Well, hello and welcome to this English lesson about struggles and problems.
We are human beings.
Life isn't always easy.
Sometimes you have a day or a week where there are just problems.
Things that make life difficult.
There are things you struggle with and we call those struggles.
In this English lesson, I will help you learn a number of different words and phrases we use to talk about struggles and problems in life.
It won't be a super happy lesson but let's face it.
Sometimes you have a good day and you're happy, and sometimes you have a bad day because you are struggling with something or there is a problem.
So, in this English lesson, we'll learn about struggles and problems.
Getting up on time.
So, for some people, this is a problem.
Some people um for some people, this is a struggle.
They go to bed at night And it's very challenging for them to get up on time.
Their alarm goes off in the morning.
They hit snooze four or five times.
And next thing you know, they are late for work.
So when we talk about things that are problematic, getting up on time can be problematic.
I have actually struggled with this one this past week.
Actually, the last couple of weeks.
I think during the Christmas break, started to get up a little bit later and because it's so dark and cold outside in the morning, it's been a little challenging for me.
So, getting up on time has been a struggle.
Getting up on time has been a problem for me.
I hope not for you.
Some people, it's really easy to get up on time.
Their alarm goes and they just jump out of bed but sometimes it's hard getting up on time.
Or being on time.
So, Maybe it's not too hard to get up on time but maybe it's hard for you to be on time.
When we talk about people being on time, we mean that they arrive at work before they're supposed to be there.
They arrive at an appointment before they're supposed to be there.
You know, if you have a dentist's appointment at 10 AM, you should probably get there at 10 to 10 or 5 to 10, and then you would be on time.
But if you get there at 1005, if you get there at five after 10, then maybe being on time is something that is a problem for you.
It is a struggle, something that you struggle with.
For me, this is not a problem.
I am, you know, I have faults, but one thing I am good at is I am usually on time for most things.
I like being on time. nervousness.
If you have to have an English conversation this week with someone, you might be experiencing nervousness.
This means that you are not excited about having that English conversation.
Maybe you have to speak in front of people.
You have to do some public speaking and your stomach it feels like you're gonna be sick because you're so nervousness.
Nervousness simply means to be a little bit afraid. be afraid to speak in front of people.
Uh to be afraid to do something.
Maybe you're playing a sport for the first time.
You might have some nervousness.
So this might be something that you struggle with.
This might be a problem for you.
You know the antidote.
The cure to nervousness is to simply do something enough times that you become good at it.
You talk in front of a crowd of people every day as a teacher.
Eventually, you're not nervous anymore.
If you start playing a new sport and you play in five or six games, eventually you will be less nervous.
Money.
So, it's kind of a funny one.
You're like, what are you talking about, Bob?
But some people struggle with money and there are two ways you can struggle with money.
It might be hard for you to find a job that pays you enough money, but you also might spend money far too easily.
You might be someone who finds it very easy to spend money when you should be saving the money.
So again, two different kinds of problems with money.
Your problem might be that you need a better job so you earn more money.
You might have a problem because every time you see something, you buy it and then at the end of the month you don't have enough money in your bank account because you have spent it.
You probably know people who have money problems.
Who are bad at managing their money, and so they spend far too much money and often find that they don't have enough.
Overeating.
This is one that I at times struggle with.
I will tell you when I struggle with overeating.
If I go to a party, if we have a staff social, if there are treats anywhere.
By treats I mean cookies or chips or chocolate covered peanuts.
Those are really yummy like peanut M&Ms.
I will eat too many and so I really work at not doing that.
Christmas.
The season of Christmas is very challenging for me, because there are so many yummy things to eat that I usually tend to overeat.
This past Christmas, I didn't.
I've been working really hard, going to the gym making sure I am doing some exercises to fix my shoulder and hamstring.
And as part of that, I'm trying to eat reasonable amount of food every day, but overeating can be a problem for some people.
It's definitely a problem for me.
If I came to your house and you had pizza and ice cream and cookies and all kinds of yummy food, I would probably eat too much of that food.
Um and but I'm sure it would be an enjoyable experience.
Having a nice English conversation and eating your food.
Social media.
I'm not sure if you heard, but recently in Australia they have banned social media for kids under the age of 15 or 16.
I don't know the exact detail but in that country, they have decided that social media.
So, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook is not good for young people.
It's not good for children.
Some people do have a problem with social media. where they are on their phone all the time.
I apparently don't have that problem because I don't know where my phone is.
They are on their phone all the time.
In a previous lesson, I taught you the term doom scrolling.
Doom scrolling is when you go on TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts and after a while you realize you've been looking at things for two hours or three hours and not sure where your day went.
So some people struggle with social media.
They just spend far too much time looking at things on their little phone screens.
Time pressure.
So some people it kind of depends with this one where you work or on your personality.
So you might work somewhere where the boss is always trying to get you to work faster and better and more efficiently, and it can be stressful.
Your boss might give you a job that takes three days and want it done in two days.
Your boss might want a project done by the end of the week, but you really need two more weeks to finish it.
You would be experiencing time pressure.
In fact, we would call that a time crunch as well.
You also might have a personality where you're always saying yes to things and you don't have enough time in your day to finish all of those things.
Then you have time pressure.
You have this inability to finish to get done the things you're doing and it will cause stress.
Fear of failure.
So I couldn't find a good picture of this, but I thought this worked.
There's kind of a little flag at the top, like as if this person was playing Mario.
Um, and they are only on the fourth step.
So, fear of failure is when you don't try something because you don't want to fail.
A good example would be water skiing.
Maybe you are going to the lake and your friend has a boat and wants to teach you how to go water skiing.
You know, you put on skis and you hold a rope behind the boat that actually kind of look.
That is kind of what it looks like.
Um, but you might be afraid that you're going to fall and you're going to look silly and you are going to do something wrong, or you won't be able to stand up, and so you decide not to try.
You just sit in the boat all day.
That would mean you have a fear of failure.
Um, maybe you have a job and there's a better job that you want to apply for, but you are afraid to apply for it because you think you won't get it or for some reason, you have this fear that things won't turn out the way you want them to.
That would be a fear of failure.
Um not a good fear to have.
Um, I have this a little bit, but I think generally, if I want to do something, I just do it, and I will fail at something as long as I know I am learning something along the way.
Health issues.
So, I mentioned at the beginning that I would talk about the things that I struggle with.
So, I struggle sometimes with health issues.
In my life, I have had four situations where I have not been a healthy person, and the one most recent would be my collarbone.
In my forget what year it was but I got pneumonia one year.
I don't know if you know what pneumonia is, but it's when you it's difficult to breathe because you are sick and your lungs have fluid in them.
And eventually I went to the doctor and they took an x-ray and my one lung was 90 full and the other one was 70 full of fluid.
So, I had pneumonia.
I also had a blood infection once, where I had to go on antibiotics for five weeks and then, as you know, I had heart surgery once.
So, enough about me.
Oh, and I just recently broke my collarbone.
Um sometimes people struggle with health issues.
They might have something serious like cancer.
They might have something less serious like their hip hurts.
They have hip pain or maybe they have shoulder pain from a life of doing really hard labor.
But health issues are not enjoyable.
You often are on medication or you need to see the doctor regularly, but those would be things that you just experience daily, uh in life, and they are not enjoyable.
Alcohol, drugs, smoking, Not sure why self-esteem was in the middle.
I thought all three were in a row.
Some people struggle with alcohol.
You can drink too much.
Maybe this is something that started simply.
You didn't realize it when you were younger.
Maybe in your twenties you were in university and you had some alcohol and then now you're older and you have trouble not drinking alcohol.
So, you can become addicted to alcohol.
You can become English, we'll say someone is an alcoholic.
That means that they drink every day and they drink a lot.
You might be addicted to some kind of drugs.
Maybe in your city there might be an area of the city where you don't go, because that's where the drug dealers are.
That's where people go to buy drugs.
So, people might struggle with drug addiction.
You might struggle with, I'll just go to cigarettes. might struggle with smoking.
You might be addicted to smoking.
Addicted to the nicotine.
And so you are smoking a pack a day or a pack and a half a day.
And most of the time people who have trouble with alcohol.
People who have a problem with alcohol or struggle with it.
Or drugs or cigarettes.
Most people would like to quit.
But there is something addictive about all of those.
So, you might be addicted to alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes or smoking.
Self-esteem.
So self-esteem is when you think everyone else is better than you, or maybe a better description would be when you don't feel as good as other people.
So a good example would.
I should have had a picture of a teenager instead.
Teenager might feel like all of their friends are smart, or all of their friends are better looking than them, or all of their friends are better athletes, and so they struggle with their own self esteem.
They don't feel worth a lot because they think everyone else is better looking taller more, more athletic, smarter.
There are a number of ways where humans compare themselves to other humans and this can affect your self-esteem.
Maybe in school, your friend never does any work in class and gets straight A's.
They get 100% on everything and you have to work a lot harder.
So, you might have low self-esteem because you think the other person is better than you.
This is a tough one for people when you have low self esteem.
Relationship problems or finding a partner.
So when we get to the point of life in life, many people would love to be in a relationship with someone.
They would love to find someone to spend the rest of their life with.
They would love to find a partner.
Some people who have found a partner might have relationship problems though.
They might be fighting with their spouse.
They might be fighting with their boyfriend or girlfriend and so that is not an enjoyable thing.
Uh I think in North America, 50% of marriages end in divorce.
So this can be a real problem for people where you both go to work And then when you come home, you end up fighting.
You have relationship problems.
You have marriage problems.
That would be another way to describe it if you are married to each other.
So, relationship problems, marriage problems, not good problems to have.
When people are struggling in their marriage, it can make life very, very hard and very difficult for them.
And then finding a partner.
So this happens, of course, with young people, but it can also happen if you are older.
Maybe you love being single.
There are many people I know who are not married.
They don't have a boyfriend or girlfriend and they're very happy.
That is a great way to go through life.
But many people would love to find a partner.
They would love to find someone to date and someone to eventually marry.
And that can be challenging sometimes.
It can be difficult to find a partner to spend your life with.
A lack of motivation.
So I do actually struggle with this one sometimes, believe it or not.
I think that sometimes when I work too hard for too long, eventually I have a lack of motivation.
I don't feel energetic.
I'm not excited to do something.
Believe it or not, this happens with my YouTube channel once or twice a year.
I find that it coincides.
It happens at the same time as when I'm really busy at work.
So in September and at the beginning of January every year I don't have a lot of motivation to work on YouTube and coincidentally, very busy at work at the same time.
So some of you might have this as well.
There might be certain times of the year where you aren't excited to do things.
You're not you don't feel like you have a lot of energy to do something.
You have a lack of motivation.
This might happen with your English learning.
Maybe you study English really hard for six months and then you just don't feel like it anymore.
That point it's probably good to just take a little break.
When you take a little break from something, you can have a lot more motivation to do that thing when you return to it.
Having a big mouth.
So, this doesn't mean to physically have a large mouth.
This means you say things without thinking about what you're saying.
Sometimes at school there will be a person, a student, who has a big mouth, and what we mean by that is they regularly say things quickly without thinking that offend or annoy other people.
Okay, so someone we also sometimes say the person has no filter.
What they think is what they say, and sometimes what they say is not very, very nice.
So having a big mouth would be yeah, it's kind of hard to describe because in polite workplaces you usually don't see this, but I have.
When I worked in construction, I've worked with a couple people who had a big mouth.
They just they were just talking all the time and saying mean things about other people and me and they just I don't know, I don't know how to describe it.
Not very fun to work with someone who has a big mouth.
Anger issues.
I don't really have this one but I do like most people get angry sometimes but it's not regular.
If you get angry every day.
If you know someone who gets angry every day, we would say they have anger issues, because you shouldn't be getting angry every day.
Anger is a completely normal human emotion that happens sometimes. okay?
We all sometimes get angry.
You know, if you were driving your shopping cart at the grocery store or what they call a trolley, I think in the UK and if you hit someone, if you hit their ankle, like their leg, from behind, that person might get angry.
They might be very annoyed with you, but if you get angry every day and you get angry multiple times a day, we would say you have anger issues, because no one should be getting angry that much.
That's not a normal thing to do.
Uncertainty about the future.
This is a bit of a mouthful, isn't it?
And I had to find an AI generated photo for this one.
Uncertainty about the future is something that usually affects younger people, Because they want.
They're not sure what job they'll have someday.
They'll not, they're not sure what they should study at university or college.
They're not sure if they should not go to university and just work for their aunt or uncle who owns a business.
But there's an uncertainty about the future.
And usually young people feel this.
I'm actually feeling this.
I don't get super political in my live streams.
But I have stopped reading the news every day because there's this uncertainty about the future of the world right now.
And it's a little unsettling because up until the pandemic, I thought the world was getting better.
I thought countries were getting along well.
And now I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty about the future.
I will leave it at that, but I think you understand what this means is you're not sure what's going to happen tomorrow.
You're not sure what's going to happen next year.
I'm pretty sure that I'm going to keep doing YouTube, and I'm pretty certain that I will have a job teaching high school for a long time, and so I don't have a lot of uncertainty about my future in terms of what I do for work, but I do have some uncertainty about the future of the world.
Little bit worried right now.
That's all I'll say.
Loneliness.
So I have read in the news that we have a loneliness epidemic in the world, especially in North America with teenagers, that people are finding it difficult to make friends and to keep friends, and so a lot of people are spending more and more time alone.
So loneliness might be something that someone struggles with.
They would really like to have a group of friends but they don't know how to make friends.
They don't know how to be a good friend.
By the way that's one way to maintain a friendship is to be a good friend.
So loneliness is something that some people in the world are experiencing.
Something that is a problem and that they are struggling with. being overworked.
So, this is something that I feel sometimes but it's my own fault.
So, when you are overworked, you have too much work in your day.
You find it very very difficult to get all of your work done when you're at work.
Right now, I am overworked a little bit but it's not too bad.
Last week, I was more overworked. not because of my boss more because of my own um like I have a boss at work but then I'm also my own boss right for YouTube.
So, when you are overworked, it can be stressful.
It can be difficult because you you have to work more, so you have less time to relax as well, and this goes along with it being underpaid.
So some people are overworked and underpaid means their boss or their place of work does not give them a respectable amount of money for the work they are doing.
So, if you work at a fast food restaurant, you might feel like you're underpaid.
If you work somewhere and you have a lot of responsibilities and you're in charge of other people and you're making a only making like an extra 10 a day, you might feel underpaid.
You might feel like you deserve to be paid more, but many people feel like they are overworked and underpaid.
Their boss expects too much from them and also does not pay them what they think they should be paid.
Hunger, so in every single country of the world, there are people who go hungry.
That's the phrase we use to describe that.
There are people in Toronto who go hungry every day.
Even in a country like Canada, where it might seem like we are a wealthy country, there are people who find it hard to afford food.
The way we try to help in Canada is we have things called food banks where people can go and get food for free.
We have government assistance programs.
We have shelters for people who maybe don't have a home, and so hunger is when you don't have enough food to eat every day, and it can be a problem.
In Canada, it's also bad.
People who go hungry and people who maybe are homeless.
It's a challenge in the winter even more, because most of us are inside.
They don't have a place to go, but also it's less likely that people will help them.
So hunger is a problem around the world and also in countries like Canada.
Too many responsibilities.
So if you are a stay at home dad or a stay at home mom with lots of kids, you might feel like you have too many responsibilities.
Um, so you see here two children, two.
One kid is on the iPad um computer phone, cup of tea.
Um, definitely a stressful look, maybe feeling like she has too many responsibilities.
Maybe she's actually working from home while raising two kids.
She might even be a single mom.
So, she might be raising two kids on her own.
I'm just guessing when I look at the picture.
Um she might feel like she has too many responsibilities.
I know, if I was a single dad I would feel like I had too many responsibilities, cuz I would need to work, cook clean, raise my kids like it would just start to feel overwhelming.
So again, responsibilities are the things you must do every day.
You need to pay your rent.
You need to feed your children.
Uh you need to work uh to earn a living. bullying.
So, bullying is the term we use to describe usually when children bug other children.
When children are mean to other children and when they do it regularly.
So, if a student at my school says to another student, your shirt is ugly.
We wouldn't call that bullying.
But if that student every day the other student.
Your shirt is ugly.
Your pants are ugly.
Your shoes are ugly.
Every day said something mean about them.
Then we would say that's bullying.
So it's repeated negative behavior from one person to another person.
And adults can bully adults as well but generally we use this term when we're talking about kids.
So bullying when one child is mean and over again to another child.
Being shy.
So this is similar to being nervous a little bit.
When you're shy.
So here's a good example.
Often little kids like talking to their parents.
They like talking to their grandparents.
They like talking to their aunts and uncles.
But if you are at a family event and there's a new person there and might hide behind their dad or mom,
They might be shy.
They don't want to talk to the new person.
So depression.
Depression is a lot more serious than a lot of the other things I've been talking about.
So when you are feeling down.
When you're feeling the blues, we sometimes say or you're feeling unenergetic or you're just feeling a bit low.
Those are things that are normal as you go through your day and through life.
Depression is when it happens more often and you have those feelings more strongly.
And my suggestion to people who feel like they might be suffering from depression or struggling with depression is you should see a doctor.
When it is at the point where, like if you go through your day and there's a balance of good and bad and at the end of the day you still feel good about your day, that's a normal human day.
But if you are constantly feeling down, day after day, and it's affecting your sleep, your relationships, your ability to eat healthy or exercise, you might want to see a doctor to see if you are struggling with depression.
And then there's loss.
So loss also sometimes called grief.
This is the emotion you experience after someone you know or love has died.
So when you say she's really having trouble getting work done right now.
She's experiencing loss.
It means that maybe her husband passed away.
Maybe her dad passed away.
Maybe her mom passed away.
And when I say passed away I mean died.
So sometimes when you someone dies we just say they passed away.
That's the more common English term or phrase to use.
So you might have a colleague who they're just not very happy at work lately and then you realize oh, they're experiencing loss.
Their grandmother passed away and they were very close to their grandmother.
So loss the feeling of extreme sadness because someone you know and love has died.
