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English Listening Practice | Why can’t we relax any more?
Today’s English listening practice is all about leisure time. Has “relaxation” become just another stressful project in your life? Learn how the pursuit of perfect leisure can spoil your relaxation and discover ways to enjoy your free time without pressure. Some great English pronunciation and vocabulary practice in this podcast.
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✔️ Lesson transcript: https://adeptenglish.com/lessons/english-listening-practice-leisure-time-and-relaxation/
Leisure is the mother of philosophy.
⭐ Thomas Hobbes
This lesson exposes you to complex ideas in English, pushing your comprehension skills. You’ll hear how native speakers articulate abstract concepts, which is crucial for advancing your fluency.
Remember, the key to language learning is engaging with content you find interesting. This lesson offers that, making your learning both effective and enjoyable.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
⭐ Anne Lamott
Find out how the pursuit of perfect leisure can spoil your relaxation. 📝 Get practical English tips on our podcast and website. Follow and subscribe to our FREE English language podcast today.
More About This Lesson
Do you ever feel stressed during your free time? This lesson looks at why some people find it hard to relax and how to enjoy your time off better.
The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
⭐ Lily Tomlin
This English lesson will teach you useful things about free time and work in the UK:
- Learn pronunciation of “leisure” in both British and American English.
- Expand vocabulary with terms like “burnout,” “anticipation,” and “productive”.
- Understand cultural differences in attitudes towards leisure.
- Improve listening comprehension through varied sentence structures.
- Gain insight into using leisure-related phrases in real-life contexts.
- Enhance fluency by hearing natural British English in a cultural context.
- Practice understanding and using idiomatic expressions like “live to work.
- Learn informal and formal language contrasts, e.g., “brag” vs. “boast.
You’ll learn why some people have trouble relaxing and how trying to have a “perfect” day off can actually make you feel stressed. We’ll also talk about ways to enjoy your free time without feeling pressure. As we discuss these ideas, you’ll pick up new English words about leisure and modern life. The best part is that you’ll get to practice listening to real British English conversations. This will help you understand how people really talk about these topics in everyday life.
This lesson is great for English learners for many reasons. First, you’ll learn about British culture and how people think about work and free time. This knowledge can help you understand British people better. Second, you’ll hear natural English conversations, which helps you learn how people really speak. Third, the topic is interesting and relates to many people’s lives, which makes it easier to remember new words. Lastly, you’ll learn how to talk about complex ideas in English, which is important for becoming fluent. Learning about this topic can also help you in real life. It might make you think about how you use your own free time and help you relax better!
You have to remember to take care of yourself. You can’t pour from an empty cup.
⭐ Unknown – often attributed to Eleanor Brownn
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- How can learning British English help me talk about leisure activities?
Learning British English equips you with the vocabulary and phrases to discuss leisure activities confidently. You’ll understand the nuances of words like “leisure” and learn how to express your thoughts on relaxation, making your conversations more natural and fluent. - Why is it important to learn the correct pronunciation of British English words like “leisure”?
Pronouncing British English words like “leisure” correctly helps you sound more natural and boosts your confidence in conversations. It also ensures you’re understood clearly, which is crucial for effective communication, especially in a British English-speaking environment. - How can this lesson help me balance work and leisure in English?
This lesson teaches you the language and concepts needed to talk about work-life balance in English. You’ll learn vocabulary and phrases that help you express how the pursuit of perfect leisure can sometimes add pressure rather than relieve it. - Is this lesson suitable for beginners, intermediate, and advanced English learners?
Yes, this lesson is designed for all levels—beginner, intermediate, and advanced. It offers practical tips on vocabulary, pronunciation, and conversation skills that are essential for fluent English speaking, regardless of your current proficiency level. - How can learning about leisure time in English improve my fluency?
Discussing leisure time in English helps you practice real-life conversation topics, expanding your vocabulary and improving your speaking fluency. Engaging in these everyday topics builds your confidence, making you more comfortable in casual English conversations.
Most Unusual Words:
- Leisure: Free time when you’re not working, used for relaxing or fun activities.
- Maximise: To make something as large or great as possible.
- Burnout: Extreme tiredness caused by working too much.
- Productive: Doing a lot of work or achieving good results.
- Brag: To talk about something in a way that shows too much pride.
- Anticipation: The feeling of excitement about something that will happen soon.
- Boast: To speak with pride about something you have or have done.
- Accumulated: Collected or gathered over time.
- Relevant: Closely connected to the topic being discussed or considered.
- Status symbol: Something that shows a person’s high social position.
Most Frequently Used Words:
| Word | Count |
|---|---|
| Leisure | 23 |
| People | 21 |
| About | 12 |
| Their | 10 |
| Spend | 7 |
| Which | 6 |
| Often | 6 |
| Other | 6 |
| Time | 5 |
| Enjoy | 5 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
Transcript: The Truth About Leisure Time for High Earners-English Listening Practice
Can you relax, or has your leisure time become ‘just another task’?
Hi there. Do you ever feel as though your free time has turned into a stressful project? This podcast looks at the change in how some people view and spend their leisure time, especially if you’re balancing a busy career and at how the ideas around what makes good leisure time have evolved – not necessarily for the better! So this is a podcast about British culture – but which also could be a comment on the culture more generally in the developed world. We’ll explore how many high earners in developed countries find it challenging to relax and how the pressure to maximise every moment can actually spoil your leisure time. The word ‘leisure’, LEISURE – that’s one that you may need to learn the pronunciation of – ‘leisure’. It’s not obvious from the spelling, is it? Well, if you are ‘at leisure’ it means ‘it’s your own time, you can decide how to use it’. And ‘leisure’ is used to mean the time we have that we’re not working and we can choose to do things we like. That’s leisure. So by extension you’ll hear of ‘the leisure centre’ or even ‘leisure suits’ – what you wear when you are ‘at leisure’, doing your ‘leisure activities’. And bear in mind also, the US pronunciation here is different – they say ‘leisure’! So our topic – how attitudes towards ‘leisure’ often change for higher earners. And the ways in which this is perhaps not a good thing!
Hello, I’m Hilary, and you’re listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works.
Reviewing your lifestyle!
When you’ve just come back from a week’s holiday, a week’s vacation and you go back to work, it’s a time when many of us think more about our lifestyle, how we organise our work and our leisure time and whether we’ve got the right balance. For many people who work a lot, this period, just after a holiday can mean questioning your choices around how many hours you spend at work, and how many hours leisure time you get. I read an article this week which analyses attitudes to leisure amongst high earners in developed countries. Really interesting!
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Have we forgotten how to enjoy free time?
Anyway, the article I read was published on the BBC Worklife website back in 2021 and was written by Aysha Imtiaz. But I think that the question is even more relevant today than it was three years ago. The article poses the question ‘Some people try to make every hour of leisure perfect, while others hate taking time off altogether. Have we forgotten how to enjoy free time?’
One of the things I enjoy when I spend time in France with my French family is that it’s more relaxed, there seems to be more leisure time. It’s more a situation of ‘work to live’, rather than ‘live to work’, like it seems to be sometimes in the UK! Here at home many of the people I see as clients have really good jobs and they get paid quite a lot – but many struggle with ‘time off’ or ‘leisure time’.
Is your obsession with productivity destroying your ability to enjoy leisure?
At its most extreme, there are some people who are so focused on building their career, so focused on being ‘productive’ – that’s PRODUCTIVE – ‘productive’ in their lives, that they take very little time off. It’s as though work becomes so important that these people can no longer see the point of ‘time off. They’re stuck in a cycle of endless productivity. Often this is people working at a high level, perhaps in financial services, or who are doctors in the NHS or lawyers or similar what we call ‘high flying’ individuals. Sometimes I ask my clients ‘how many days’ annual leave have you accumulated?’ Meaning that they’ve built up lots of days holiday, which they haven’t taken. And when people tell me ‘Oh, a lot – I’ve only taken a week’s annual leave all this year’ that can sound the warning bell to me as a therapist that this person is at risk of burnout. That’s BURNOUT. People in the UK typically only have 25 days holiday a year – that’s not very much. And it’s even less in the US. So if you don’t even take these days, you’re really not getting very much time off at all. And then if you add in ‘long working hours’, that can be really disastrous for people. Physical and mental health suffer.
Is it possible that your “perfect” holiday is actually making you unhappy?
And there are still more people who struggle to decide how to spend their leisure time. It’s so precious and these decisions can themselves be stressful. This may mean how they spend their leisure time at the weekends or the holidays they plan, their vacations. High earning people sometimes feel enormous pressure to maximise their leisure time by making the best choices. Everything has to be thoroughly researched, to ensure that they have the best experience. The anticipation is much greater and therefore the disappointment, if it doesn’t work out, is also much greater. People research more and spend more money. It’s as though there’s a pressure to ‘maximise fun’. And that can prevent or reduce the amount of enjoyment in something. Lots of time and energy is spent trying to craft ‘the perfect experience’. And of course when it happens, it often doesn’t measure up. It doesn’t feel quite as people imagined or they’re disappointed – it doesn’t match the picture they had in their heads!
Because people take so little time off, the anticipation – that’s ANTICIPATION, that means the ‘looking forward to it’ – it’s very much part of the pleasure. It’s the excitement and expectation. And in fact, the pleasure of the anticipation is often greater than the event. Which is a bit mad!
The pressure to collect ‘perfect experiences’
For some people, leisure has come to represent ‘collectable experiences’ that convey their status and this is often seen on social media. So for some people how they spend their leisure time, how many experiences they’ve had, how many places they’ve visited – or even what they did at the weekend, becomes something to brag or to boast about. ‘To brag’, BRAG – that’s slang or ‘to boast’, BOAST, that’s more formal language – that means to talk about something with the purpose of impressing people. That’s ‘boasting’.
Surely being able to boast isn’t the point of your leisure time? Surely leisure time is about doing what you enjoy – regardless of whether that impresses other people or not. It’s what you want to do – which for many, might be quite low key, quiet, relaxing. It might just be sitting in a chair in the sunshine and reading a book. That’s not about impressing other people, but it maybe enjoyable for you. Unless of course, the book title is one that’s intended to impress other people! And that’s what I’m talking about – everything being turned into a sort of ‘competition’, instead of being about enjoyment.
Is working long hours a status symbol, or is it ruining your health?
The article I read referenced a 2011 research paper by Anat Keinan, who is associate professor of marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Or at least she was when the research was done. Anat Keinan has done extensive research on how the lack of leisure time is itself now a ‘powerful status symbol’ and how working long hours and taking little holiday is a ‘badge of honour’. Rather like Gordon Gekko’s famous quote in the film Wall St, I guess – ‘Lunch is for wimps’! Anit Keinan also pointed out that some people work hard to acquire ‘collectable experiences’ so they have unusual, novel or extreme experiences or holidays. It’s almost like building a CV, a resumé of leisure experiences to impress people with. The idea of a ‘bucket list’ – the impressive things we all want to do before we die. So for some people, even leisure time has become pressured, rather like a job, building the relevant experiences that are impressive other people with. The spirit of productivity cannot be put aside even in leisure time. It’s less the trend to show your wealth with physical items, like luxury goods, watches, cars etc. Much more a trend to be able to talk about your ‘luxury experiences’. “And people’s ‘valuable time’ must only be spent on activities that are truly meaningful, productive or spectacular,” says Anit Keinan.
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I like the variety of travel, but sometimes predictability is good!
Don’t get me wrong – I like to travel and I like to have experiences. But I have had the sense sometimes in the past that people feel a bit sorry for me, as our summer holidays have often consisted of southern France or southern Greece, because my sisters have houses there. I do like new and interesting places and take every opportunity to visit new places, when I go on holiday. But I actually enjoy France and Greece because it works for me. I don’t go to impress other people – I go to relax and enjoy myself. I can have a nice time there. Although I like variety, there’s something very relaxing about ‘knowing exactly what to expect because you’ve been there before’. It works well for relaxation, if that’s what you need from your holiday.
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Let us know what you think!
So two schools of thought on this. Is leisure time purely for your enjoyment and relaxation? Or is leisure time, especially holidays about ticking off your ‘bucket list’ or ‘impressing other people, with your ‘leisure time CV?’. Let us know what you think. We always love to hear from you!
Goodbye
Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
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