Shadowing Practice: How to take back control of your mind through journaling - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Hi friend, today I'm going to teach you to take back control of your mind with journaling.
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I promise you, you can do it.
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You just need a piece of paper and a pen, and you're going to pull yourself out of a slump.
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Get your brain to start thinking clearly again, start to feel like yourself.
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It would be pretty awesome if you could do those things.
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Maybe you're overwhelmed with cheap dopamine, media, stimulation.
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Maybe you're going through something difficult in your personal life.
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Whatever it is, if your brain is going 100 miles an hour with negativity, with rumination, spiraling thoughts you feel totally out of control with.
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Journaling can be a really helpful practice to bring yourself back to center.
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I call this practice redemption journaling and I have used it countless times.
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The first step is I need you to get a piece of paper and a pen, something you can write with and on,
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and you're going to write the date and the time at the top of the page.
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And it's very important that you start with that because you don't have to think about that.
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Most people, when they go to start writing or journaling, they start freaking out.
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They feel all this resistance.
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Oh God, I'm going to have to face myself now.
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I'm gonna have to think up something to say, oh I have so many thoughts in my head but I don't know what to say.
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Guess what?
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Don't think about it.
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Pick something, pick a little detail that you don't have to think about, which might be the date and the time.
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You can also write your name at the top.
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What you've just done in doing something like this, writing the date, your name, whatever, is you've made a mark on the page as you started.
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You have created an open loop in your brain, however small, that now you can just continue with.
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Here's what you do for your first sentence.
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I want you to just write down where you are in the physical world.
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Where are you?
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You are somewhere.
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And I trust that if you're watching this video, you have the cognitive bandwidth to assess where you are in the physical world.
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Maybe you're sitting in your room.
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Maybe you're lying in bed.
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Maybe you're on the train.
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Maybe you're at your desk at work and you shouldn't be watching this right now.
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I don't know.
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I don't care.
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That's awesome.
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Just write it down.
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I am sitting in a chair.
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Great.
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First sentence.
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Done.
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Awesome.
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Then all you're going to do is connect that thought to another thought?
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What's another small, basic, material realm observation you can make?
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What's great about picking these little physical details is they require zero interpretation.
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You don't have to write about how you're feeling or what you think is happening.
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You're not going to start in the most complex, painful aspect of your situation.
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You are starting with physical details.
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I can hear the flickering of the fluorescent lamp overhead.
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My coworker just walked past or the crumbs in my bed.
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There are crumbs in my bed.
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That's it.
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You're not imposing a judgment on it.
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You're going to start with these physical details.
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I want you to do this until you have about half of a page filled out.
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What you've done is you have warmed yourself up.
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You are now in the writing practice and you've made no creative decisions.
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You have just served as a journalist for your life, reporting on the most basic menial details.
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And that's awesome.
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Now you've begun the process, I want you to take that observation muscle that you're starting to practice
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and I want you to zoom in on the specific details of your situation that you might call chopped.
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Maybe right now, let's say you're in a dopamine hole.
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You have not left your room in several days
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and you are surrounded by evidence of a lifestyle you no longer want to live.
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Maybe there are mounds of dried tissue on the floor. Are there?
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Maybe there are open boxes of vapes surrounding.
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I don't know.
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I want you to write down the specific pieces of evidence that are making you feel not great right now.
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Again, no interpretation.
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You're just reporting the facts.
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Maybe you're going through a breakup.
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You might say, yesterday I got broken up with.
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No feelings or interpretations yet.
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We'll get to that but you're just going to write down the thing that happened, things that happened.
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In doing this, you create a little bit of distance between all of the obsessive, ruminative emotions that have been driving you crazy.
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What a lot of people do when they journal, I've seen this and I used to do it myself,
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is they start with the most general assessments of how they're feeling.
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Oh, I am such a lazy person.
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I can't get myself to do anything.
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I feel like, I feel like, I feel like, I think I'm, and there's nothing wrong with getting your thoughts out.
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I I think that if it's that or nothing, do that.
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What I don't love about that practice though, is you're making all of these judgments on yourself that are not informed by any evidence.
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And what you probably need when you're obsessive, ruminative, spiraling in a dark place, is you need to create a little bit of distance.
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There is a stain on the floor that has been there for three days.
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Many times I have stood up to try and clean it, but then I have sat back down on my bed.
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No feelings in that statement, but it's a very, very specific piece of evidence that speaks to maybe the problem we're trying to address here.
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What you're noticing here, hopefully, is that this is what I think in a lot of senses good writing is.
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You don't make the interpretation for the reader.
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You give the reader all of the evidence, you give them the details, and you let them paint the picture themselves,
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or you let them jump to their conclusions.
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This is a lesson I learned from Chuck Palahniuk, who's the author of Fight Club,
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but it's a pretty solid axiom that I think a lot of writers go back to.
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Hemingway, many others who I'm failing to name right now.
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Don't… tell the reader what they should feel, give them the evidence and let them feel that way themselves.
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We're going to apply this same principle to your journaling.
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Does that make sense?
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Because you're basically, when you're journaling, both the writer and the reader of the creative material that is your life.
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So don't say I'm a lazy piece of shit, or don't say I'm a lazy, depressed person who has no executive functioning.
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Don't make those claims about yourself.
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Tell me that you have a pile of clothes in the corner of the room
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that has been staring you down for three days or whatever it is.
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Or say, you know, talk, then once you're starting to get into the practice, then you can say,
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you can talk about the glimmer of tears in your significant other's face as they ended things with you.
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Again, that's a physical realm detail.
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That's a piece of evidence.
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No interpretation, no feeling on it.
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Okay.
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What I'll encourage you to do in this first round of this practice is I I want
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you to focus on all of the grimy, gross, really chopped details of the situation, okay?
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You're just basically making a list of all the worst aspects of your experience right now.
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Now, again, you're not ruminating on who you are.
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You are almost in a third -person perspective right now, looking down at yourself, okay?
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This distance is helpful.
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What you'll also notice is when you get really specific, you start to have a little bit more empathy for yourself.
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Not even because you're in the right or your decisions are justifiable, but because you're looking down at this creature who isn't really you
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because you're separate from them as you're in this narrative mode.
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And you can kind of, it's like, oh, I get it.
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Like, I get you.
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You're okay.
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You know, here's a really scared, lonely human.
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And again, you didn't use the word scared and lonely.
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You just mentioned the fact that this person hasn't left their house and,
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you know, hasn't eaten in a few hours and maybe needs to take a shower.
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And you're seeing this person, you have a little bit of compassion for them.
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That's ultimately what we try to get to a little bit.
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Now you might also experience momentary feelings of shame or guilt or self -loathing.
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And with these things, like with all negative emotions that we don't want to experience, we're just going to observe them moving through our cognition as
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if they are bits of driftwood in a flowing body of water.
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And our cognition is that river.
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And we're just going to watch them drift away.
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Now your goal might be to fill two pages with that observation practice, looking at all the gross, grimy details of your situation.
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And when I say gross and grimy, by the way, I'm not actually imposing judgment on you or your situation.
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I'm just aware that that might be how it feels to you right now.
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That's certainly how it's felt for me.
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I've turned to this practice of redemption journaling when I have felt the worst about myself.
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And I've used this basic practice of observation to create distance.
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And I look at all the things I don't like
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and there's something cathartic about writing down all the things I don't like in just very detached clinical prose.
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I think you'll have a similar experience.
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But once you've said you've reported on all the details you need to report on, you feel like your job is done, typically that's two pages.
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Sometimes it's one page.
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But once you've done that, then you're going to close the journal and you're going to step away
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and you are going to systematically get back in your body.
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And the way you do this is through initiating a metabolic response.
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You're going to get your heart rate to speed up.
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You're going to get yourself either really hot or really cold.
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You're going to reset your situation.
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This can look like a lot of different things.
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You need to assess what you're capable of right now.
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I don't want you to push yourself past your limits or hold yourself to a standard that is unreasonable for you.
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Otherwise, you won't do anything.
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This might be going for a walk outside.
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This might be going for a run outside.
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This might be doing a full workout.
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It might be getting into a sauna if you have access to
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that or taking a really hot shower or a really cold shower.
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It might mean eating a meal.
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It might mean moving a little bit gentler through your life over the next 15 minutes and cleaning the kitchen,
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doing the dishes, resetting your living space.
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You're basically going to impose some level of physical effort over your life in the physical realm to change your situation.
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You want to basically snap out of the thinking mode that you've been in.
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After you've done all those things, you're going to feel like a different human being.
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And it really takes a lot less than people realize.
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Like one little shock to the body, a good shock, don't tase yourself,
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one little shock to the body is often enough to feel like a human being again.
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But you need to feel something in your body
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and then you can come back to the page
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and then I want you to do the exact same practice but focusing on some of the nicer details.
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So you can say, you can report on the experience you just had.
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The water landed cold on my skin like little pinpricks of
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the high pressure water from the shower crashed upon my skin like little pinpricks of light.
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Whatever comes out of you.
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The geometric proportions of my freshly made bed are soothing my mind.
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Whatever it is, okay?
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You're just going to write little details.
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I've surely beaten this horse to death and then back to life and then dead again on this point.
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So we're going to move on.
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You are ultimately not your obsessive ruminative thoughts.
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You are not your thoughts.
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You've probably heard that before, but you can hear it a hundred thousand times and that might not get you out of the spiral.
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What will get you out of the spiral is action. And what
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that action can sometimes start with is just creating a little
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bit of distance in your cognition by just reporting on the details.
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Report on the details.
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You can fill multiple pages like this
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because again you don't have to think about what to say
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you don't have to make any judgments about yourself
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you don't need to know yourself you don't need to find yourself
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you are just a consciousness moving through the most insane adventure of your life
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it's the only adventure you'll live it is your life okay you are you are a consciousness
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and I want you to just report on what's coming in through your senses and then let the interpretation happen later.
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But in the modern world, we've fallen into a cycle of constant obsessive interpretation.
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And we often forget to live in our bodies and to just be here.
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And I hope that these things don't sound like bumper sticker cliches to you.
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I hope that there's something in these words that rings true for you.
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I want you to practice the skill of living through writing the physical details.
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And then from there, then you can start to, you know, maybe make interpretations or draw connections, conclusions through the stuff you've observed.
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But when you're really overwhelmed, when you're spiraling, just start with that.
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Redemption journaling.
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Start with the chopped details, write everything that's wrong in the physical realm.
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Give me the evidence.
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Don't tell me how to feel.
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Don't tell yourself how to feel.
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Just write down what happened, what occurred, things that happened in the material realm.
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And then take a shower, go for a walk, go for a run, get in the sauna, change your body's physical state.
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Eat some food, drink some water, make some tea, light some incense, come back, write down the good details.
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You're going to feel like a human being again.
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You are in control of your life.
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I promise you, you can do this.
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This is, by the way, the exact practice that got me in the flow of writing
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and got me to write my second book and my first book that I don't have right now, How to Run Away from Home,
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which is available in all my links everywhere.
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Let me know if you have questions on the writing process or journaling.
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I'm not an expert.
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I'm just a guy who's trying to stay sane in the modern world through writing and creative work.
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And if that resonates with you, then I invite you to join me.
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I think that's it.
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Okay.
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Bye.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “How to take back control of your mind through journaling”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: detail, write, practice, physical. This video has 218 sentences and 2572 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:37. The speaker talks fast, about 204 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
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| interpretation noun | /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/ | An act of interpreting or explaining something unclear; a translation; a version. |
| spiral noun | /ˈspaɪɹəl/ | A curve that is the locus of a point that rotates about a fixed point while continuously increasing its distance from that point. |
| reader noun | /ˈɹi.dɚ/ | A person who reads. |
| judgment noun | /ˈd͡ʒʌd͡ʒ.mənt/ | The act of judging. |
| observation noun | /ˌɑbzɚˈveɪʃn̩/ | The act of observing, and the fact of being observed (see observance) |
| shock noun | /ʃɔk/ | A sudden, heavy impact. |
| gross adjective | /ɡɹoʊs/ | remarkably great, big, vast in an often unpleasant way; (of behaviour) Highly or conspicuously offensive. |
| lazy adjective | /ˈleɪ̯zi(ː)/ | Unwilling to do work or make an effort; disinclined to exertion. |
| redemption noun | /ɹɪˈdɛmpʃən/ | The act of redeeming or something redeemed. |
| chop verb | /t͡ʃɑp/ | To cut into pieces with short, vigorous cutting motions. |
| adventure noun | /ədˈvɛn.t͡ʃə/ | A feeling of desire for new and exciting things. |
| helpful adjective | /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/ | Furnishing help; giving aid; useful. |
| aspect noun | /ˈæspɛkt/ | Any specific feature, part, or element of something. |
| conclusion noun | /kənˈkluːʒən/ | The end, finish, close or last part of something. |
| lonely adjective | /ˈloʊnli/ | Unhappy due to feeling isolated from contact with other people. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| write down verb | To produce or set (something) down in writing; to record something. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| fill out verb | /fɪl ˈaʊt/ | To complete a form or questionnaire with requested information. |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| live through verb | To survive a difficult period or event | |
| run away from verb | To avoid or shirk a problem or consequences; to rush to back away from or disclaim responsibility for something. | |
| sit back verb | To recline while still in a seated position, with one's back on the frame of the seat. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Maybe you're overwhelmed with cheap dopamine, media, stimulation.
- Here's what you do for your first sentence.
- Maybe you're sitting in your room.
- Maybe you're lying in bed.
- What's another small, basic, material realm observation you can make?
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 | have been driving · has been staring |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've just done · have created · you've done |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are surrounded · are not informed |
| Possibility with “might / may” might/may + verb — something that is possible but not certain | might be · might call · might say |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 119 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, you've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: empathy /ˈɛmpəθi/, bandwidth /ˈbændwɪdθ/, cathartic /kəˈθɑɹtɪk/, loathe /ˈloʊð/, soothe /suːð/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, observation /ˌɑbzɚˈveɪʃn̩/, shock /ʃɔk/, redemption /ɹɪˈdɛmpʃən/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/
- Long words — get the stress right: interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, unreasonable /ʌnˈɹiːz.(ə)nə.bl̩/, initiate /ɪˈnɪʃ.i.eɪt/, stimulation /stɪm.jʊˈleɪ.ʃən/, metabolic /mɛtəˈbɒlɪk/
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 interpretation, spiral, reader.
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.