Daily Dose of English 24
Habits
Daily Dose of English 24
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today because in this episode, we're talking about one of my favorite topics, habits. Habits, building habits. If you don't know that word, a habit is something that you do very consistently a lot and you often get very good at it and it becomes a natural part of you in many ways. Something that might be a habit is brushing your teeth every night before bed. Or another habit could be sleeping on your right side, right? You get used to always sleeping on the right side of your body and so you always sleep like that. Or little habits, like do you put on your pants right leg and then left leg, or left leg then right leg? There's tons of tiny little habits that we build, and I think they're very interesting. Habits are also something that are really important to self-improvement and health and language learning specifically. Because habits allow us to essentially process less information and still do more things. Let me explain that. What do I mean by that? So every day, we have to take decisions or make decisions frequently, very, very often. But decision-making is tiring, right? Your brain does get tired by taking or making more decisions. I don't know why I'm saying taking decisions. Do you take a decision? I don't think you take a decision. You make a decision. Anyways, making decisions is a tiring thing. And so if you have to make a lot more decisions throughout your day, you're going to be a lot more tired at the end of it. And so habits allow us to essentially already have made a decision. Our brain doesn't have to think, okay, what order should I put on my pants in? Should I do right leg, then left leg, or left leg, then right leg? You just chose to do right, left. That's fine. It's completely irrelevant to the rest of your life. And so you just choose to always do that. Same goes for things like brushing your teeth or I don't know, like probably the order that you shower in, right? Maybe you probably shower in a similar order by washing a certain part of your body, then the next, the next, da, da, da, because you don't need to think about that. That's not helpful to think about every single day because you can just choose it once and you're good for the rest of your life. And so there's a lot of ways that habits can be used by people to improve their lives as well. Habits can be bad, we'll get to that in a second, but I wanna start with the good of habits. Because if you build a habit well, it can essentially take you further, it can take you very far in your life without any extra effort, so to speak. For example, with language learning, if you can build a habit to do a couple of things every single day with language learning, you will learn that language eventually. You don't have to worry every single day that you're doing enough of it because you've built this base habit that you can just build on top of. So for example, with my check learning, I've been learning check every single day for over a year now. And every single day I do a certain amount of time. Right now I'm doing two and a half hours per day. And I just do that every day. I don't really make a choice about it. I wake up and I do my check. That's what I do. It's a habit. I've built that habit into my system. There's a lot of different habits I've built. specifically to help me with my personal projects or personal development or whatever. Actually, recording this podcast has become a bit of a habit and it's been very, very helpful for making all of these episodes. A lot of similar style podcasts or YouTube channels really struggle to make daily or even weekly videos because they don't let it become a habit. And that's reasonable. Building habits is hard because we're never taught how to build habits, or most people aren't. Most people aren't taught how to build habits, yet they're so powerful and useful. They're actually not even that hard to build once you get used to it. There's a couple of tricks you can use to improve them, but just a very basic how to build habits, I guess, crash course is start very small, do it consistently, and then build from there. And I say start small as in choose something very, very small, right? So an example would be if you want to build a habit with your English learning, your habit, you could start it as, start listening to a daily dose of English every single day. Just start. That's all you need to do. Because then from there, once you can do that every single day, then you can say, finish a daily dose of English with Ben every single day. And then you can go from there and you can build it up over time. But if you try to start your habit with something like do four hours of English every day, you're going to fail very quickly because one day where you can't make four hours, you're going to go, well, I guess it's useless. I shouldn't even continue. And so I highly recommend that you start really small and build up from there. There's other tricks that you can learn. Um, I talk about that in other places and I'll probably talk about it on future episodes, or you can look into the book atomic habits, um, by James clear or, uh, Oh, geez, I forget the other name. There's a similar book. Um, I don't remember the name right now. I'm sorry, but there's a lot of books on habit building. Honestly, you can just look it up and you can find plenty of stuff often in English to improve other parts of your English. But now I want to talk a little bit about bad habits because those can have the same impact but in the other direction, in a negative way. Because bad habits are often easier to build because somebody else is benefiting from them in some way. What do I mean by that? Because most habits that we have are doing something for someone, whether it's for ourselves or for somebody else. An example of a bad habit would be a certain kind of junk food that you really like and getting it every single day on your way home from work or something like that. That habit of food that is unhealthy for you isn't really helping you, it's helping the company that sells that food. It might also be helping you if you really enjoy it or it's a really happy part of your day, but if it's not really something like that, then maybe you should examine that habit and ask yourself if it's really necessary. because a lot of products and things in our daily lives are created through habits, essentially. A lot of companies want you to build a habit of using their product because customers that come back every single day spend more money. That's just a fact, right? If you go to the same restaurant every single day, you're going to spend more money there, obviously. Video games use this a lot, right? And so a lot of video games have daily quests or whatever it is to build a habit so that you log in every day and you do something there. It might feel like they're not really getting anything, but they are getting something from you. They're getting your attention, your time, and you're much, much, much more likely to spend money on something that you do every single day. Same goes for companies that put tons of sugar or whatever is just addictive into food to build a sort of habit or dependency on that food, right? Sugary drinks do the exact same thing. Um, or you can also just build bad habits on your own, right? If you, if you're sort of sabotaging yourself or causing yourself problems by putting something off, for example, let's say you get a new, um, assignment from work or from school and your habit is to do it later. Right. And say, I'll do it later. I'll do it later. I'll do it later. Building that habit makes it a lot harder to actually do that thing on time. And so if you want to be a really successful language learner, it's also important to look at the habits in your life that are not helping you in any way and look at ways to reduce their damage or to get rid of them. This is not easy. I'm not saying that you can just suddenly choose to eliminate all your bad habits, but at least being aware of them is very, very helpful. Nobody's perfect. Nobody has no bad habits and that's totally fine, but you can at least be aware of them and understand when they're getting in your way. I've known a lot of people who are completely oblivious. That means that's when you just don't know that something exists or is. They're completely oblivious to the fact that they have a lot of bad habits and they end up blaming the rest of the world on things rather than themselves and their bad habits. because they do have control over their own actions in terms of little things like that, especially if it's stuff like junk food or when you do your assignments or whatever else. So, I invite you to think about your habits. What are some good habits you have? What are some bad habits that you have that you maybe want to get rid of? I'm curious if you want to share. The comment section is open and you can leave your comments there. Um, but that's all that I have for today on habits. I'm sure that I'll touch this topic again in the future because I find it very interesting and very helpful for my own language learning and personal development. Um, but that is all that I have for you today. I hope that you learned a little bit of something from this podcast and I hope to see you again tomorrow for another episode of a daily dose of English with Ben. Bye-bye.
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