S6E20: How will you tell your brain it’s time to rest?

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Friday, and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages and those who really don't but have to learn one anyway. And to finish off this week, I have just one question for you, and that's this: What are you going to do to signal to your brain that you've finished working?

What are you gonna do to signal to your brain that it's time to just… relax now? Because one of the things that's amazing about language learning is that we can bring all our hobbies and our interests into it. And that's great in so many ways. But the downside to that is, it's very difficult to then ringfence some leisure time when we are not asking anything of the learning and self development sides of our brain.

You know, we're watching our favourite shows on Netflix, but we're dubbing them. But we're just putting the subtitles on in our new language just to see what people say, how it's translated. Or, we're listening to music but we've got half an ear out because the music is actually in our new language and we're just trying to figure out the chorus.

And so, what I wanted to ask today is, how can you make sure that at 5pm or 6pm or whatever time you're going to stop studying today, how are you going tell your body and your mind it's time to rest? And it could be anything. It could be watching some comedy or something in your own language where you can just enjoy yourself for the sake of it.

No learning, no development. Nothing. Just pure joy. It could be physical signals, like putting your pens down and leaving the room, going somewhere else, maybe even going outside. It could be something as simple as turning off the study music as soon as you've finished, to signal that this is a separate chapter of your day now.

Whatever you do, I hope you have a fabulous evening. I hope that your work today is productive and I will see you back here at 7am on Monday.