One of the more surprising findings in learning research is that how well you do while you practice is often a poor guide to how much you’ll remember later. Sometimes, the two even point in opposite directions.

Much of the work on this gap traces back to an idea UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork called “desirable difficulty.” It holds that certain kinds of effort, the kinds that make learning feel slower and less certain, are what actually make it last. When you have to work to recall something, your memory of it gets stronger. When learning comes too easily, less of it tends to stay with you.

That’s an uncomfortable idea, because most of us treat ease as the main sign that things are going well. It’s also why the most useful ways to learn tend to be the ones people avoid. Understanding why that discomfort helps, and where its limits are , makes it much easier to use well. That inconvenience, learning that feels harder than it needs to, is often what separates real progress from just the feeling of it.

Why This Inconvenience Trumps Ease

Generative AI shows how this plays out. A chatbot can solve a hard problem in seconds, which removes most of the effort that would have gone into learning how to solve it. In a 2025 study published in PNAS , high school math students who used a standard version of ChatGPT during practice did better while they had access to it. Once it was taken away, they did worse than students who had never used it at all. In that study, students who used AI this way also tended to overestimate how much they had learned.

That doesn’t mean AI is bad for learning. In the same study, a version of the AI set up to act like a tutor, guiding students rather than handing them answers, largely avoided that harm. What matters is whether the tool does the thinking for you or leaves the thinking to you.

The same principle applies to shortcuts in general. When something makes a task feel effortless , it’s worth asking whether it has also removed the part of the task that would have helped you improve.

Not Every Inconvenience Helps

A difficulty is only desirable if you can get past it with effort. If the material is far beyond what you already know, struggling with it won’t deepen your learning. It will mostly leave you confused and discouraged.

Cognitive load theory explains part of this. Working memory, the part of the mind that holds new information while you make sense of it, can only handle so much at once. When the material is already complex, adding more difficulty can overwhelm it instead of strengthening memory.

This is why some techniques have limits. Mixing different types of problems together in one session tends to work well for simpler material, but its benefits seem to fade with very complex content. A 2026 study published in Learning and Instruction found that when secondary school students practiced complex physics this way, the approach paid off most when they worked through the material together rather than alone. Testing yourself is also more reliable for remembering facts than for building a deeper understanding of how ideas connect.

The goal is to aim for challenge that’s within reach. If you feel completely lost, it usually helps to get a clear explanation or walk through an example first. Harder practice works best once you have some footing.

The Inconvenience Is Worth Sticking With

Even people who know these methods work often don’t use them. Our sense of how well we’re learning is closely tied to how easy studying feels. A 2024 meta-analysis published in Educational Psychology Review found that the more effort learners feel they’re putting in, the less they tend to think they’re learning. Effortful practice brings more mistakes and less confidence in the moment, so it feels less effective even when it’s working better.

This is also why simply telling people to space out their studying or quiz themselves rarely changes their habits for long. Researchers who study self-regulated learning have turned their attention to what helps people start using these methods and keep using them.

A 2023 paper published in Educational Psychology Review set out a framework for exactly this, focused on helping learners persist when learning feels hard but is actually working. Two things seem to help

  1. Understanding that mistakes are normal and part of learning rather than a sign of failure
  2. Building a routine where reviewing older material is already scheduled, so it doesn’t depend on deciding to do it each time

A simple habit is to change the question you ask yourself after studying. Instead of asking whether the session felt productive, ask whether you could do it again tomorrow without help.

Desirable difficulty isn’t about making things hard for the sake of it. It’s about accepting that a certain amount of effort is part of how learning works, and not reading that effort as a sign that something is going wrong. In most cases, it means you’re learning.

Does a tough study session feel like an inconvenience, or a sign you’re growing? Find out how you really think about effort and ability with this science-backed test: Growth Mindset Scale