If English drains your energy, watch this

Do you feel like you get tired after speaking in English? Do you feel like speaking English is more exhausting than speaking in your first language? If that is the case today, I'm going to talk about why that is and give you practical strategies to help you become more effortless and feel less tired after speaking in English. If you are new to my channel, then hi, my name is Hadar. I'm a non native speaker of English and I am here to help you speak English with clarity, with with confidence and with freedom. I highly recommend that you check out my website@hadar shemesh.com you can even bookmark it because you'll find there hundreds of lessons and resources to help you speak English with clarity and confidence. You can also follow me on social media for daily lessons. Okay, so why do you feel tired after speaking in English? Probably because you're investing more energy, physical energy and mental energy into speaking, which results in you feeling tired. You might feel even pain and you might not want to speak after more than 30 minutes. Or you might just not want to talk to anyone after a full day of work in English. Now, I know this. I know that this is something that happens to non native speakers. And you know, sometimes it is what it is. It is your second language. You weren't born into it. You might put in more effort into speaking your second language. That is okay, right? Like, the most important thing is not to be so hard on yourself for experiencing that. Also know that you're not alone. However, there are a few things that might help you not invest all this energy. And this is what I want to talk about today. So the first reason is you investing too much energy into the pronunciation of the sounds. What does that mean? First, you. To pronounce a certain sound, you need to activate your articulation organs in a certain way. For example, if you pronounce the th, your tongue needs to come out and you need to release air. So the muscles that are engaged in the pronunciation of this sound are the muscles that allow your tongue to come out and stick out and stay there. And for you to push out your air to almost like breathe out. That's it. In many cases, even though that's all you need to do, people might add more tension or activate more muscles in addition to these specific muscles that are required. So for example, you might clench your jaw, you might purse your lips. And adding more tension or using more muscles means that you're putting more force, more energy in a way that is not needed. And more energy means that you'll have less energy later on means that you'll feel more tired after. Now, this is just one sound. There are more sounds where people invest more energy in like the R sound or the ah sound. Non native speakers tend to pronounce these sounds and more with a lot of tension, engaging more muscles than needed. And when you think about it, there are all these sounds. And These sounds repeat 10, 20, 30, 50 times in a short speaking session. You end up investing 300, 400, 500% of the energy that you should be investing to say what you want. So no wonder you feel tired. So that is reason number one. You are just adding more tension. You're using more muscles than needed to pronounce these sounds. Now the solution is really learn the optimal pronunciation of a sound and focus deliberately on releasing tension around everything that is not needed. So if we go back to the th example and stick the tongue out, you don't want to add a lot of tension. And if you do, you just tell yourself, relax, don't hold a lot of tension here. And the more you do it, the more you train your brain to pay attention to it and to alert you when you actually add more tension out of habit. So that's the first reason. Another reason is that you might be changing or pushing your voice. So sometimes we add strain here and we just change our voice a little bit and we add more tension to our voice so our voice is not expressed freely. That creates a lot of tension, intense energy in your body and in the production of speech. And also you might become a little self conscious about it, which also adds weight and into the experience of speaking. But also that makes your voice feel tired. You might be losing your voice often. You might feel exhausted, like you need to rest your voice after speaking. You might be speaking too loud or too soft or too low in a way that for you to be heard, you might have to push your voice. Right. If I were to speak really low, then my voice is going to get quieter. And if it's quieter and I want to be heard, I might have to push it in an unhealthy way. Now, I have a lot of videos about the voice. I'm going to link them in the description if you want to explore that a little bit more. But I want you to know that this is another reason why you might feel tired after speaking in a way that doesn't happen to you in your first language. Another reason is all the mental energy that goes into speaking. So if you are an overthinker, if you are someone who tends to edit themselves. If you are someone who tends to really worry about speaking, or you tend to always review what you said, how you said it, that takes up a mental, emotional toll when speaking. So even though it's not technical, it's not like, oh, you know, like you, it's not something that you can quantify or you can measure. Worrying, overthinking, editing, you know, doubting, like all of that takes up a lot of mental space and mental capacity and also emotional capacity because it makes you feel uncomfortable, afraid, ashamed. And these things are so incredibly draining. So especially if those negative thoughts and negative self talk is already a part of your English experience and you're used to it and you don't even notice that anymore, but it's always there and you're like thinking, no, it's just, you know, an objective interpretation of reality. It's not. Your negative self talk is the result of your fears, of your limiting beliefs, habits. And those things take up a lot of energy and we're not even aware of how much it drains you. So that every speaking experience feel exhausting. And then what ends up happening is that you're not using the language, you're not speaking, you're not expressing yourself. And then therefore you're not practicing enough, which means that you are unable to improve work on the nuances and all of that. So this is why I want you to become aware of these things. When we think of learning a language, we think of, okay, vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, speaking, practice, writing, being correct, you know, having opportunities to speak. But we don't think about how we show up our individual experience, we don't think about how we think, we don't think about all these extras, like all the extra energy and all the, you know, changing the voice. And it might seem subtle or not important or luxury problems, but I am telling you, after having worked with over 17,000 people from around the world in the almost 20 years that I've been teaching English, and from my own personal experience, I can tell you that these things matter not less, but sometimes even more than, you know, knowing more words or being more accurate. It is so important to give yourself time and space to think about these things, to reflect, to do the work, self work, because it's all about your thinking and it's all about your approach and it's all about your awareness. And you don't need more knowledge, you don't need more content, you don't need feedback. You just need to do the internal work to start shifting how you think about English. You know, like the amount of energy that you put in feeling comfortable. You know, when you don't feel comfortable, you feel tense. And that 10 city translates into more tension and tension makes you tired. Right? So all of these things that can be resolved with just changing your perception, changing your mindset. This is why I believe that mindset is such a huge part of the work that we do. Becoming confident and becoming fluent. So if you feel that this is the case for you and you want to learn more, I'm going to put some resources in the description below. One of them is a link to my program, My English Mindset, which is a training designed to help you develop a healthy and confident mindset. I also have an English practice community that you can join and practice in a safe environment with my support, my coaching. I have incredible coaches that teach daily there, a ton of conversation groups and many opportunities to speak daily sprints. So all of that is within my program. It's called Beyond. So that is also available to you. And I'm also going to post some links to other resources, free resources that you can download and that you can practice with and start changing and shifting your approach, your perception and the amount of energy that you put in when speaking. Okay? We want you to be efficient. We want you to be effortless so that you can build your confidence and you can build your fluency in English. And I can absolutely help you with that. Now, I'd love to hear from you if you've experienced any of those things that I talked about. So share them in the comments below. If you're listening to the podcast, you can always reach out to me, my Instagram account, and send me a private message and share with me what you think. Have a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful rest of the day and I will see you next week in the next video. Bye.