English Listening - Self-Control

Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast. Hey English learners, this is Connor, and you're listening to episode 234 of the Listening Time Podcast. Thank you all for listening. I hope your English learning is going well, and that you're ready to practice your listening comprehension with another episode. Today, I'm going to talk about self-control. This is an important topic, because it's essential to have self-control in different situations. We all have urges, desires, cravings. These words kind of mean the same thing. So an urge is like you feel this impulse to do something, or you want something. Suddenly, a craving is like when you really want to eat a certain food suddenly. Like you suddenly have a craving for sour cream and onion potato chips, or something. So we all get these urges and cravings, desires, and impulses, and they're not always good. And so we need to control them. So I want to talk today about this topic and about different situations in which it's important to practice self-control. And as always, I want to remind you to start using my advanced podcast episodes so that you can reach a higher level of listening comprehension. Because in those episodes, I speak fast, not slowly, like in these normal episodes. So if you're interested in those, the link is down below. And also check out my US Conversations podcast. In that podcast, I talked to different English teachers from all around the US. And it's a lot of fun. You'll learn a lot about the country, the different regions and states. And it's great practice for your listening, of course. I provide the transcript for you. And it's a great way to find an English teacher. Because I mostly talk to English teachers on that podcast. And I include the link to their teacher profile. So you can take classes with them online. I know many students have already done that. And they found a teacher that they like because they listened to them. They heard them on my podcast. So that link is also down below. Okay, let's talk about self-control. Why is it important to have self-control? Well, if we don't practice self-control, we are slaves to our desires. Meaning our desires control us. They are our master if we don't have self-control. Because whenever we have a desire and urge a craving and impulse, we just do it without thinking. So that's not good. We want to have self-control. And not all desires and impulses are bad, of course. A lot of them are good. But sometimes we have these bad impulses to do something that we will later regret. And we want to be able to recognize this and stop ourselves from doing this and have that control over ourselves. And sometimes we don't have this self-control when it comes to good things. Like maybe we're so happy that we just can't control our happiness or our excitement. And that's okay in many cases. So I'm not saying that you always need to control all of your emotions and everything. Sometimes we just need to express ourselves without trying to control all the details of what we say and how we say it and those things. But often our desires are not good. We're mad, we're angry. And so we have the urge to do something about it and that thing that we want to do is not good. So we should control ourselves. And so that can happen. We can have desires that go against our overall goals or maybe they go against our morals. Maybe you have certain morals, certain ethics, meaning things that you believe are right and wrong. And even though you have this in your brain, you know what is right and wrong. You have desires sometimes to do what you know is wrong. And you want to be able to control that desire and not allow it to push you to act how you're not supposed to act. So there are plenty of different situations in which it's important to practice self-control so that we don't go against our morals, go against what's right so that we don't regret our actions later so that we don't hurt another person so that we don't negatively affect ourselves. There are many reasons and many different situations. Let me talk about a few of them and I'll talk about why it's important to practice self-control in these situations. The first one that comes to mind is when you are driving. This is hard for a lot of people. For some reason, when people get in their car, they often become a different person. They are so much more stressed and they get angry easily, they take offense easily, meaning they get offended by what other people do. They have no patience suddenly, suddenly it's like they want to fight everyone. You know what I'm talking about. Driving often brings out the worst in people, meaning it highlights their worst characteristics or the worst part of them. Even when talking about people and maybe countries that are overall happy countries and the people there are considered to be not too stressed and more easy-going and friendly even in those places. Once those people get in their cars, it's like they turn into different people, not always, but this is often the case. So driving is a situation in which it's important to practice self-control because it's easy to lose our cool, meaning to lose our self-control and suddenly do something or say something that we shouldn't. So for example, people will sometimes cut you off in traffic. When someone cuts you off, this means that they move their car right in front of yours and you have to press on the brake quickly because the other car is not giving you a lot of time to slow down. So when that happens, we say that someone cuts you off. This happens sometimes and it annoys everyone, of course, and it's very easy to lose your cool and get really mad. and who knows what, but it's important to have some self-control here because if not, we can do things that we normally wouldn't do. Sometimes people tailgate you when you're driving, when someone tailgates you, this means that they drive really close behind you. Maybe they want to go faster, but you're not driving that fast and they drive right behind you so that you can feel the pressure. This is extremely annoying. I think we can all agree, but it happens sometimes and we need to practice self-control and not want to fight the other person because they're tailgating us. Some people get like this. When someone tailgates them, they take offense to that and they want to see who the driver is and yell at them. This can happen. That's another thing that happens on the road. When people pass you in a really aggressive way, you might take offense to that. If someone honks at you with their horn or maybe they do something really rude and they flip you off, as we say, that means that they give you the middle finger. There are many things that can happen on the road. If we can't control our emotions, we're going to want to do things that we shouldn't do and that we will later regret. Remember, when people get in their car, you don't know what kind of person they become. There are some absolutely crazy people out there. You don't want to pick a fight with the wrong person on the road. When you pick a fight with someone, it means that you start a fight. You don't want to pick a fight with the wrong person because you don't know what they're capable of doing. It's important to be able to have self-control and not allow our impulses, our sudden urges to control our behavior when we're driving. Another situation in which it's important to practice self-control is when we're arguing with someone. So when you're arguing with people, you might feel the urge to say something hurtful. So I'm talking more specifically about arguing with people. You love your spouse, your sibling, whoever. It's sometimes tempting to say something that will hurt the other person, but you should not do this. Even if it feels right, like you feel like you need to go on the attack because the other person is being mean or whatever. Don't say that hurtful thing. It's important to have self-control and stop ourselves from saying something that we will regret in the future. It's very easy to ruin a relationship by simply saying something. Just saying something that the other person will never forget. They will never forget that you said that to them. So we want to resist the urge to say hurtful things when we're arguing with people we love. And don't insult them. Don't say things just to win the argument. The goal should not be to win. It should be to resolve the conflict as a team. So you don't want to insult them or hurt them. And don't bring up the past because if something happened in the past and the person already asked for forgiveness and you forgive them, even if it was something bad, you shouldn't bring that up if it's already forgiven. That will really hurt your relationships when we forgive someone for doing something we're supposed to move on from that. And I'm not saying that it's always possible to forget that thing, but we shouldn't constantly bring it up after it is already forgiven. So we want to have self-control and resist the desire to bring up all the bad things the other person did in the past. So don't do that. And definitely don't hit the other person. I know that sometimes people can have the desire to just hit the person they're arguing with because they're just so angry and the other person is being such a jerk or whatever, but don't do it. Don't hit the other person. Obviously, we need to have some self-control and not just punch someone because we're mad at them. Right? So when you're arguing with someone whether it's someone you love or a stranger, we should not just give into our urges and do the things and say the things we feel like doing and saying if these things are not good. So that's another situation. It's also important to practice self-control when it comes to eating. We all do this sometimes. We all overeat from time to time. Some people overeat very often and I'm not judging here. I overeat sometimes. We all kind of eat too much from time to time and regret it afterwards. It's not a terrible thing to do this once in a while. But if you have the tendency to overeat and it's something that you constantly do, this probably means that you need to practice more self-control in this area. You want to think about how you'll feel afterwards because after you overeat, you always feel bad. It never feels good when you eat too much. It always feels bad. So this is a good example of being able to foresee the consequences of our actions when you foresee something. That means that you can imagine this future event happening. So it's important to be able to foresee the consequences of eating too much. In the moment, it feels good. You want to keep eating those chips or those cookies or whatever. But afterwards, you're not going to be happy with yourself. So it's important to be able to practice self-control and deny yourself another cookie even though you want it because you know that you will face negative consequences afterwards. It's important to have this self-control. And I know this struggle. It's like you're eating chips and you just want to keep on eating them. Potato chips often have this effect on people. I'm not even a huge potato chip person. I like chips. Most people do. But I don't usually crave potato chips. I don't have a sudden desire to eat potato chips usually. But when I do eat potato chips, I feel like I just want to keep on eating more and more potato chips. Have that effect on people. And it's so easy to just give into your desire and keep on eating more. And so it's important to have self control and know how to stop and when to stop. And so this is something that many of us can improve on. And we should be able to control our cravings. And sometimes it's not about eating too much. You just shouldn't eat something at all, even though you have the craving for it. And so you need to resist the temptation to eat that food because you shouldn't. So this can be a hard area in which to practice self control. But it's important. And one other area, one other situation in which we should have self control is with entertainment. This is a huge one nowadays. I think this is one of the hardest things for many people. People consume a lot of social media and TV series and things like that. And people often binge watch shows. I think many of you have done this. When you binge watch TV series, that means that you just keep watching episode after episode. And like you watch the whole season in one day or two days. So binge watching can really affect our sleep, our productivity, our work, our brain. It's not good for us. But of course it's very easy to do. And it's tempting when you're really interested and engaged. And you just want to keep on watching something. It can be hard to stop. So practicing self control is really important. You need to be able to deny yourself another episode and say, no, I've already watched two episodes. It's late. I need to work tomorrow. So I'm going to stop right now. I know that's hard. But we will think ourselves later if we can do this. And of course social media has the same effect, the same hold on people. Like people just want to keep on scrolling and consuming more social media. And people need to be able to put their phone down and do what they need to do work or spend time with their family or whatever. They need to practice self control and not just spend hours and hours consuming social media, even though it's addictive. And they want more of it. Video games are the same. They can be really addictive. And people need to have self control and not just play video games all night knowing that they need to work in the morning. And they should sleep and be well rested for their work. So all of these things require self control because these forms of entertainment are tempting and addictive. Of course, so we need to be able to stop when it's time to stop. Right. So all of these situations are common ones. And hopefully after hearing all this, you think about your own self control. And if you need to improve in one of these different areas, I know I have room for improvement. And so I need to take my own advice. And I want to encourage you to use my advanced podcast episodes, start practicing with real English spoken fast so that you can move up to the next level in your English. So the link to sign up for those is down below. And also use my US conversations podcast to practice listening to more than one person talking. Eventually, you'll need to be able to do that. And so that resource is one of the easiest ways that you can start practicing with that. And you can also use that resource to get to know different English teachers. So you can find someone who you like, who sounds interesting or nice, and you can take a class with them. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode. And I'll talk to you on the next episode of listening time.