach, you'll find that your medical learning, your understanding will be a lot more easier and stronger in terms of your foundation compared to the rest of your peers. Because they're trying to understand the forest and the trees at the same time, but now you've understood the forest. You've had two or three lectures where somebody has been able to tell you, this is what's important about this topic. And then you can go ahead and fill in the details through your lectures, through your future reviews of your slides and your syllabus lectures. But the tips for this video don't stop there. The next step is to be critical of every phase of your learning process. Now I've given this tip into different forms and various different videos, but essentially evaluate everything that you do for your learning. That includes how you acquire a piece of information, what you do when you go to lecture, what you do when you review your lectures, what you do as the test is coming around. And then basically ask how much time am I spending on each of them, as well as how much retention am I getting on each phase. If you're spending two or three hours acquiring a piece of information, but I don't know how to ask you. What did you learn during those two or three hours and your answer is like, well, not very much. Then you need to take a step back and say, I need to either make this more effective, potentially shorter, or do something completely different to make sure I'm getting the retention during that short piece of time. In a similar way, if you're going to lecture, if you're watching lectures, ask yourself in that hour, hour and a half session, how much information am I retaining? How could I make myself more active? How can I use this time to be more effective? As we start to get a little bit more specific, a little bit more critical of everything that we do, you realize one of two things. One, the thing that you're doing is probably not necessary and you can completely remove it. Or two, you may be spending more time than you probably need. So a very common question I ask a lot of my coaching students in the medic night program that'll be linked down below is if you had a two hour session that you're normally spending, what would you do differently if I forced you to only do one hour? What if you had no ability to fit two hours of studying and you only had an hour to do so? You find that the students will start to reflect on how they study. Are they spending too much time when they start their studying? Could they be doing something else where they could be getting the same amount of value but in half the time? Every time you do this, every day you do this, every week you do this, you find that you started doing less and less of what works regardless of what everyone else is doing on the internet or in your school and you only do what's personalized to you. That's exactly how I was able to find a study technique and I'll link it down below a video of the technique that I used to study for five hours a day in med school. That's how I was able to do it. I was able to take out all of the junk that wasn't working for me and only stick to the things that were giving me active results and also helping me in my long-term retention. And on that note, if you're enjoying this video and you want all of my tips for studying that we have here on YouTube, you can check out our studying playlist down below. Now I have two more tips that are very common pitfalls for medical students so make sure you say to let in. But number three is to use time limits and time reflections. Now we've kind of already talked about time reflections a little bit is where you go through a session and you ask yourself, how could I have done this more effective? But time limits is something that I found to force myself to be more efficient or instead of just saying, I'm going to review lecture number three today, instead I'm gonna say, I'm gonna give myself an hour to review lecture three. This forces myself that if I'm getting to minute number 35 or getting to minute number 40 of my study session, of a 60-minute study session, I'm not gonna be focusing too much on the details to pretend I need to make sure I get through the lecture versus focusing on the nitty gritty. So always give yourself a time limit on everything. That includes a time limit for your study day, what time do you wanna finish studying? This is my clock out time. But also every time you're doing a specific study task, say, how long do I think this will take me to do? So if you are going to review a lecture and it's gonna take you an hour, then fit that into a Google calendar and give yourself an hour and 15 minutes, but that's it. At the end of that hour and 15 minutes, you have to move on to the next task. Now the benefits of this really vary depending on the student you are. One class of students will find that they become much more efficient on focusing on the forest from the trees in terms of understanding the high yield information and not so much the details when they give themselves a time limit. On the other hand, you find students who still love to learn the little pieces of details and they'll get through that hour and 15, but then they're like, well, I need to switch, but I've only done 25% of what I should have done. That's a very good highlighting and kind of slapping the face of saying either my technique isn't working or I'm underestimating how long I should be spending doing this. And it forces you to adjust your study schedule and look for different techniques that you can do. So always make sure you're adding time limits to each task as well as each day so you can quickly then take a step back on a daily and a weekly basis and saying, where could I have been more efficient or where do I need to make some changes? And the last tip is probably the most important and that is that it's not about perfection, instead it's about gradual understanding. The biggest issue that I find in medical students is that there's this fear of what happens if I don't study this little piece of detail and it shows up on the exam. I want you to take a step back. The ultimate goal is for you to be able to take care of your patients and whatever field you choose. If it is a small piece of detail and you think that it may not contribute to the care of that patient, then it's usually a good idea to instead, again, focus on your foundations, focus on the forest from the trees. Next time you review it, focus on the details. Every time you go through a new piece of repetition, you'll find that you'll be able to collect those pieces of details, but it ultimately won't matter for your ultimate goal, which again, is to take care of patients. Once you get comfortable with this fact that you won't know everything, the first time you do it, the second time or the third time or even when you're in my shoes and it actually is a practicing physician, you feel comfortable of being able to learn every piece of information, every topic in a way of what's the most important thing I need to know to be able to provide adequate patient care and every time you find yourself uncomfortable, then you can go ahead and review those little pieces of details that are important to connect with us. And so to make this tip a little bit more practical, I wanna share an idea that I call my list of unknowns. And basically, if you start a new topic, if you are going into cardiology blocking, you know nothing about cardiology. It's probably gonna be a thousand different topics that you need to know for your exam that you have no idea how to even start and it's overwhelming. But instead, if you said every single day is an opportunity for me to take more things off this list and feel more comfortable, then eventually you'll get to the time where before test day, you reviewed everything on that list and that's the same thing that you should do in medicine. Where instead of focusing on the little pieces of detail, start creating a list of all the things that make you uncomfortable. You know, if you're learning about hypertension, but you don't really understand how calcium channel blockers work or how hydrolyzine works or all the different kind of numbers of systolic and diastolic blood pressures, all those things regarding high blood pressure, if you don't understand them, add them to your list. And every time you review your hypertension lecture, your goal is to be able to take more things off that list and saying, I feel comfortable with this. The more you can do that, the more in your cardiology block you'll say, okay, there was a thousand different topics that I didn't feel comfortable with on day one. Now, there's not so much and that's just because you basically ticked away every single day at one of those topics. So again, it's not about perfection, it's about gradual understanding. And even when you're in my shoes as a practicing physician, you're still doing that on a daily basis. But those guys are the various different tips that I would offer to you to help medical school a lot less stressful, a lot more relaxing and help you do better. And if you enjoy this video, first of all, ask me to hit a like and subscribe down below. It really supports the channel. It tells me one, you guys like this kind of content. But two, if you guys are also interested in learning more and want more step-by-step tips, then check out some of the resources we have down below in the descriptions. One of the things you'll see down below in the description is our med school domination bundle. These are basically e-books and strategies and step-by-step tips, that I was able to use in my own experience to help me do better and the same tips of help countless med students in the past. So if you guys are interested that e-book bundle is gonna be one of your best resources to help you do better on your first and second year, as well as your clinical rotations and also things like step one and step two. And if you want even more step-by-step advice and definitely consider checking out either our free resources on the MedVault or some of our step-by-step courses and trainings that we have on the MedElive Academy. I'll link all of those down below. But with that guys, thank you so much for watching. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Make sure you drop your comments down below. I'll be happy to answer them when I can. Thank you guys so much for always and watching my videos to the very end. I appreciate the support. Appreciate you watching this video. Hopefully I've been a little help to you on your journey. Thanks for being a part of mine. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.