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English Listening Practice: What’s the Secret to a Calm Mind at Night?
Tired of lying awake with a busy brain? Learn English while discovering real techniques for calm, restful sleep. This English lesson covers the common struggle of “overthinking at night” and ways to quiet your mind, all while building your English listening skills!
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Your future depends on your dreams, so go to sleep.
⭐ Mesut Barazany
✔️ Lesson transcript: https://adeptenglish.com/lessons/english-listening-how-to-calm-busy-mind-sleep-tips/
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More About This Lesson
Calm your busy mind and improve your English listening skills—all while learning simple ways to drift into a peaceful night’s sleep. In this lesson, you’ll pick up helpful words and relaxing techniques that ease you into sleep and support your English learning.
A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything.
⭐ Lady Gaga
Learning English through everyday topics, like sleep, helps you connect to the language naturally:
- Learn practical vocabulary on health & sleep topics.
- Build listening comprehension on real-life issues.
- Strengthen spelling with repeated word emphasis (e.g., “S-L-E-E-P”).
- Understand British phrases like “on the ball”.
- Practice active listening with actionable sleep advice.
- Engage with real British pronunciation and pacing.
- Absorb tips to manage worry, a useful life skill.
- Hear sentence structure patterns for effective speech.
- Learn the art of relaxation vocabulary & phrases.
- Gain insight into using “calm down time” for routine.
- Experience cultural context on “busy brains” and modern life.
- Receive relatable advice in simple, clear English.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- How can listening to English sleep podcasts improve my language skills?
Learning English while focusing on sleep techniques gives you a double benefit. You’re absorbing natural vocabulary about wellness and daily life while your brain processes everyday English speech patterns. This method works especially well because the content is deliberately paced slower and uses a soothing British accent, making it perfect for training your ear to British English pronunciation. You’ll find that relaxation-focused content often repeats key phrases naturally, which helps with retention. - Why is it important to understand British English vocabulary about sleep and relaxation?
When you’re living in or visiting the UK, discussing sleep and wellbeing is a common conversation topic. Understanding these vocabulary patterns helps you connect with native speakers on a personal level. The sleep-related vocabulary you learn – words like ‘routine’, ‘alert’, and ‘wind down’ – are frequently used in British workplace and social situations. Plus, these terms often appear in British media and literature, enhancing your overall comprehension. - How can I practice the vocabulary from this sleep-focused lesson in real conversations?
Start by incorporating these sleep and relaxation terms into your daily English journal. Write about your own sleep routine using the vocabulary you’ve learned. Then, practice speaking these phrases aloud during your evening routine. You can also join English language exchange groups and discuss sleep habits with other learners. Remember, British English speakers often use indirect language when discussing personal topics like sleep, so this content helps you develop that cultural awareness. - What makes this British English lesson different from other language learning materials?
This lesson combines practical life skills with language learning, which makes the content immediately relevant to your daily life. The focus on sleep and relaxation means the speech is naturally slower and clearer than typical British English content. You’re not just memorizing phrases – you’re learning how native speakers discuss wellness topics while picking up authentic British intonation patterns and everyday expressions. - How often should I listen to this type of English lesson to see improvement?
Listen to this type of content at least 3-4 times, but space out your listening sessions. First time, focus on general comprehension. Second time, pay attention to new vocabulary and expressions. Third time, try to shadow the speaker’s pronunciation and intonation. Finally, practice retelling the content in your own words. This spaced repetition approach helps your brain process both the language patterns and the sleep advice more effectively.
Most Unusual Words:
- Neuroscience: The study of the brain and the nervous system.
- Subscription: A service where you pay regularly to receive something, like podcasts or magazines.
- Chemistry: The way substances interact with each other; can also mean how people or things connect or work together.
- Psychological: Related to the mind or thoughts.
- Productive: Getting a lot done; achieving results.
- Surface: To wake up slowly, becoming fully awake over time.
- Energised: Feeling full of energy or excitement.
- Sequence: A particular order in which things happen or are done.
- Stimulating: Making you feel interested, excited, or more awake.
- Acknowledged: Recognised or accepted something as true or real.
Most Frequently Used Words:
| Word | Count |
|---|---|
| About | 15 |
| Sleep. | 11 |
| Brain | 11 |
| Sleep | 10 |
| Think | 10 |
| Might | 9 |
| Really | 8 |
| Going | 7 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
Transcript: English Comprehension That Helps You Sleep At Night
How to get your busy brain to sleep
Hi there and welcome to this podcast from Adept English. Do you have trouble sleeping? One of the problems I suffer with and one of the problems I try to help my clients with – getting good sleep. That’s sleep, S-L-E-E-P, and we are meant to spend at least a third or 33% of our lives doing it – sleep that is. If you’re a child, even more of your life is spent asleep. And health studies and neuroscience are discovering more and more about just how important sleep is to our general health and in particular the health of our brains. So those of us who struggle to sleep, knowing this really doesn’t help late at night or early in the morning when we’re trying to relax and go to sleep and we just can’t. So today’s podcast is first of all an English language learning podcast. So don’t forget to listen several times so that your brain remembers the vocabulary, the words that are new to you. So today’s topic is how to get your busy brain to sleep. Having a busy brain is not something that’s useful if you want to go to sleep. Today I’m going to talk about some things that you can do to help with that.
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.
Don’t forget our new subscription service. You pay a tiny amount each month and you get not six, not seven, but eight extra podcast episodes per month. In the last few weeks, subscription episodes have covered topics like ‘Brand Names Used in Everyday English Conversation’, ‘Did the Pandemic Change Your Personality?’ and ‘Four Surprising Truths About Your Brain Chemistry’. So it’s English language learning on topics that are actually interesting! You can sign up for our subscription service on our website at adeptenglish.com. Just think what it will do for your English! And in this podcast, here comes another interesting topic. ‘How To Get Your Busy brain To Sleep.
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What gets in the way of good sleep?
So when people talk about their difficulty sleeping, I am full of suggestions because I’ve tried most of them myself. There are all kinds of things which disrupt sleep. And actually I talk about some of these other things in subscription episode 29. But in this podcast, I’m going to talk about one of the main psychological reasons why we have trouble sleeping. And that is ‘a busy brain’. A brain that won’t switch off. And I know all about this because I have one of those. I’ll give you some advice and some tips on how to manage this better. How to get a good night’s sleep despite having a busy brain. This problem is very common. Lots of people can’t get their brains to switch off at night. Some people are just made that way. Sometimes I think it’s modern life. And it can happen to anyone if you have something particular on your mind. A particular worry, if you like. That’s W-O-R-R-Y.
Alertness is an advantage, but only during the day
Normally during the day, we really value busy brains. Being alert, A-L-E-R-T. Or as we say in English, ‘being on the ball’. This is how we solve our problems. Many of us need to be thoughtful, productive, creative for our work. And I think our brains have adapted to these demands. We’re trained to think constantly. So the act of switching off that thinking so that we can go to sleep can be a real challenge. The pace of modern life, the way we value ‘quick thinking’ and all the demands on us, can mean that the art of relaxation is lost.
Think about that state you’re sometimes in first thing in the morning, when you’re lying in bed. You’ve had a really great night’s sleep and your alarm goes off. You may wake up and jump straight out of bed. But if you’re like me, it takes a while to surface. It takes time for your eyes to open and for your brain to get going. And bed just feels wonderful. For me, if I’d felt like this last night when I was trying to go to sleep, that would be great. And what’s more, that alert busy brain that I had the night before when I was trying to go to sleep? Well that would be really useful now when I have to get up, wouldn’t it? So it can be quite frustrating!
What can we do about that?
Tip 1 – Have ‘calm down time’ before bed
One of the mistakes that people often make is trying to move between this alert, ‘on the ball’ state and going straight to bed and expecting to sleep. If you’re ‘alert’, that’s A-L-E-R-T, you’re the opposite of sleepy. You’re very much awake and paying attention. You may have been gaming on your computer. You may have been working on your laptop until late at night. Or you may have had a really interesting late night conversation with a friend. All of this can make you feel quite energised and make going to sleep difficult. Think about getting a small child to bed. Most adults know that in the half hour before bedtime, it’s not a good idea to race round the house making your children laugh, playing energetically with them. That’s going to make it difficult to calm them down so they go to bed. Most adults know that about children but we don’t always realise the same for ourselves. We also need quiet activity before bedtime. We need to have a ‘calm down time’ too. That means perhaps an hour or an hour and a half ‘calm down time’ before bed. It’s best during this period of time not to look at your emails and messages, especially if they’re from work, because you’ll go straight back into ‘work mode’. Passive activities like listening to music, reading a book or watching TV are much better. They’re all good for winding down.
How to Speak About Smells in English | Even If You Are Busy
Just watch the amount of blue light from screens. A TV in the corner of the room isn’t going to be a problem but your phone or your laptop might be. But basically focus on quiet, calming activities and keep the lights low. And just like for small children, bedtime routine is really good for us. R-O-U-T-I-N-E means the same set of activities, the same sequence of actions before you go to bed. Children might have a bath, a drink, a story. Think what your bedtime routine’ might be.
Tip 2 – Make a plan for if you wake up in the night
Second tip. What if you wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t get back to sleep? Well, good advice is ‘have a plan’. That’s P-L-A-N. That means your plan can kick in automatically. You don’t need to decide what you’re going to try and do to get back to sleep. Sometimes sleep experts advise that if you’ve been awake for a while in the night, it’s better to get up, do something else and wait until you feel sleepy again. This doesn’t work for everyone and it doesn’t work for me. I find that if I get up, go downstairs, sit in my lounge with my cats watching television for a time, it takes me even longer to get back to sleep. I get cold and it just doesn’t work. What works much better for me is to stay in bed and to stay warm and focus on calming my mind and relaxing my body. I ask myself, ‘What is getting in the way of sleeping? What’s stopping me sleeping? Am I comfortable? Am I too hot? Is it my body or my mind that can’t sleep?’ If I’m worrying about something, if there are things on my mind, I might quickly note them down. I try slow breathing and I try to focus only on my body.
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My rule is to think and focus on only what’s in the bed, nothing outside the bed. I find that much easier than trying to clear my mind completely as you would in meditation. I might try working on my muscles, perhaps tensing and relaxing each set of muscles in turn until I’ve been all around my body. That can help have a calm body. And if it’s your brain that’s particularly busy, listening to something really easy often can help. Or it might be a sleep app. I need something that’s just enough to take my mind off my worries and my thinking, but which isn’t stimulating more brain activity, which isn’t making me think more. And that’s my plan if I’m awake in the middle of the night. It kicks in. It starts automatically when I’m awake. And these techniques can also work if I can’t get to sleep at the start of the night.
Tip 3 – Have a ‘worry time’ during the day
Third technique is to schedule ‘worry time’. If you find that your sleep’s disturbed because you’re worrying about all kinds of things, scheduling a time to worry during the day can help with this. There’s a verb ‘to worry’, W-O-R-R-Y, and a noun. And worrying might mean thinking about things that might happen in the future or processing what happened today. If you choose to spend 20 minutes worrying during the day, it means you’ve already done this before it’s time to sleep. You’ve already processed these things so that they don’t come in the middle of the night and keep you awake. It may sound a bit crazy to schedule time to worry on purpose, but it just gets it out of the way. Choose a time of day which works for you most of the time. Set a timer on your phone maybe 10 minutes or 20 minutes, however long you think you might need.
It is important to have an end time to the worrying. And for this 10 minutes, worry as hard as you can. Make sure as many worries as possible come to mind and then you’ve made a list of them. This simple act of worrying on purpose can mean that your worries are not then arriving in the middle of the night, keeping you awake. You’ve already acknowledged them. You’ve already put them on a list. Often that’s enough. You don’t even need to solve them. You just need to know that they’re there. These three techniques, these ideas can work really well. They’ve made a real difference to my sleep.
Goodbye
But you do have to practise. You get better at putting this advice into action with practice, like many other things. Let us know whether you found this podcast helpful, both to your English language learning and to calm your busy brain and help it sleep.
Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
Thank you so much for listening. Please help me tell others about this podcast by reviewing or rating it. And, please share it on social media. You can find more listening lessons and a free English course at adeptenglish.com
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