Shadowing Practice: Why I'm able to study 70+ hours a week and not burn out (how to stay efficient) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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I never pull all-nighters.

I never miss the gym, even if the most important test of my life is tomorrow.

And I always study at the same seat at my desk every single day.

Why don't I do these things?

Well, in this video, I'm going to give you four evidence-based tips on how to actually prepare best for a heavy day of studying.

Studying the right way is important, but what about what we do before we start studying?

After we start studying?

Just like bodybuilders and big weightlifters can maximize their gains from the gym by eating a certain diet

and sleeping a certain amount of time, we can maximize our gains from a heavy day of studying by how we do certain things after and before we study.

These aren't going to be tips or techniques for how to study.

I'll be making a video on that in the near future.

These are just going to be tips and techniques for what to do when you're not studying.

What you can do when you're not studying to maximize that information sticking in your brain.

And actually for your brain to start creating new connections even while you sleep.

So let's start with sleep.

There was this really cool experiment where researchers took participants and had them complete the Tower of Hanoi task.

If you've never seen the Tower of Hanoi task, it's just this kind of test where you have to move rings onto different poles.

So what happened to these subjects? well, they got to try the Tower of Hanoi challenge once.

Then they were retested.

But they were retested in different kinds of scenarios.

Amazingly, when they were retested on the Tower of Hanoi test a week later without any practice in between, their performance improved by 40%.

However, if you let them try this Tower of Hanoi task the next day right after doing it the day before, but you mess with their REM sleep,

no such improvement is seen.

So that sounds to me like sleep is probably important for learning, right?

Well, I'll give you one better.

In another experiment, subjects were taught an algorithm for solving a kind of complicated math problem, but there was actually a better way,

an easier way to solve this math problem that if you thought about it enough, you could figure out.

This was a secret technique that the researchers didn't tell the participants about.

During the experiment, none of the participants kind of figured out this secret technique.

They waited 12 hours during the day, so they tested them in the morning and then tested them later in the night.

This was before any sleep would happen and see, wanted to see if anyone could figure out this new way of solving it.

Some did figure out kind of later on this the 12 hours later kind of how to solve this.

But what if you tested a set of people, again you gave them 12 hours in between tests, but instead of 12 hours in the day,

so morning to night, you gave them night to morning.

So you let them have a full night of sleep before retrying this complicated math problem, which there is a secret easier way to solve.

Remember both of these subjects get 12 hours of time in between their first test

and their second test but one group of people got

that time during the day and the other group of people got

that time during the night so guess what the people

that slept on it

or slept on the problem the rate of the discovery of

this easier solution more than double super cool to me i

don't know it kind of shows to me how important sleep

is not only overnight is the sleep locking in our memories

but judging from this last experiment it seems

that our brain is also trying to figure out better ways

to connect pieces of information inside our head our brain is coming up with new solutions

and answers to problems while we're floating away in dreamland

and even though we don't remember our dreams

and don't remember what happened during the night we wake up

usually with a better understanding of what we learned the previous

day one of the biggest handicaps you can actually put on

yourself before a test is not getting a good night's sleep Sleep is a huge topic

and it's one that's really interesting to me.

If you want to learn more about it, I suggest you check out a book called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

He says kind of many things about this topic, but the one thing that stood out to me, he said, once you start to drop below seven hours of sleep,

you start to see detriments in health and performance.

The quality of your sleep is also important, so here are just some quick things he suggests.

He suggests increasing bright light exposure during the day, reduce blue light exposure in the evening.

I always have my Mac go to night shift mode and turn as far to red as possible.

Avoid caffeine in the evening.

Caffeine has a pretty long half-life.

So even though you drink it and you may feel the effects kind of for only four hours, it actually sticks around your system for another four hours after that and another four hours after that.

Try and go to bed and wake up at consistent times.

Avoid alcohol, especially before bed.

Keep your bedroom as dark as you can and colder than you think.

It's recommended from a couple sources to keep it around 65 degrees Fahrenheit.

Again, this differs person to person, but you want to keep it colder than you think.

Personally, also, I have found that showering or taking a bath before bed really helps me go to sleep.

And I've almost classically conditioned myself to get tired after I take a shower at nighttime, because after I take a shower, I go straight to bed.

So bottom line, aim for eight hours of quality sleep.

The number two tip out of four for how to best kind of prepare for studying

when you're not actually studying is exercise.

I actually maybe discovered this on my kind of long study times alone.

I found that if I sit at a desk for a long, long time, I get kind of fidgety.

And if I just do some push-ups or do some sit-ups

or just get up and get out of my desk and do some kind of exercise, when I sit back down, I actually feel better and can usually focus better.

Exercise seems to play a role in how well our memory works.

In one study, two bouts of three minutes of intense treadmill running, so that's running on the treadmill for three minutes pretty hard, times two before doing vocabulary tasks,

increased peripheral concentrations of catecholamines indicated in memory such as dopamine and epinephrine, and accelerated the rate of learning by 20%.

I'm going to push even a little bit more here.

One meta-analysis looked at 21 studies and the effect of acute and long-term cardiovascular intervention or exercise on human memory.

Acute exercise improves memory in a time dependent fashion by priming the molecular process involved in the encoding

and consolidation of newly acquired information.

So again, I'm not giving any medical advice.

Again, I don't know anything about medicine yet.

I'm still only a second year medical student, but these are just the recommendations that I've seen from these journals.

How do we take advantage of this information, these kind of reports that exercising helps memory work better?

Well, we exercise, we do whatever exercise you like.

This could be playing soccer, going for a run, lifting weights, and I think it's better.

It seems like the research most supports

either exercising kind of before you study

or mid-study as opposed to after you're done studying is

because it seems the evidence is kind of less emphatic on exercising after studying.

So bottom line, I would say exercise before or in between studying.

Tip number three is your environment.

Where are you studying?

How are you going to be learning these things?

Take advantage of classical conditioning here.

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Every time I sit at a certain spot on my desk or in a seat at my desk, I know it's study time.

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If it's playtime or if I want to like do some random things on the internet

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or even if I want to do YouTube stuff, I'll actually just sit on a different side of the table

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or I'll sit at a different kind of place in my apartment just

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because I want to condition myself

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because I know in this place I'm going to be working on med school stuff and studying.

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In this place I'm going to be chilling out and in this place I'm going to be doing YouTube stuff.

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That's why I never ever do any work in my bed because my bed is kind of just for sleeping.

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So I'm only going to go in my bed when I want to sleep and not when I want to work.

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And if the location that you're at right now isn't working and you have the option, try a new location.

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Maybe this is the library.

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Maybe this is a hopefully quiet coffee shop.

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Maybe this is a friend who's really nice and will let you study with them who hopefully isn't too distracting.

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Find a nice quiet workplace where you can focus and maintain that same workplace every day you study.

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Because every day you study in that same workplace, every day you work hard in that same workplace, you're going to condition yourself to remember that in this place I will work hard and I will study hard.

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Next, I would say clean your workplace.

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In my high school psychology class, I think this was about 10 years ago, I remember I did an experiment with my friend and our experiment was,

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okay, we're going to have people try and memorize this list of terms, but we're going to put them in three different situations.

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The first situation is completely quiet, memorize as many of these terms as you can and then we'll test you afterwards.

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The second scenario is we're going to play some annoying noise, so a buzzing noise or a distracting beat kind of in the background while they're memorizing these terms.

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The third situation is we're going to put distracting imagery on the screen

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and play things and show things to kind of distract the people.

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So distracting them visually, distracting them auditorily.

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What did we learn from our experiment in that psychology class?

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Well, we actually saw that it seemed that people were able to remember 25% more information when there was complete quiet,

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when there was no kind of of distracting noises or there was no distracting visual thing.

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Now of course we shouldn't put complete faith in 16 year old Zach's high school psychology experiment, but I think we can put some faith in these peer-reviewed journals.

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And what does the research say?

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Well it kind of says the similar thing.

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Distracting environment, a distracting noise will kind of harm your retention of information.

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This doesn't necessarily apply to sounds that drown out other noises.

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So if you're in a city or if in your house where there's a lot of noise on, but you can put on noise reducing headphones with rain sounds

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or ambient noise or something like that that will help you drown out the background noise, that may actually help you as opposed to hurt you retain information.

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Finally, I just want to give a shout out to an amazing book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

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I hope I said that name right.

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This is a quote from the book.

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It is not our memories, but the person we have become of those past experiences we should treasure.

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This is the lesson that these keepsakes teach us when we sort them.

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The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.

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And maybe this is a bit deep for kind of a studying video, but I think it's a really good point.

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I'm kind of use your space as an indication of who

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you want to become as opposed to what you were in the past.

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So bottom line, what should you do?

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Set a consistent place for studying that is clean, quiet, and yours.

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my final tip is a tip about your mindset

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when you study one major shift in my mind

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that I've started to do before I start studying or

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when I'm doing something that I feel like I have to do

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instead of framing it as I have to study I have

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to work frame it as I get to do this thing

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I get to study I get to learn these amazing things I get to work with these amazing teachers

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and professors this change of mindset has improved my motivation and kind of happiness while I'm studying for long, long times.

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Side note, this can also be applied to other things you have to do.

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But yeah, I'm in medical school.

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Isn't that amazing?

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I've tried so hard to get here.

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It took me so long to get here.

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And I'm finally here.

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I finally get to learn about the human body.

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I finally get to be in the hospital.

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I finally get to do the things I've dreamed of doing for as long as I can remember.

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The other major change in mindset that I've had is from a book

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that I read recently called How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.

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My favorite thing I learned from this book is to live in daytight compartments.

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Well, what does that mean?

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Well, only focus on the thing you're going to be completing that day.

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Yes, you have a big test coming up in a week.

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Yes, you have to study all these things, but hopefully you've made a plan before so you know what you're going to study in that day.

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Don't think about where you're going to study tomorrow or the next day or the day after that.

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Just focus on what you're going to be studying that day.

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What are you doing right now?

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Just focus on that.

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A quote from the book is, if you want to avoid worry, do what Sir William Osler did, live in daytight compartments.

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Don't stew about the future, just live each day until bedtime.

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My last mindset tip is to know specifically what you are going to be studying that day.

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Because if you don't set where you're going to be studying that day, how are you going to live in a daytight compartment?

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And the specifics of what you'll be studying that day should be specific, right?

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It shouldn't be, today I'm going to study biology.

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No, it should be today I'm going to study chapter two of biology, chapter three of biology.

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I'm going to do 20 practice questions and I'm going to review a hundred flashcards or something like that.

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It really just needs to be something that you know exactly what to do so you can get down and do it.

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I have other videos about this, but I personally make my day for day exam strategy nine days before my exam

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and I make my week strategy during kind of a regular week of studying Friday before the next week.

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Bottom line, change your mindset from you have to do this to you get to do this.

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Only focus at the task at hand.

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Live in daytight compartments and know specifically what you will be studying, exactly what you will be studying before you actually get started.

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These are things that I've kept to consistently

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that I think have made the biggest difference in my studying outside of actual studying.

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But that is it.

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Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one.

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About This Lesson

In this lesson, you’ll explore practical strategies for staying efficient while studying—plus, you’ll practice your English listening and speaking skills through shadowing. The video dives into evidence-based tips for maximizing learning, focusing on what to do when you’re not studying, like sleep and routine. You’ll learn how to follow natural speech patterns, pick up new vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation by mimicking the speaker’s tone and pace.

Key Vocabulary & Phrases

Burn out: To become exhausted from overwork or stress (e.g., "She avoids burning out by taking daily breaks").
REM sleep: A stage of sleep where dreaming occurs, crucial for memory (e.g., "Disrupting REM sleep can hinder learning").
Algorithm: A step-by-step process for solving a problem (e.g., "He learned an algorithm to solve the math equation").
Maximize gains: To get the most out of an activity (e.g., "Athletes maximize gains with proper diet and rest").
Lock in memories: To solidify information in your mind (e.g., "Sleep helps lock in memories from the day").

Practice Tips

This video has a conversational tone with a moderate speed, making it perfect for shadowing. Here’s how to practice: First, listen to short 10-15 second clips and repeat them immediately, focusing on matching the speaker’s rhythm and stress. Notice how words like "actually" and "amazingly" are emphasized to highlight key points—this will help you improve English pronunciation. For tricky phrases like "Tower of Hanoi task," break them into syllables and practice saying them slowly before speeding up. Use a shadowing site to record yourself and compare it to the original; this will show you where to adjust your intonation. Remember, shadow speak (or shadowspeak) is about mimicking naturally, not perfectly—so don’t worry if you stumble. Over time, this practice will make your English sound more fluent and confident. Try shadowing the section about sleep experiments first; the story-like structure makes it easy to follow and repeat!

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	you've never seen · have found · I've seen
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	were retested · is seen · were taught

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →