IELTS Plus: Episode 73 - Stress

Hi everyone and welcome back to the IELTS Plus English podcast where today we are talking about stress. So stress today. Stress. I don't think I really experience stress nowadays. I'm pretty relaxed, but I've certainly experienced it through the years of... running this business, running the online business, raising a family. So I certainly have a lot to say on this topic.

Now what I would like to ask is a student question today. I haven't done this for a long time so I'm going to give you a student question. which I would like you to answer in the comments. It could be on Spotify, it could be on YouTube. And I'd like to know, how do you alleviate stress? How do you alleviate stress? That's the word I'd like you to use, alleviate. And that's one of our words in today's list.

It's the stress-related vocabulary. Alleviate means to make something less severe. So another way of asking that question would be, how do you reduce your stress? How do you relieve your stress? For me, well, I'll tell you later. I'm sure, I haven't seen, but I'm sure it'll be one of today's questions. So we'll see if that comes up.

Now, it's going to be a fairly short episode today. I'll keep just to the questions, to the topic. There's nothing extra, but I will make it a very honest episode. I say that because... Sometimes, and you know I've said this before, I make up answers in order to answer the question. And I encourage my students to do the same. Now, we can say, sometimes I say, you can lie.

Some people don't like that concept of lying. So okay, you can make up stories, whatever, you know, however you want to frame it. But today... I will be honest. So you can know that everything I say today will be the truth. We talked about alleviate. This is part of our language list today. Some wonderful words. And I think you'll know these, some of these related to the topic of stress. Very topic specific. We talked about alleviate.

We've got stressor, irritable, wind down. This is another good word. When you're talking about alleviate, I could ask you, how do you wind down after a long day at work? So some great words today. Go and check them out in the textbook, which is available on www.britplus.net. So let's get started. I'm going to go to part one, question one.

Do you often feel stressed? I have certainly felt stressed in the past, but nowadays I don't often feel stressed. I think that I have much less stressors in my life. My business is fairly calm and running well, reasonably well. And family life is content. So no, I'm not very stressed nowadays. How do you usually deal with stress? Okay, so this is our alleviate question, right? How do you usually deal with stress? If I am stressed, I do like to unplug.

which means to get away from my digital devices as much as possible. And very often I wind down with a book. For me, I love fantasy or science fiction, something that's really away from regular life, that takes me away to another place, and that helps me relieve stress.

Good. Okay. Now we move on to part two. And today is pretty simple. Describe a time when you felt stressed. So immediately when I see this, I'm just setting up my clock here as well, my timer. When I see this, I think it's a good example of a question that is past focused. And we've talked about this before. You know now, this is episode 70-something, so you know I have my structure, and it does go through all tenses, past, present, future.

But when we have a past-focused question, you can make your whole answer past-focused. So I think that's what I'm going to do today. You pay attention to my tense. Let's see how it goes. I haven't planned anything, but I have a feeling this could be past focused. So I've got two minutes on the clock here, and I'm going to start now. I'd like to tell you about building my business in 2017. In 2016, I started my business.

But in 2017, I started building it, meaning I started writing the textbooks. I rented an office. I started to build... a student base i in 2016 maybe i had 20 students but through 2017 i expanded to perhaps 40 or 50. so 2017 was a big year of building my business and the workload. was very high. I very often went to work at seven and I got home at 10. And I remember I used to work on Sundays as well. I worked seven days a week.

So there was a lot of pressure on me and it had a big effect on my health. So let me tell you a little more about this year, 2017. It really built up through the year. It felt okay at the time, but then towards the end of the year, it built up and the workload overwhelmed me. And I had to find ways. Firstly, I had to cut down my work a little bit, but also I had to find ways to alleviate the stress. I think at the time I took up.

No, I went to the gym. I started going to the gym at that time. And I think that that had a big, it was a big help. Because what I noticed... From my friends and my girlfriend at the time was that I was becoming quite unpleasant and irritable. And of course, that was a symptom of being very stressed. So for me personally, I learned that dealing with strep... Okay. Happens very often, doesn't it? That I say for me personally, and I start my sentence...

and the timer goes off. So my timing is pretty consistent nowadays. As I was saying at the start of that, this is episode 73 today. So we've had season one, episode one to 40, and this is season two, episode 41 to 80. But wow, we're already on 73. There's not much until we complete season two. So, yeah, you've had a lot of episodes so far. I hope you're enjoying them. I'm pretty happy with that, and I think I'm going okay today with language. Let's move on to part three.

What is the common cause of stress in modern life? I think the modern cause of stress, I mean, it has to be work. I think there are other factors such as pollution too many people, competition, things like that. There are lots of factors. But very often it comes down to work. A lot of people are dissatisfied with their work or perhaps they have too high a workload. And this causes stress, and I see that a lot around me. Here in Korea...

There's a lot of people who are in office jobs working far too many hours and they really feel the effects of stress. Good. Do notice, and I know I mention this a lot. But that was very clearly following my structure. And it's a simple structure. It's give direct answer, give some detail, and then give an example.

And I just, you can do that every time. That's a very typical way of answering a question, not only in IELTS, but outside of IELTS as well. Next question. How does stress affect people's health? I think... It has an enormous effect on people's health. Of course, it causes fatigue. It causes tension, which can affect their... character you know it affects their mood and it affects the people around them of course there's this that you can go even further than that and talk about serious disease

You know, things like cancer, serious illnesses that come from being stressed and your immune system goes down. So really, there's an enormous list. of ways that stress affects our health. Last question. That was a little short. I think I missed doing an example there, but that's fine. I was pretty happy with that. Do remember...

And I had this with a student recently, that if you give a short answer, the examiner will almost certainly ask follow-up questions and it will feel like a conversation.

But as much as possible, let's have our structure and stick to it. Last question. What are some long-term strategies for managing stress? I think... Most importantly, you have to keep control of your workload. And if that means you're running your own business, then you have to not take on too much. And if you're in a company... And if you have the opportunity, you should delegate work to others, to people below you or however you do it in your company. So delegation can be a good method.

So really it's keeping on top of how much work you have to do and not feeling overwhelmed. In my case, back in 2017, I reduced my... number of classes i had a lot of classes at that time maybe 40 or 50 students 40 or 50 students and i i cut down my by maybe five or six and that was enough to give me some breathing room Excellent. Okay. I think that's everything I'm going to do today. So I'm pretty happy with that. As I said, everything was honest.

And I was able to do that within my structure. So I'm really happy. Hopefully you noticed part two was very past focused. So that's everything I have time for. And we are going to move on to another really... broad, somewhat, it's definitely relatable topic, study. Study. So that's what we're going to do next week. So have a wonderful week this week. Study super hard. And I'll see you next week to talk about study.