Shadowing Practice: How To Never Get Angry Or Bothered By Anyone - Learn English Speaking with Video
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309 sentences
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It's 4.12 in the afternoon.
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A message comes in.
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Nine words, maybe ten.
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Nothing in it is an insult.
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If you read it out loud to a stranger, they would shrug and hand your phone back.
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But something in the tone was flat in a way that felt deliberate.
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And your chest goes warm, your jaw sets, and somewhere in the back of your head, a sentence starts assembling itself,
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sharper and cleaner than anything you would ever actually send.
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And now you go looking for how to never get angry.
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You search for how to stop letting people bother you, how to stay calm when someone provokes you, and every result gives you the same two pieces of advice.
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Let it out or let it go.
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Blow off steam.
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Hit something.
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Go for a run.
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Or just be the bigger person and don't take it personally.
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But here's the problem.
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Letting out is not the move here, and researchers have known it for 50 years.
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And just be the bigger person isn't advice at all.
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It's a description of the finish line handed to someone standing at the start.
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because being unbothered was never about feeling less.
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The people you know who seem impossible to shake feel exactly what you feel.
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Their chest goes tight, too.
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What they stopped doing is something else entirely, something almost nobody names.
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Welcome back to Psych Tunes.
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Today we're going to break down the real psychology of anger, why certain people can still reach inside your day and turn the temperature up, what's actually happening in the seconds after they do,
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and how to stop paying the price for it.
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Let's start by being precise, because anger is doing too much work as a word.
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In the research, anger is treated as two separate things stacked on top of each other.
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There's the physical part, the heat, the tight jaw, the heart rate, the adrenaline, and there's the meaning part,
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the story you're telling about what just happened and what it says about you.
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That distinction sounds academic, until you realize it's the whole game.
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In 2024, two researchers at Ohio State, Sophie Kiervik and Brad Bushman,
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published something in Clinical Psychology Review that should have made a lot more noise than it did.
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They pulled together 154 separate studies covering more than 10,000 people across different countries,
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ages, and settings, and they asked one simple question.
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Of everything humans do when they're angry, what actually works?
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They sorted every technique into two piles.
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Things that push your body up.
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Hitting a bag, running, cycling, smashing plates in one of those rage rooms.
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And things that bring your body down.
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Slow breathing, muscle relaxation, meditation, or just walking away and doing nothing for ten minutes.
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The result was completely one-sided.
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The calming pile worked, reliably across almost every group they measured.
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And the other pile, the one every movie, every gym, and every well-meaning friend recommends, did not.
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In some cases, it made people angrier than doing absolutely nothing.
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Bushman had actually shown a version of this back in 2002.
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He got people insulted by a stranger, then had one group hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who insulted them.
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Classic advice.
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Get it out of your system.
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Those people ended up more hostile afterward than the people who just sat there.
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One of them punched a hole in the laboratory wall.
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Sitting still and doing nothing outperformed venting.
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Here's the picture I want you to hold, because it explains almost everything that follows.
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Someone says a sentence to you.
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That's an ember.
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One small piece of heat, flicked in your direction, out of their own bad afternoon.
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An ember on its own does almost nothing.
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It lands.
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It glows for a moment, and if it is left completely alone, it goes out.
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That's not optimism.
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That's just physics.
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It does not have enough in it to become a fire.
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So how does a nine-word message become seven hours?
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Because you pick up the bellows.
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Every time you replay the sentence, every time you rehearse the comeback, every time you tell the story to a friend with the tone included, every time you go to the gym specifically to burn it off while thinking about their face,
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you are pumping air onto something that was going out on its own.
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And this is the part that stings.
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The ember was theirs.
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The fire is yours.
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You built it.
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Not because you're weak or dramatic, but because every instinct you have about anger is pointing you toward the bellows and telling you it's a fire extinguisher.
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The word vent comes from a model of the mind that treats you like a pressure cooker.
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Pressure builds, pressure must escape, or you explode.
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It's an old idea.
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It came down through Aristotle, it got a scientific costume from Freud, and it ended up in school programs,
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therapy rooms, and eventually in businesses that charge you money to break glass in a warehouse.
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Albert Bandura called for the field to abandon it in 1973.
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The field largely did.
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The pressure cooker just never left the culture.
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You are not broken.
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You inherited a bad instruction manual.
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So if the heat isn't the problem, why can some people still get so far inside your head?
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Let's look at four reasons.
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Reason one, you're still trying to win an argument that already ended.
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The conversation finished at 412.
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You're still in it at 11.
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You know the loop.
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You replay the exchange.
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You try a better version of your line.
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You imagine their face when you say it.
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You imagine what they'd say back, so you build a second line for that.
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You are running a courtroom in your skull where you are the lawyer, the judge, and the only person present.
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And it feels productive.
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That's what makes it dangerous.
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Every rehearsal feels like you're getting closer to resolution.
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Here's what the research says about that.
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In 2015, Philippa Verdoyne and Saskia Lavraizen looked at how long emotions actually last.
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27 different ones.
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And what predicted whether an emotion stayed for 10 minutes or 3 days wasn't how hard it hit you.
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It was two things.
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How important you rated the event and how much you ruminated about it.
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How long you stay angry is not set by what they did.
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It's set by how much you handle it afterward.
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That's the bellows.
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Each replay is one more pump, and the cost is that you hand over an entire evening, an entire commute, sometimes an entire weekend, to a moment that lasted four seconds,
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and to a person who is currently asleep.
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Reason two, you're checking whether they were right.
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This is the quiet one, and it's the one that decides which comments actually land.
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Think about it honestly.
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Somebody tells you that you're terrible at basketball.
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If you've never played basketball, nothing happens.
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You don't even file it.
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But somebody makes one small comment about how long your project is taking, and it goes in like a splinter.
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Why?
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Because the second one triggered an audit.
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Some part of you immediately went and checked the books.
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Is that true?
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Am I slow?
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Have other people noticed?
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The moment you run that check, you've done something specific.
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You've told your own nervous system that this event is important.
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And importance, according to that same research, is one of the two things that keeps an emotion alive.
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So the insult didn't stick because it was accurate.
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It stuck because you stopped to verify it.
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You gave someone with incomplete information about your life the position of examiner, and then you sat the exam.
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The cost isn't just the bad evening, it's that your sense of yourself becomes something other people can edit.
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Anyone with a bad mood and a spare sentence gets a vote.
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Reason 3.
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Some part of you doesn't want it to end.
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I want to be careful here because this one is uncomfortable, and I'm only going to say it once.
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Being wronged is a very restful place to stand.
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Think about what it gives you.
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You are right, they are wrong.
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The line is clean, and crucially, you don't have to do anything.
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You don't have to have the difficult conversation.
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You don't have to look at your own part in it.
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You don't have to change anything on Monday.
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Your only job is to be correct, and you already are.
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Compare that to the alternative.
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Letting it go means going back to the actual work.
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The project that isn't finished.
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The thing you said you'd start.
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The conversation you've been avoiding for six weeks that has nothing to do with this person at all.
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So when you notice yourself reaching for the story again at 11 at night, reaching for the version where you were treated unfairly, it's worth asking a hard question.
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Is this anger or is this shelter?
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Because righteousness is one of the very few emotional states that feels like motion while you're standing perfectly still.
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And the cost of that is measured in years, not evenings.
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Reason four, you discharge instead of settling.
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This is where all the popular advice does its damage.
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Something happens at work, you come home and you vent to your partner for 40 minutes, tone included, gestures included, the impression of their voice included.
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Or you go hard at the gym specifically to burn it off.
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Or you drive too fast.
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Or you find the one friend who will agree with you completely and you tell it again.
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You do feel something afterward.
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Lighter maybe.
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Heard.
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But watch what you actually did.
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You just took the moment and rehearsed it out loud with your body activated while holding their face in your mind.
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In terms of what your nervous system learned, you didn't process the event.
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You practiced it.
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You strengthened the exact pathway you were trying to weaken.
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Bushman's finding was blunt about this.
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People who vented and reported feeling better afterward were more aggressive, not less.
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The relief is real.
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The relief is also the problem.
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It's what makes you come back and do it again next time.
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The cost is that you can spend 15 years doing something that feels like emotional maintenance and is actually emotional rehearsal, and never once suspect it because it felt good every single time.
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So here's where all four of these leave you.
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You defend your dignity by holding onto the insult.
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You protect your self-respect by refusing to let it slide.
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That's the logic, and it's a decent logic.
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But look at the outcome.
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The person who said the thing spent four seconds on it.
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You spent seven hours.
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They forgot it by 4.15.
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You'll remember it in a year.
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You went to war to prove you weren't affected by them, and the proof you produced was an entire evening of your life, signed over in their name.
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Whoever can make you angry the fastest is the person with the most control over your calendar.
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That's the trade, and nobody agrees to it out loud.
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So how do you actually stop?
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Now before the practical part, I need to take one thing off the table, because it's the reason most people fail at this.
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You cannot decide not to feel it.
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Anger is, by the researcher's own description, the negative emotion people have the hardest time regulating.
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It arrives before you do.
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By the time the thought, I shouldn't be angry, appears in your mind, the adrenaline is already out, your heart rate is already up, and your body has already committed.
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Trying to use willpower at that point is like trying to talk a car out of skidding.
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Telling yourself to be unbothered is the same as telling yourself to be taller.
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So we're not going to work on the feeling.
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We're going to work on the two things you actually control.
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Your body in the first minutes, and your story in the hours after.
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Three principles.
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Principle 1.
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The body comes first.
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Always.
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The most common mistake is trying to think your way out while your body is still hot.
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You try to be reasonable, you try to see their side, you try to be the bigger person.
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And it doesn't take, because reasoning is happening on top of a system that is currently preparing for a fight.
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The story you build in that state will always be a hostile one.
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It has to be.
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Your body is already voting.
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So invert the order.
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Body first, meaning second.
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Practically, leave the room.
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Not to sulk.
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To lower your heart rate.
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you're breathing down deliberately with the out-breath longer than the in-breath for two full minutes.
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Sit down.
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Put your feet flat. Do nothing.
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That last one is important.
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Doing genuinely nothing outperformed almost everything in the studies.
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Not scrolling, which keeps you activated.
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Not running, which raises arousal even higher.
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Nothing.
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And a small note that surprises people, don't go to the gym while you're still holding the story.
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Exercise is excellent for you.
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It is not a good way to metabolize a specific grievance
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because you'll spend the whole session rehearsing it with your heart at 160.
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Come back to the meaning later.
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It will be a different meaning.
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Principle two, change the pronoun.
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This one takes four seconds and it is the strangest useful thing in psychology.
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Ethan Cross and his colleagues at Michigan tested what happens
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when people reflect on something upsetting using their own name in the word you instead of I.
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Not out loud, just internally.
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So instead of, I can't believe he said that to me.
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Why does he always do this?
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You run.
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Okay, Sarah is angry right now.
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What actually happened to Sarah?
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It sounds like a trick, and in a sense it is.
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But the effect showed up across their experiments, less emotional reactivity, less rumination afterward, and a more accurate read of how threatening the situation really was.
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A related study with Bushman found that people who took this stepped-back perspective during an actual provocation had fewer aggressive thoughts,
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less anger, and behaved less aggressively.
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Here's why it works.
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When you say I, the person feeling the emotion and the person analyzing it are standing in the same spot.
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There's no room.
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When you use your own name, the problem is still yours, but the wording puts you one step outside it, roughly where you stand when a friend tells you about their bad day.
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And you can see the whole thing clearly in about 11 seconds.
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You already have that ability.
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You just have never once pointed it at yourself.
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Principle 3.
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Rate the importance honestly.
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Remember what actually sets the length of an emotion.
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Importance and rumination.
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You can't lie to yourself about importance.
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Telling yourself, this doesn't matter while your chest is tight doesn't work.
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Some part of you knows you're bluffing and the emotion stays.
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But you can rate it accurately, which is different.
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Ask one question and answer it seriously.
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Is this person's opinion load-bearing in my life?
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Not, are they important?
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Not, do I like them?
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Load-bearing.
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If they were wrong about me permanently, would anything in my actual life fall down?
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For most of the people who ruin your evenings, the honest answer is no. A colleague you'll leave behind in two jobs.
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A stranger in traffic.
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A relative who has been saying the same thing since you were 19.
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Their assessment is not holding up any wall in your house.
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And then, occasionally, the answer is yes.
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Sometimes it's your partner, your closest friend, your child.
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And when the answer is yes, the correct response isn't calm, it's a conversation.
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Real anger at a load-bearing person is information.
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It means something needs to be said, on purpose, once, when you're cool.
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That's the actual sorting.
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Not everything gets swallowed.
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Most things get released, and a few things get said properly.
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What this turns into.
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Here's what I don't want you to expect.
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You will not become someone who feels nothing.
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That person doesn't exist, and if he did, you wouldn't want to be him.
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The same wiring that makes a comment land is the wiring that lets you care about people at all.
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You can't have one without the other.
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What changes is smaller and much better than that.
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The ember still lands.
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Someone still says the thing and your chest still goes warm at 412, and you still notice the tone.
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That never stops.
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You just stop reaching for the bellows.
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You feel the heat, you let it be four seconds long instead of seven hours, and you go back to what you were doing.
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The ember goes out on its own the way it was always going to.
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And after a few months of this, you notice something strange.
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People describe you as calm.
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They think you're not affected.
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They're wrong.
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You're affected exactly as much as before.
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You've just stopped funding it.
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That's the whole thing.
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Unbotherable people aren't people nothing reaches.
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They're people who stopped building the fire.
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Almost 2000 years ago, a former slave named Epictetus wrote down a line
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that every one of those 154 studies eventually circled back to.
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People are not disturbed by things, he said, but by the views they take of them.
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He didn't have brain scans.
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He didn't need them.
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He'd already noticed that between what happens to you and how much it costs you, there is a gap.
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And that gap is the only real estate you've ever owned.
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So of the four reasons we went through, replaying the argument, checking whether they were right, using the anger as shelter, or venting it out, which one is yours?
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Be honest in the comments because most of us live in one of them almost exclusively, and naming it is genuinely most of the work.
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And if you recognize yourself today, know this.
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There's nothing wrong with you.
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You were handed a broken instruction manual about anger, along with everybody else, and you followed it faithfully.
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That's not a character flaw.
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That's just what happens when the wrong advice is the loudest.
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If this video gave you even one useful thing, hit like and share it with someone you know who's been carrying a conversation around for weeks.
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They might not have the words for what's happening to them yet.
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Your 10 seconds could give them their evenings back.
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You were watching Psych Tunes.
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subscribe, and turn on notifications so we can keep taking apart the hidden mechanics of the mind together.
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Thank you for staying with me to the end.
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See you next time!
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How To Never Get Angry Or Bothered By Anyone”. This video has 309 sentences and 3116 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:48. The speaker talks fast, about 186 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| emotion noun | /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/ | A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data. |
| ember noun | /ˈɛm.bə/ | A piece of coal or wood glowing by heat; a hot coal. |
| insult noun | /ɪnˈsʌlt/ | Action or form of speech deliberately intended to be rude; (countable) a particular act or statement having this effect. |
| bellows noun | /ˈbɛl.oʊz/ | A device for delivering pressurized air in a controlled quantity to a controlled location. At its most simple terms a bellows is a container which is… |
| replay noun | /ˈɹiːpleɪ/ | An act or instance of replaying (of playing something, such as a game, again); a replaying of (something). |
| rehearse verb | /ɹɪˈhɝs/ | To repeat, as what has been already said; to tell over again; to recite. |
| pile noun | /paɪl/ | A mass of things heaped together; a heap. |
| cooker noun | /ˈkʊkɚ/ | A cookstove. |
| outperform verb | /ˌaʊt.pɚˈfɔɹm/ | To perform better than something or someone. |
| rumination noun | /ˌɹuːmɪˈneɪʃən/ | The act of ruminating; i.e. chewing cud. |
| unbothered adjective | Not bothered, serene. | |
| adrenaline noun | /əˈdɹɛnəlɪn/ | Epinephrine, the hormone and neurotransmitter. |
| ventilation noun | /ˌvɛntɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n/ | The replacement of stale or noxious air with fresh. |
| rehearsal noun | /ɹɪˈhɝsl̩/ | The practising of something which is to be performed before an audience, usually to test or improve the interaction between several participating people, or to… |
| activate verb | /ˈæktɪˌveɪt/ | To encourage development or induce increased activity; to stimulate. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| blow off verb | To vent, usually, to reduce pressure in a container. | |
| break down verb | To stop functioning. | |
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| come down verb | To descend, fall down, collapse. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| fall down verb | /fɔl ˈdaʊn/ | To fall to the ground. To collapse. |
| go out verb | To leave, especially a building. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Let's look at four reasons.
- Every rehearsal feels like you're getting closer to resolution.
- It's set by how much you handle it afterward.
- Is this person's opinion load-bearing in my life?
- Not, do I like them?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | you've been avoiding · has been saying · who's been carrying |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if he did, you wouldn't want |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being unbothered · is treated · is left |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | person who insulted · people who just · person who is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 63 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, you've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: faithfully /ˈfeɪθfəli/, pathway /ˈpæθˌweɪ/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, theirs /ðɛɚz/, strengthen /ˈstɹɛŋ(k)θən/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, rumination /ˌɹuːmɪˈneɪʃən/, ventilation /ˌvɛntɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n/, instruction /ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən/, crucially /ˈkɹuːʃəli/
- Long words — get the stress right: rumination /ˌɹuːmɪˈneɪʃən/, adrenaline /əˈdɹɛnəlɪn/, ventilation /ˌvɛntɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, extinguisher /ɪkˈstɪŋɡwɪʃə(ɹ)/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like emotion, ember, insult.
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.