It's a Sunday afternoon, you're sitting on the couch and you're supposed to be relaxing.
But suddenly you might find yourself checking some work emails.
If you've found yourself in this situation, you're not alone.
Hi, I'm Oliver and welcome back to the Easy English Podcast, the best place to practice your English listening skills while learning new vocabulary and talking or listening to English
With very interesting topics, I hope.
We're all guilty of overworking sometimes or trying to separate work from our everyday life.
And today I want to talk about what some psychologists are calling the death of the weekend.
To be honest, in 2026, the boundaries between work and relaxation and our free time, or maybe a better word for that is our personal lives, have increased.
Become more complicated, become more blurred.
And while the technology that we use and we've increasingly used has provided or promised to provide us with more freedom, it has in some ways made it impossible to disconnect.
Or at least very hard to disconnect.
And we have to make an effort to do so.
Today, we are going to learn some great new words, but we're also going to explore why modern society can feel obsessed with constantly being productive
Or doing things, making progress, and how this can affect our mental health.
And finally, some tips that I've read online about how we can begin to take back our time.
So before we look at our key vocabulary for today's episode, I want to ask you a question.
And if you're on Spotify, you can answer it in the poll.
So on the vote, there's an interactive vote section
And you can see how everyone else has voted as well.
It's totally anonymous.
So be honest.
Do you check work emails or messages during the weekend?
You can answer on the poll.
The first response is never.
So your your weekend is 100% work free time.
The second is occasionally.
You sometimes take a look at your work emails or messages.
And the third option is constantly.
So you're constantly feeling anxious, checking emails at least once every weekend.
So I want you to vote as honest as you can.
If you don't work or you're retired or a student, you can say the same about maybe some other kind of stress or
Work-like activity that you have on a regular basis.
Okay, before we get into our topic, if you're new here, this is the part of the show where we learn some key vocabulary for the episode.
These are words and phrases that I will use when talking about this topic.
So I want you to listen out for them in today's episode.
The first key word here is boundary.
Boundary.
Boundary is a real or imaginary line that marks the edge or limit of something.
Our second phrase here is to disconnect.
This is a verb and to disconnect in this case means to break a connection.
So to stop concentrating or engaging with something.
So we are disconnecting from it.
Our third piece of key vocabulary today is guilt, guilt.
And guilt is a painful feeling of having done something wrong or having a failed obligation.
So something that you have to do.
Our fourth keyword for today's episode is urgent.
Urgent.
And when something is urgent, it means that it requires immediate attention or action.
It's something you have to do, right?
And our final key word here is to restore, to restore.
And this means to bring back to a former, original or normal condition.
So to renew something.
So listen out for those key words in today's episode.
And remember, if you're new, make sure you're following or subscribed to the Easy English Podcast.
And you've got notifications switched on so that you don't miss out on an episode every single Monday.
I've made an episode every Monday for the last almost two years consistently, and I haven't missed an episode for a full year, which is something I'm very proud of.
So I love seeing you all here each week.
Okay, let's get into the episode.
50 years ago, when a worker left the office on a Friday afternoon, work physically stayed in that office.
It stayed behind.
The files were locked away in metal cabinets,
The computer was left on the desk, and even if there was a phone, it was so big and it couldn't fit in their pocket, it stayed behind.
And no one would be able to reach you or contact you until 9am again on a Monday morning.
So you had your weekend, your free time protected by a physical barrier, a physical reality of what you could actually do.
But today we carry our offices, our tools in our pockets.
We can access them at any time, even if it's our free time, even if we have a day off,
Or we're on holiday, or we've traveled to the other side of the world, we can still access in some way our work or our office.
And because we can be reached anywhere at any time,
Every notification, perhaps every email at times, can feel urgent.
It can feel like an urgent request that we need to respond to or reply to or fix.
And this teaches you to be in a state of constant alert.
So you're always waiting to try and fix something or solve something.
And even when you're not actively doing something, you're not checking for work, the fact that you know that you can access it at any time, that you can see it at any time, it can keep your brain in a state of at least a little bit of stress.
And it can really affect or limit your ability to properly, completely rest and relax.
I know myself, I find it quite hard if I know that I have something in work that is going on and I can easily look at it or check my emails, check the messages.
It's really hard to keep myself from doing that, to keep myself from opening up my phone, going and checking it.
Of course, there are positives with having the phones.
I can see all of your lovely comments, messages on Patreon or Spotify, wherever I've put episodes out.
It's fantastic being able to do that from anywhere.
And by the way, if you want bonus episodes every week and you want to support the show, make sure to sign up for the Easy English Patreon.
We had two extra episodes last week on the Patreon.
One was News in Easy English, where I read a news article in Easy English.
And I explained vocabulary from that news article.
We also had a easy English story as well as the main episode with PDF transcripts and flip cards.
So you can check out the link in the description below.
Okay, so with the physical office now being gone for many people, or at least,
Although we have a physical office, we have a digital one too.
Our mental office, I guess, our work in our mind sometimes can never really end.
It's very hard to close it.
And really here, the problem isn't only the technology, it's also the psychology.
So how we think about it.
And I...
Have problems with this personally is switching off and disconnecting from work
But what causes these psychological feelings that you have to check it
Or maybe you have to be doing something that you you know you can't be relaxing and it really does come down to modern culture
So how our culture is nowadays in most
Sort of modern economies.
And that is where we look at productivity, so being productive and successful as almost like a measure of human value, a value of us as people.
So you could spend an entire day, maybe a Saturday, doing absolutely nothing.
But you might have that voice maybe inside your head, which is telling you, you should be doing something, you should be working, you should be studying English, you should be practicing the guitar.
We have that kind of
Feeling that we should be doing something all the time.
And this can create a feeling of guilt.
So a feeling where you start to feel guilty or that experience guilt for resting, for having a rest.
And instead of viewing relaxation as something that we need to restore our energy, to restore our bodies, we start seeing it as a waste of time, as something that is not important for us.
And this mindset can create a toxic cycle.
So we work because we feel guilty, and then we're tired because we're working too much.
And then we want to relax, which makes us feel guilty, so we work even more.
Which is clearly not a healthy way to deal with it.
We need to relax, we need to take time and we need to care for ourselves and give ourselves that mental space to breathe, to restore our energy and recover.
We shouldn't feel guilt when we relax.
That's my opinion.
And I think relaxing is very important.
And I love cultures around the world that really prioritize doing nothing, that prioritize just relaxing, spending time with family and not pressuring towards, you know,
Improving, making more money, doing things.
And without naming names, there are plenty of cultures, particularly in the West, that are exactly like that, including the culture that I live in.
And I think there's things that we can learn from lots of cultures, from different cultures around the world,
That can really prioritize living in the moment, relaxing, and that everything is not always about progress, about doing things, about working.
It's important to actually live a little bit
So my question for you today, and I want you to answer in the comments on Spotify.
We had so many answers to last week's question about coffee.
But I want you to tell me this week, what is your work life balance like?
So do you struggle to switch off, to disconnect from work?
Or do you have a very good work-life balance?
Good rules around switching off from work.
Let me know and I'd be very curious to hear how you are with this.
Last week I asked a question about coffee, you know, whether you were addicted to coffee and tell me about your relationship with coffee and I had so many great answers.
So many so that I can't really read out any today because there was, I don't know,
There was maybe like 12 great comments with answers across platforms.
Excellent, excellent writing.
So well done to everyone who answered that.
I read all of them and I hopefully replied to most of you as well.
So I love seeing that in the comment section.
Please do reply on this topic.
I love hearing your opinions.
It's just so nice to read that people are listening, that they enjoy the podcast.
It means so much to me that you listen to the show and that you engage with the content, that you enjoy it.
I always want to make the show better and I want to keep on developing our community.
So again, thank you.
If you support on the Patreon, thank you.
If you just listen to the podcast, thank you.
Honestly, just listening is enough and I really appreciate that you're here.
Okay, final part of the show is we're going to look at some tips that I've seen because I need to get better at this on how to take back your free time and how to properly disconnect from work.
The reason I chose this topic is because recently I've been quite stressed at work, you know, a couple of months.
It's been very busy.
I've been working too much outside of work, so outside of working hours, and I don't really have a good boundary between work and rest.
So I've been trying to think about how I can better balance my personal time with work, how to separate the two more.
And the first thing I saw is a tip about creating a digital shutdown ritual or routine on a Friday.
You can even do it every day for the next day.
And what this means is before you finish work, so for the last 10 minutes, spend some time writing down a fresh list of everything that you need to do on Monday or on the next day.
And then you close your laptop, close your computer, and physically turn off your notifications or log out of your email app, whatever you need to do.
So you're telling your brain that those tasks are there, they're remembered, and they're going to be waiting for you on Monday, but you've got them out of your head and onto paper.
And supposedly, this helps you to disconnect from that worry about the things that you have to do because you know they're there in a list, nicely organized for the next day.
And it gives you a bit of closure.
The fact you've put it on paper or you've put it somewhere physical, you've taken those and you've left it there for working hours.
So this is something I'm going to try.
Our next one is if you use your phone for work in some way,
Take your work apps and either uninstall them at the weekend or put them into a folder, maybe get an app that you can lock them in, just some way to limit your access to those work apps.
And that way you'll not be questioning if something is urgent or not because you'll not even be checking it.
And the third point is practice active leisure time.
Now, what I mean by this is not passive activities like social media or TV.
This can leave us feeling also a little bit empty, maybe anxious, or even tired because we're still consuming things, but some active time that you set out each day to properly relax.
Whether that is meditation, whether it is cooking, walking in nature, something that isn't just consumption.
So some proper relaxation time where your focus is going on something else.
And I think that can really help restore your energy as well.
You've probably had it where you've went on a nice walk or you've done some exercise and afterwards you feel more energy than when you started, even though you've actually burnt energy, you know, if you spent energy, but you feel more from it.
So in conclusion, a real true weekend of time is not something that you're rewarding yourself with.
It's not something that you should feel guilty about.
It is a fundamental part of your week, your routine, and it's something that you need to restore your energy and
Keep yourself in a position where you can work hard, where you can be productive during the week.
It isn't something you should feel guilt with.
It's not something you should feel guilty about.
And whether you're putting pressure on yourself with language learning or work, it doesn't matter.
You can apply this topic, this episode to almost anything that you do as a routine.
So it might be language learning, it could be study if you're a student, or it could be work.
Having a balance is important.
Okay, our final bit of the episode is our comprehension check.
So I'm going to ask you some questions about today's episode, about the topic, and I want you to answer as best you can.
So pause after I ask the question and then...
You can play and listen to my answer.
Okay, so question one, how did physical boundaries protect weekends 50 years ago?
Or to rephrase that, why were people able to have proper weekends 50 years ago?
That is because files, paper documents, even computers, phones, they all stayed in the office when you left for the weekend.
They didn't come with you.
Question two, why do people feel guilt when they relax?
That's because in modern society, we often measure value by productivity.
And you feel like you should be working, that you should be learning, that you should be doing something
Rather than relaxing.
And our final question, what is the benefit of a digital shutdown at the end of the week?
So what is that?
So it's when you write down a list of all the things that you have to do on Monday, or maybe the next day if you're doing it during the week,
And it allows you to disconnect over the weekend.
It puts them physically on a page where you know that it's remembered and the tasks are there.
Okay, so that's all for today's episode.
Remember, if you would like to support, check out the Easy English Patreon.
Thank you for all the support there as well.
Remember to enjoy your free time.
If you finished work today or you're listening to this outside of work, relax.
Take some time for yourself.
Remember that relax time or relaxation time is not wasted time.
Don't feel guilt about it.
Don't feel guilty or that you have to be doing something else.
Take the time for you.
It's important.
I will see you in next week's Easy English episode on Mondays as always.
Goodbye.
