Shadowing Practice: How to Make Stress Your Friend | Kelly McGonigal | TED - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
C1
I have
215 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
I have
2
a confession to make.
3
But first, I want you to make a little confession to me.
4
In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've experienced relatively little stress.
5
Anyone?
6
Mm-hmm.
7
How about a moderate amount of stress?
8
Who's experienced a lot of stress?
9
Yeah, me too.
10
But that is not my confession.
11
My confession is this.
12
I am a health psychologist,
13
and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier.
14
But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good.
15
and it has to do with stress.
16
For years, I've been telling people, stress makes you sick.
17
It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease.
18
Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy.
19
But I've changed my mind about stress,
20
and today, I want to change yours.
21
Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress.
22
This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years.
23
And they started by asking people,
24
how much stress have you experienced in the last year?
25
They also asked, do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?
26
And then they used public death records to find out who died.
27
Okay.
28
Some bad news first.
29
People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying.
30
But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.
31
People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die.
32
In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study,
33
including people who had relatively little stress.
34
Now, the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths,
35
182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress,
36
but from the belief that stress is bad for you.
37
That is over 20,000 deaths a year.
38
Now, if that estimate is correct,
39
that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year,
40
killing more people than skin cancer, HIV, AIDS, and homicide.
41
You can see why this study freaked me out.
42
Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health.
43
So this study got me wondering,
44
can changing how you think about stress make you healthier?
45
And here the science says yes.
46
When you change your mind about stress,
47
you can change your body's response to stress.
48
Now, to explain how this works,
49
I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out.
50
It's called the social stress test.
51
You come into the laboratory,
52
and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech
53
on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you,
54
and to make sure you feel the pressure,
55
there are bright lights and a camera in your face,
56
kind of like this.
57
And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging nonverbal feedback, like this.
58
Now that you're sufficiently demoralized,
59
time for part two, a math test.
60
And, unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it.
61
Now, we're going to all do this together.
62
It's going to be fun.
63
For me.
64
Okay.
65
I want you all to count backwards from 900 to 96 in increments of 7.
66
You're going to do this out loud as fast as you can, starting with 996.
67
Go!
68
Go faster!
69
Faster, please.
70
You're going too slow.
71
Stop, stop, stop, stop!
72
That guy made a mistake.
73
We're going to have to start all over again.
74
You're not very good at this, are you?
75
Okay, so you get the idea.
76
Now, if you were actually in this study,
77
you'd probably be a little stressed out.
78
Your heart might be pounding,
79
you might be breathing faster,
80
maybe breaking out into a sweat.
81
And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure.
82
But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized,
83
was preparing you to meet this challenge?
84
Now, that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University.
85
Before they went through the social stress test,
86
they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful.
87
That pounding heart is preparing you for action.
88
If you're breathing faster, it's no problem.
89
It's getting more oxygen to your brain.
90
And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance,
91
well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident.
92
But the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed.
93
Now, in a typical stress response,
94
your heart rate goes up,
95
and your blood vessels constrict like this.
96
And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease.
97
It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time.
98
But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful,
99
their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this.
100
Their heart was still pounding,
101
but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile.
102
it actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage.
103
Over a lifetime of stressful experiences,
104
this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s.
105
And this is really what the new science of stress reveals,
106
that how you think about stress matters.
107
So my goal as a health psychologist has changed.
108
I no longer want to get rid of your stress.
109
I want to make you better at stress.
110
And we just did a little intervention.
111
If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year,
112
we could have saved your life.
113
Because hopefully, the next time your heart is pounding from stress,
114
you're going to remember this talk,
115
and you're going to think to yourself,
116
this is my body helping me rise to this challenge.
117
And when you view stress in that way,
118
your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier.
119
Now, I said, I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from,
120
so we are going to do one more intervention.
121
I want to tell you about one of the most underappreciated aspects of the stress response.
122
And the idea is this.
123
Stress makes you social.
124
To understand this side of stress,
125
we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin.
126
And I know, oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get.
127
It even has its own cute nickname,
128
the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone.
129
But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in.
130
Oxytocin is a neurohormone.
131
It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts.
132
It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships.
133
Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family.
134
It enhances your empathy.
135
It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about.
136
Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin to become more compassionate and caring.
137
But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin.
138
It's a stress hormone.
139
Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response.
140
It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound.
141
And when oxytocin is released in the stress response,
142
it is motivating you to seek support.
143
Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel instead of bottling it up.
144
Your stress response wants to make sure you notice
145
when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other.
146
When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you.
147
Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier?
148
Well, oxytocin doesn't only act on your brain,
149
it also acts on your body.
150
And one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress.
151
It's a natural anti-inflammatory.
152
It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress.
153
But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart.
154
Your heart has receptors for this hormone.
155
And oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage.
156
This stress hormone strengthens your heart.
157
And the cool thing is,
158
is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support.
159
So when you reach out to others under stress,
160
either to seek support or to help someone else,
161
you release more of this hormone,
162
your stress response becomes healthier,
163
and you actually recover faster from stress.
164
I find this amazing that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience.
165
And that mechanism is human connection.
166
I want to finish by telling you about one more study.
167
And listen up, because this study could also save a life.
168
This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States,
169
and they ranged in age from 34 to 93.
170
And they started the study by asking,
171
how much stress have you experienced in the last year?
172
They also asked, How much time have you spent helping out friends,
173
neighbors, people in your community?
174
And then they use public records for the next five years to find out who died.
175
Okay, so the bad news first.
176
For every major stressful life experience,
177
like financial difficulties or family crisis,
178
that increased the risk of dying by 30%.
179
But, and I hope you are expecting a but by now,
180
But that wasn't true for everyone.
181
People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying, zero.
182
Caring created resilience.
183
And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable.
184
How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress.
185
When you choose to view your stress response as helpful,
186
you create the biology of courage.
187
And when you choose to connect with others under stress,
188
you can create resilience.
189
Now, I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life,
190
but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress.
191
Stress gives us access to our hearts.
192
The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others.
193
And yes, your pounding physical heart,
194
working so hard to give you strength and energy.
195
And when you choose to view stress in this way,
196
you're not just getting better at stress,
197
you're actually making a pretty profound statement.
198
You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges.
199
And you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone.
200
Thank you.
201
Thank you.
202
I mean, this is kind of amazing what you're telling us.
203
It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy.
204
How would that extend to advice?
205
Like if someone's making a lifestyle choice between,
206
say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job,
207
does it matter which way they go,
208
that it's equally wise to go for the stressful job
209
so long as you believe that you can handle it in some sense?
210
Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health and trying to avoid discomfort.
211
And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions
212
is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.
213
Thank you so much, Kelly.
214
Thank you.
215
It's really cool.
Download App
AI scoring for every sentence you speak
TRENDING
Popular
About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will practice English speaking skills using a compelling TED talk by Kelly McGonigal about how our perceptions of stress can affect our health. This session will help you improve your English pronunciation, enhance your vocabulary, and develop confidence in speaking. By understanding the key concepts of stress and health presented in the talk, you will gain valuable insights while practicing your English skills in a meaningful context.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Health Psychologist - A professional who studies the psychological and behavioral processes in health, illness, and healthcare.
- Stress - A physical or emotional factor that causes mental or bodily tension.
- Perception - The way in which something is regarded, understood, or interpreted.
- Risk - The possibility of suffering harm or loss; a factor that increases the chance of a negative outcome.
- Study - A detailed examination and analysis of a subject or situation.
- Life expectancy - The average period that a person may expect to live.
- Premature death - Death that occurs before the average age of death in a certain population.
- Change your mind - To change one's opinion or decisions about something.
Practice Tips
To effectively enhance your English speaking practice using this lesson, consider applying the shadowing technique. This method involves listening to Kelly McGonigal's talk and simultaneously repeating what she says. Here are some tailored tips to help you:
- Listen Carefully: Pay close attention to the speech's speed and tone. McGonigal speaks with clarity and emphasis, which is vital for improving your pronunciation.
- Start Slow: If the pace feels too fast at first, listen to shorter segments and repeat them until you feel comfortable before tackling longer sections.
- Focus on Intonation: Notice how she varies her tone to emphasize key points. Imitate her intonation patterns to sound more natural in your own speech.
- Practice Regularly: Use a shadowing site to find similar talks or speeches. This can provide you with a range of accents and styles, enhancing your overall skills.
- Record Yourself: As you practice, record your voice to evaluate your pronunciation and fluency. This step is crucial for tracking your progress over time.
By using these techniques and incorporating the vocabulary from the TED talk, you can significantly improve your English speaking skills and build your confidence. Engage actively and enjoy the learning process!
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
☕ Buy us a coffee
ShadowingEnglish remains 100% free thanks to your support. Server and AI costs are high — your coffee keeps us going! 🙏