Shadowing Practice: Why We Worry All the Time and How to Cope - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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It's not an illustrious category to belong to, of course, but there are plenty of us at least.
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It's not an illustrious category to belong to, of course, but there are plenty of us at least.
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We worry about work, money, being left, illness, disappointing, over-promising, madness, disgrace, just to start the list.
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We worry in the early hours, we worry on holiday, we worry at parties, and we worry all the time while we're trying to smile and seem normal to good people who depend on us.
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Thus, it can feel pretty unbearable at moments.
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A standard approach when trying to assuage our blizzard of worries is to look at each in turn and marshal sensible arguments against their probabilities.
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But it can, at points, also be helpful not to look at the specifics of every worry and instead to consider the overall position that worry has come to occupy in our lives.
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There is a hugely fascinating sentence on the topic in an essay by the great English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.
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The catastrophe you fear will happen has in fact already happened.
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When we worry, we're naturally fixated on what will occur next.
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It's the future with its boundless possibilities for horror that is the natural arena for exploration by our panicked thoughts.
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But in Winnicott's unexpected thesis, something else is revealed.
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The disaster that we fear is going to unfold is actually behind us.
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There is a paradox here.
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Why do we keep expecting something to happen that's already happened?
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Why don't we better distinguish past from present?
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Winnicott's answer is that it's in the nature of traumatic events from childhood not to be properly processed and as a result, like the dead who have not been adequately buried and mourned, to start to haunt us indiscriminately in adulthood.
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For example, we may panic that we are about to be humiliated and shamed.
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There are no particularly strong grounds for this in objective reality, but we are utterly convinced nevertheless because this is precisely what happened to us when we were tiny and at the hands of a parent.
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Or we worry intensely that we are about to be abandoned in love, not Not because our partner is in any significant way disloyal, but because someone who once looked after us at a very vulnerable point definitely was.
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A benefit of understanding how much our worries owe to childhood is a new sense that it isn't so much the future we should be distressed about as the past.
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We can replace dread and apprehension with something sadder yet ultimately more redemptive.
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Mourning.
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we can feel profoundly sorry for our younger selves as an alternative to being panicked for our future selves.
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Appreciating the childhood legacy of worries, we also stand to realise that we can adapt and improve on how we respond to what alarms us.
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If we have been well-parented, we will have been bequeathed a repertoire good moves to latch onto when crises occur.
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We know how to reach out, seek help, perhaps move away and only take as much responsibility as we are due.
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We have access to a corridor through our troubles.
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But when we have lacked this kind of tutelage, we remain in significant ways in relation to our troubles like the frightened children we once were.
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We may be tall, drive a car and sound like a grown-up, but faced with concerns, we resort to our toolkit of childlike solutions.
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We overreact, we go silent, we scream, we have little sense of other options, we feel extremely limited in our powers of protest and agency, we lose all perspective.
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To which it's appropriate, and in no way patronising, to remind ourselves of what can, in our deeper psychological selves, still be an entirely implausible thought.
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we are now adults.
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In other words, in response to the kinds of terror we knew so well at the age of four or eight, we don't have to be either as afraid or as powerless as we were.
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We can mount a direct protest, we can make an eloquent case for ourselves, we can complain and defend our position, we can rebuild our lives in a new way elsewhere.
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There are two ways to mitigate risk.
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To try to remove all risk from the world or to work on one's attitude to risk.
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Knowing that many of our fears have childhood antecedents, as do our responses to them, can free us to imagine that history won't have to repeat itself exactly.
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Adult life doesn't have to be as terrifying as our childhoods once were, and our responses to our fears can have some of the greater vigour and confidence that is the natural privilege of grown-ups.
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We'll still be worried a substantial portion of the time, but perhaps with a little less fragility and fewer burning convictions of total, upcoming catastrophe.
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About This Lesson

In this lesson, learners will practice their English speaking skills through the theme of worry and its implications on personal growth and emotional resilience. The transcript from the video titled "Why We Worry All the Time and How to Cope" offers invaluable insights into the origins of our worries rooted in childhood experiences. By shadowing the speaker, you will enhance your vocabulary, pronunciation, and comprehension while exploring a profound psychological concept.

Key Vocabulary & Phrases

  • worry - to feel anxious or concerned about something
  • illustrious - well known and respected; illustrious worries are those that seem significant but may not be based on reality
  • assuage - to make an unpleasant feeling less intense
  • traumatic - deeply disturbing or distressing, often linked to past experiences
  • abandonment - the act of leaving someone or something behind, often leading to feelings of insecurity
  • redemptive - providing a sense of forgiveness or salvation often through reflection and understanding
  • repertoire - a range of skills or types of behavior available to someone
  • mitigate - to make less severe or serious

Practice Tips

To effectively practice your English speaking skills using this lesson, consider the following shadowing advice:

  • Listen to the video at a normal speed initially, focusing on understanding the context and emotions being expressed.
  • Utilize shadowspeak techniques by repeating sentences immediately after the speaker, paying attention to their intonation and rhythm.
  • For a deeper practice experience, use a shadowing app or site that allows you to control playback speed, enabling you to gradually increase the difficulty as your confidence grows.
  • Focus on the emotional undertones while shadowing; try to express the same concern and hope as the speaker, adding a personal touch to your practice.
  • Record yourself speaking, then listen back to compare your pronunciation and pacing with that of the original speaker.

By engaging with these strategies and immersing yourself in the video's content, you will not only learn English with YouTube effectively but also develop a greater understanding of how to articulate complex emotional themes. This holistic approach will bolster your overall communication skills.

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.

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