Shadowing Practice: How to replace doomscrolling with creative writing - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Hi, my friend.
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Today, I'm going to teach you how to systematically take back control of your mind through creative work.
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So we live in one of the most distracted periods of human history.
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Probably you feel brain rotted a lot of the time.
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And that's not necessarily your fault.
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It's that you live in a really overwhelming media environment.
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And what we need to do now is build skills so that you can fortify yourself against the distraction.
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Because the phones aren't going away.
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Social media isn't going away.
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We need to learn to adapt to the situation.
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And the good news is that it's going to be fun.
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If we do this the right way, it's going to be one of the most meaningful and engaging experiences of our lives, because we're going to use creative work,
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pursuing a passion, pursuing a craft to replace the consumption.
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Today, I'm going to teach you exactly how to start doing that.
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And I'm going to try to imbue within you all of the beliefs
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and the principles that you need to guide you on this.
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If we haven't met before, my name is Josh.
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I am not a doctor, though I do hold a bachelor's in psychology.
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I'm a full -time creator.
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And for the last three and a half years, I have been obsessed with this question of how to replace dopamine consumption with meaningful creative work.
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Because in a perfect world, we could take this amazing technology of the internet and social media and use it for good by writing and creating music,
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creating art, whatever our passions happen to be.
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So first, we're going to go through the exact system that I want you to program into your life.
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And then we're going to spend some time talking about the beliefs that you need to make this possible.
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So for the next 30 days, it's very simple.
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You're just going to wake up
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and you're going to go to your journal first thing in the morning before you go on your phone.
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And you've probably heard that advice before.
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Here's why it's important.
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You have so many ideas in your brain
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and often it can feel like you don't have any ideas because you're so overwhelmed with noise.
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You spend a lot of time on social media, just consuming information you didn't choose for yourself.
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And you need to get into the practice of emptying the reservoir that's up here.
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So in the beginning, you're not going to judge your ideas.
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You're not going to try to write something beautiful, but you're going to program 30 minutes for yourself in the morning where you can fill two pages with longhand writing.
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If you're familiar at all with The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, she recommends three longhand pages of writing called The Morning Pages.
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It's a very similar practice.
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A lot of people live by this kind of thing.
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You don't need to get perfectionistic with it.
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I just want you to get a pen and a piece of paper and practice emptying your mind.
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This is a meditative practice and it shows you what you're made of up here.
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You realize very quickly that you do actually have ideas.
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You realize quickly what you care about, what your attention gravitates towards.
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And those are beautiful pieces of data
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that then you can use in whatever creative work you're going to use to replace your consumption habits.
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30 minutes in the morning before you go on your phone, combine that with a morning walk, whatever you want.
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That's step one.
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Step two is going to be spending an hour a day consuming meaningful media that you choose for yourself.
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So very likely your brain and your soul is starving for nourishment.
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If 100 % of your media diet comes from information, videos, reels that you didn't choose for yourself, you're going to be overwhelmed with noise and starving for nourishment.
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It's like living on a diet of airheads, extremes, fast food.
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You get stimulated all the time, but you don't really ever feel full.
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So by pursuing stuff you care about, by finding a fiction book or a podcast or an album of music that really excites you, you start to nourish yourself again.
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Spend an hour walking listening to an audiobook or in a quiet room reading something.
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If you have no idea where to start with this, you can pick one of the great classic novels of our time or you can read something easier, which would be my collection of short stories,
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Dopamine Hole, that speaks to a lot of the emotional problems we talk about in this place.
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You might find it interesting.
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You might find it a little bizarre and scary and uncomfortable as some of the best art is.
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You get what I'm saying?
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Okay.
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You need also within this practice, some type of metabolic response from your body.
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You need to challenge your body.
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When you spend a lot of time thinking, when you spend a lot of time creating or consuming, whatever, you need to uncoil your brain.
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And you do that through physical practice.
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In the beginning, this is just walking.
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But over time, I'd recommend building a workout practice or some type of physical endeavor that challenges you and that is exciting.
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For me, it's bodyweight calisthenics, climbing, resistance training.
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I love that.
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And I walk all the time and things like that.
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Find a thing you enjoy that is challenging and get your body to sweat, especially if you've spent some time writing during the day.
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Some of my favorite writers all live by a dedicated fitness practice to get out of their brains and into their bodies.
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Joyce Carol Oates, she runs and often finds that some of her best ideas come to her during her runs.
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Haruki Murakami as well, same thing, right?
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Everyone's going to have a different approach.
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You got to find the thing that your body craves and do that, but understand the power of that for reconnecting to your humanity.
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Understand how physical practice feeds the creative practice.
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And in the beginning, you just start with these very, very small things and you slowly
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but surely start to fall in love with the practices
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that make your body feel good as opposed to drained and overstimulated all the time.
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And then lastly, within your day, you're going to connect with one human being.
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This can be reaching out to a family member, a friend, a loved one, having a deep conversation with your significant other,
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or just having an honest human conversation with the fast food worker who you happen to run into or whatever.
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This can look like a lot of different things, but I want you to make the effort to connect with another human being, not so that you can get something from them,
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but so that you can feel connected to someone else with a central nervous system who's probably not all
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that different from you.
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If you do these things, you're going to feel like a human being again, and you'll slowly pull yourself out of the brain rot.
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In theory, that's how this practice starts.
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And I know that sounds really dead simple.
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That might not excite the part of your brain
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that wants this really complicated or really advanced system for turning your life around.
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But you have to start with the smallest thing possible so
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that you can do it and so that you feel motivated to do it again the next day.
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What I think a lot of people do, people like us who tend to gravitate towards black and white thinking, is we want to push ourselves to the absolute limit when we're starting something.
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and then we can't do it.
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We don't have the capacity for it and so we burn out quickly and then go back into self -soothing.
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This is a vicious cycle that we're trying to get out of
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and you do that through gentle exposure to the meaningful practices.
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That's what the system looks like
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and I want you to try this for a week and let me know how it goes for you.
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See if it starts to stimulate more exciting thoughts.
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See if it makes you want to do more and then you start applying progressive overload.
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You start doing more just because you want to, because you start to crave these things.
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And that's exactly what we want.
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Then you start this snowball of positive momentum where you're naturally writing more, not because it's built into your perfect plan to write three pages today instead of two,
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but because your soul wants to keep going.
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That's great.
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Maybe you want to push yourself in your physical practice a little bit more because you want to.
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That's great.
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Maybe you want to like go out of your way to talk to more people, go out of your comfort zone because you're like, you want to.
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Do you understand that?
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Okay.
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Here are the beliefs that I found to be most helpful over the last three plus years of doing this work.
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Understand what the goal actually is.
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So let's say we're trying to go from consumer to creator.
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What is the goal there?
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The goal is to create a life so exciting, you don't need to run away from it.
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So many people, when they're trying to reduce their scrolling or consumption habits, try to, they fixate their attention on the scrolling or the distraction itself.
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And this is where you get blocker apps, time blocker apps, which I don't have a problem with, but I think they're band -aid solutions.
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Or people say, you know, I'm going to delete the apps or whatever.
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I'm going to try to, I'm going to impose all of these restrictions on myself to minimize my ability to distract myself.
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When in reality, it's like, what if you were so captivated by something better that you weren't even tempted to scroll?
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Imagine if you could build a life that was so exciting you didn't want to escape from it.
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Imagine you had something better to do in your free time rather than numb yourself into oblivion.
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That to me is a much more exciting outcome than trying to use self -control to just to box yourself in.
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It's like putting yourself in a straitjacket.
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What if you could live for something better?
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To me, that's what the real goal is.
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And that's why creativity has always been this North Star as opposed to consumption.
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For me, that's what excites me.
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I want to write and perform stories.
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I want to get on stage.
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I want to like make movies and do all the fun things that makes my soul come alive, that might look different for you.
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That might be the physical practice or the business or cooking.
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It can be any craft that requires you to invest your full attention in it
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and then create something that could never have existed without you.
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It's got lots of different forms, but to me, that's a better North Star than let me just limit myself
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so that I'm not tempted by the distractions around me all the time.
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So the goal is really to create something better than distraction.
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Also understand that your natural proclivity to distraction can be used to your advantage.
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So very likely, if you're a young person watching this between the ages of 15 to 40,
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you've spent many years now engaged in a hyper -stimulating media environment that you were not psychologically prepared for.
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You've been hit with dopamine at unprecedented rates every day for many, many days.
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And I fall into that camp as well.
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What that has done is it's actually, I mean, it's made you probably addicted to dopamine.
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But on another hand, it's increased your capacity for stimulation, which means you can handle a lot thrown at you because you've become accustomed to it.
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Imagine if you could apply that capacity to something worthwhile.
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It means you can handle a lot of ideas.
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You've consumed more stories and more media than any generation of humans before you.
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And if you apply that to a creative practice, you realize you have a lot to give and you realize
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that you really don't want to be distracted as much as you want to be engaged.
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And if you find things to engage you, if you put in the effort and the time to build practices that engage you, then you realize you have so much to give.
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You could probably create for a long period of time.
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right?
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You probably, I mean, it will take some practice and it will take some skill building as all things do.
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But I think that your threshold, like your meter for engagement is extremely high.
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And that's, that's an exciting prospect, right?
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That your threshold for dopamine actually makes you a powerhouse in terms of creativity.
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I'm still trying this idea on for size with myself.
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I'm not sure if it's for real or if it's a cope, but I invite you to spend some time with it and see if it rings true for you in your own practice.
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Understand also that entropy is the default state.
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So if you constantly, or if you over and over again fall, get on track and then fall off track, you lock in and then you fall off.
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Understand that that entropy is normal.
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Like the falling back into bad habits is normal.
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It's not that you're fundamentally flawed and it will always be a part of the process.
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Let's say that you invest yourself in creative practice
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and you find the passion of your life and you give yourself to it for 10 years, guess what?
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In 10 years, you're still going to struggle with entropy and bad habits.
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It doesn't go away.
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Steven Pressfield talks about this in The War of Art.
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He defines it as resistance.
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And it's a universal force that doesn't go away, especially as a creative.
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So you have to learn to befriend it in your own brain.
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All of your proclivity to distraction and, oh, I would rather mess around today or vape or do something other than create.
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I don't know what it sounds like for you, but understand that that's always going to be in the room with you.
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And you're better off talking to it, engaging in conversation with that part of your psyche rather than saying, no, I'm ashamed of you.
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I don't want to see you.
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I don't want to look at you.
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I'm just going to lock in until you're gone.
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It's not the way to go.
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Engage in conversation.
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Have love for that part of you.
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That part of you is probably connected to like the inner child part that you need for the creativity.
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So much of my best writing comes from the chaos within my own brain.
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My work would not be alive without it.
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So understand that the same things that pull you down into chaos
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and entropy might be the very dark vitality you need to create something meaningful,
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to maybe create your first piece of honest work that resonates with another nervous system across the internet.
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Understand that AI and all the chatbots
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and all the bullshit that's coming for us that's going to
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create really hyper -addictive media will never be able to understand the psychic stress,
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chaos, turmoil that you have within you that then becomes your competitive advantage in the creative ecosystem.
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You with me?
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Great.
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Entropy is the default.
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It's not going away.
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Learn to live with it.
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Understand that this game of creative work, going from consumer to creator, is an infinite game.
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It is a lifelong battle uphill, and that's what's fun.
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Go ahead and imagine Sisyphus smiling, because that's you.
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Lastly, understand that this process of fortifying our minds against distraction by aiming our attention at something better is a skill.
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So I want you to stop talking to yourself as if you're fundamentally broken.
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I want you to stop over -identifying with the things you struggle with.
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Everything that we're talking about here is essentially a skill issue.
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And that's a really empowering thought because it means through practice, through repeated exposure, through patience and intentional effort,
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you can achieve this transformation for yourself and understand that it's going to be fun and engaging.
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If it's not fun and engaging, you're not going to stick with it and it won't happen.
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This is an infinite game, like we said, and it's a skill that you can practice.
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Everything that you want, going from consumer to creator, building a meaningful life that you don't want to escape from, finding your passion in this limited life,
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and then throwing yourself at it so that you have something better to do than infinitely scroll in the age of consumption.
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All of that is the result of a few specific choices made over and over again because you want to, okay?
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Your attention goes to what is meaningful, right?
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You're not broken.
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Your attention is going to what you care about.
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So I will invite you to bring into your mental ecosystem new things to excite you.
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Let your attention latch onto something nourishing.
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Give yourself to it.
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Follow the simple four steps that we talked about earlier in the video, and then notice all the time the thoughts that come up.
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See if these beliefs ring true for you.
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Find your own journey with it.
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You're going to be different than me.
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But we are in this together.
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And this is effectively our resistance against all of the forces that want to reduce us to slop, that want to take away from us our human agency.
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If we do nothing, if we don't engage our creative spark, if we don't challenge ourselves, if we don't intentionally develop our human skills of thinking,
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writing, communicating, creating art, training our bodies, discovering what these physical forms can even do, we will be reduced to zombies.
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That's the trajectory we're on.
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And that sounds a little fear -mongery.
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I'm not, I, I, that sounds extreme.
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But I think you understand the sentiment I'm trying to communicate.
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And that's where a lot of my frustration comes from.
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That's the core spark of anger that got me started on this journey in the first place, that got me to start writing.
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That negative emotion can be really powerful.
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It can be the inciting force that gets you to start something.
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So if you're frustrated with yourself in any way, take responsibility for what you can and then get to work.
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Because in a very real sense, my friend, we need you.
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Speaking Goals for This Clip: Building Focus and Fluency Through Daily Practice
This video targets a critical fluency milestone: transforming passive consumption into active expression. By replacing mindless scrolling with structured writing, you’ll strengthen your ability to articulate thoughts clearly—an essential skill for confident speaking. The practice of "emptying your mind" through writing trains you to organize ideas, a foundation for fluent conversation. Plus, analyzing your own writing helps identify patterns in how you express ideas, making it easier to translate those patterns into spoken English.
Phrase Bank: Reusable Expressions for Daily Life
- "Systematically take back control" – Use to describe intentional habit changes.
- "Fortify yourself against distraction" – A powerful way to talk about building resilience.
- "Emptying the reservoir" – A vivid metaphor for clearing mental clutter.
- "Starving for nourishment" – Expresses a deep need for meaningful content.
- "Gravitates towards" – Describes natural attention patterns (e.g., "My focus gravitates towards storytelling").
Fix Your Weak Spots: Pronunciation and Rhythm Through Shadowing
The video’s conversational tone and clear pacing make it ideal for shadowing practice—a technique where you repeat phrases aloud immediately after hearing them. This helps improve pronunciation, intonation, and rhythm. Pay attention to how the speaker stresses words like "systematically" and "nourishment"—these are common trouble spots. For extra practice, use a shadowing site to record yourself and compare it to the original. Focus on mimicking the natural pauses between ideas, which will make your speech sound more native. Remember, shadowspeak (or shadow speech) isn’t just about copying sounds—it’s about adopting the flow of natural English. Combine this with the video’s writing exercise: after journaling, read your words aloud. This bridges the gap between writing and speaking, reinforcing both skills.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | haven't met · have been obsessed · you've probably heard |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | have been obsessed · be overwhelmed · weren't even tempted |
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.