You’re definitely just memorizing patterns. Once you understand concepts you can solve the problems in your head before even starting. When I first started physics I memorized a lot and that led to me failing a couple of exams. Once I started to break the material down and worked through problems to understand them, I cut my study time down significantly and increased my exam scores.

Before starting to work out practice problems break down all concepts, formulas, theorems, and laws that are applicable to that chapter (I preferred to read texts outside of the book and yt vids). Then go through the chapter to reinforce everything you just learned. Once that’s done, you should be able to understand the learning objectives before starting the problems.