When you’re trying to learn something new, it is useful to create desirable difficulties. You want to work hard without getting to the point of frustration. That work will signal to your brain that you need to learn the material, which ultimately promotes retention of the material.

One way to create desirable difficulties for complex material is to explain the information back to yourself. Quite a bit of research suggests that people who routinely explain complex material to themselves learn better than those who don’t.

If explaining complex material to yourself is so effective for learning, then why doesn’t everyone do it? This issue was explored in a 2025 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Stav Atir and Jane Risen.

Their studies exposed people to information about a complex topic, such as how GPS works. In general, they find that people who explain the material they have seen back to themselves do better on a later test of knowledge than those who just review their notes.

In several studies, participants are exposed to the material and then are asked what method they would prefer to use to study this material for a later test. They can choose to explain the information back to themselves or to review their notes. The better participants believe that they already understand the material, the more likely they are to state that they prefer to explain the information back to themselves rather than reviewing their notes.

This finding suggests that people are concerned that the explanation task will be difficult and that they will not enjoy doing it. This is particularly true when people have a feeling that they do not understand the material that well. One study in this series later randomly assigned people to the two methods. Even people who stated they did not want to explain the material back to themselves did better on the test when they did give this explanation rather than just reviewing the material.

To provide further evidence that people’s sense of their own understanding is affecting their preference for how to study the material, another study manipulated people’s sense of how well they understood it. After being exposed to information about how GPS works, some participants were asked a few very easy questions, and some participants were asked a few very hard questions. The people given the easy questions believed they understood the material better than those given the hard questions. Then, everyone was asked to select a study method. Participants asked the easy questions (who believed they understood the material better) were more likely to select explanation as a study method than those who were given the hard questions.

In yet another study, some participants read a paragraph talking about the effectiveness of self-explanations as a strategy. Other participants read a paragraph suggesting that self-explaining is enjoyable. A third group did not read anything about this technique. The participants who read these paragraphs were more likely to select explanation as a method than those who did not—and the paragraph suggesting that self-explanations are effective was most likely to lead people to choose this method.

Finally, one study took this phenomenon out of the lab and applied it to a topic being learned in a biology class. In this real-world situation, students were more likely to want to explain material to themselves if they already believed that they understood the material pretty well than if they didn’t. Regardless of their preference, students were randomly assigned to a study method. Those who explained the material back to themselves did better on a later quiz than those who did not.

These findings demonstrate that giving self-explanations is a great way to study complex material. However, people are concerned that this method will be difficult and unpleasant, so they often avoid it. Telling people that this method is effective can increase people’s tendency to self-explain. If you’re trying to learn something difficult, don’t just read about it. Explain the material back to yourself.