MYTH: "If a study method feels harder, it must be working worse." Verdict?

DEBUNKED — and it's exactly backwards for the best techniques. Interleaving and testing FEEL harder and get judged worse, yet objectively win.

Effective techniques often introduce desirable difficulties: retrieval, spacing, and interleaving all feel effortful and slow, and learners rate them as less effective in the moment. Easy methods like re-reading feel smooth and get rated highly — the opposite of their actual value.

So "feels hard" is not a reliable signal of "learning less." The fix is a discipline: judge methods by measured outcomes (delayed tests), not by how they feel while you do them. Trust the data, not the feeling.