One of my students came in to chat last week about how to stay motivated and intellectually curious once she starts working. She is going into management consulting after graduation, a high-pressure field where there’s emphasis on constant improvement. Her challenge: although she gets her work done in school, she’s worried that she is going to check out and start “coasting” once she starts working. Coasting in the sense of, she will work her required work hours and not do anything to advance herself in her off time.

Without getting into whether or not she should continue to “work” in her off time, she described a situation where, absent the external pressure of an exam, she often checks out of learning for its own sake. This piece explores why we emotionally shut down during learning—and how to keep going anyway.

The Emotional Experience of Learning

People think learning is a logical, left-brained activity. In reality, it isn’t, or at least it isn’t exclusively that. We experience a range of emotions as we go through the learning process, but we usually aren’t aware of what we are feeling.

The emotion my student described was paralysis. Many times throughout school, she would open up her homework, start to get into it, and get overwhelmed with this feeling of paralysis. Her mind was saying, “I understand so little.”

In a way, her experience relates to the Dunning-Kruger effect—the tendency for novices to overestimate their ability in a given domain, and experts to underestimate theirs. When we start to build real understanding of a subject, that’s when we start to become aware of how little we actually understand.

This emotion is completely normal. I feel it often, and indeed, it might be the #1 thing that has held me back in my career. In the past, when I would start to dig in to some complex financial topic, by the fourth page I would realize how little I understood about the topic and would shut down. Couldn’t make it to page 5. It felt like I could see the mountain, but not the peak, and I was so far down in the valley that I couldn’t imagine how I could ever possibly climb to the top. In effect, I was giving up right after I started.

Why We Shut Down: The Emotional Barriers to Learning

This “giving up immediately after starting” feeling is a form of overwhelm.

There are a few drivers underlying this desire to shut down. These include comparisons, perfectionism/fear of feeling dumb, and impatience—the usual stuff.

·         We may subconsciously compare ourselves to someone who is already a master at something. If we hold this other person as the standard, without taking into account the time and effort they put into mastering the subject, our default narrative can turn into something like “I’ll never catch up to them” and as a result we’ll give up as soon as we start.

·         The early stumbling involved in learning something new highlights how imperfect we are (at least at the beginning), and if we already have a negative self-belief of not being good at something, the early failure of reading a sentence and not immediately understanding it just reinforces the negative self-belief.

·         Impatience can play into shutting down. When we sit down to study for class, for example, we sometimes have an end goal in mind—“understand the material” or “do well on the exam.” It’s also in human nature to want that thing immediately. But learning is a process of delayed gratification—it takes time for neural pathways to form and strengthen.

Learning is hard. It is slow and difficult, which is something we have to acknowledge up front. That’s the underlying theme connecting all of these negative emotional patterns—comparison, feeling dumb, impatience and perfectionism. Neural pathways form from use, and the only way to use them is to spend time using them. There’s no other way around it.

Antidotes to Overwhelm

My student’s core question was how to stay engaged, knowing that she often goes through this process of shutting down. Each of the underlying causes for overwhelm—impatience, negative self-talk, and comparisons—has an “antidote.”

·         The antidote to impatience: if I feel very far away from my goal, the important thing to remember is that learning probably has a stronger compounding effect than even money does. Learning often takes the shape of an S-curve—the earliest gains are the hardest. Getting the first 1% increase in knowledge is the hardest. The subsequent 1% gains become easier and easier.

On this point, we also have to accept the feelings of frustration and stay in the game long enough to allow that 1% to compound. If I spend time with the material or the task, I will learn. Human beings can’t not get better with practice.

·         The antidote to comparison: this is just accepting that learning takes time, and is always going to be difficult, for any person. Legendary investors like Warren Buffett weren’t born that way—he built himself into what he is, reading one financial statement at a time. Invest the time, and you will get the results.

·         The antidote to negative self-talk: In my experience, negative self-talk starts to crumble when we begin to receive incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. If I believe that I’m not capable of learning something—let’s say dancing—as soon as I successfully perform some kind of dance, that negative belief is now on shaky ground.

Again, getting to this positive outcome—learning one dance step and executing it successfully—does require that we have enough trust in our own ability to learn to stick with the overwhelming task long enough to experience a win.

I’ll conclude with a last point about the emotional dimension of learning. At least for me, there is an emotion connected to learning that is the opposite of the feeling of overwhelm and shutdown. That emotion is the “aha” moment. For me, it’s not happiness, exactly, but more of a feeling of satisfaction that I’ve transcended some intellectual challenge I’ve been stuck with.

The “aha” moment is one of the most satisfying emotions for me. It’s why curiosity and learning are among my most deeply held core values, and also why I enjoy teaching as much as I do. Seeing someone else get the “aha” moment is almost as much of a thrill for me as getting it for myself.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Noticing

When engaging in the process of learning something new, when have I experienced the feeling of getting overwhelmed or shutting down?

This could manifest in different ways. For example, this could be opening up a book, getting through a few pages, and feeling a strong desire to do something else. It could be avoiding opening up the book in the first place. It could also be other forms of busy “work” that help you to avoid the difficult emotions that come up when the learning process begins.

2)      Inquiry

If I feel overwhelmed when learning something, what is the underlying painful emotion? Am I worried that I’ll never master the subject, that I’m too far behind, or that it is going to take too long?

It could be all of the above, at different times.

3)      Action

The action here is to try to learn something and fail.

What is the smallest step I can take to confront the difficult emotions that are attached to the learning process? Sitting down with the book, getting into the first few pages, and noticing the overwhelm as it happens counts.

Learning is not easy, it is hard. We are here to do hard things!