Chatterbox #341 – Talking about frustration

Have you ever felt so frustrated that you wanted to throw your phone or your laptop out the window? If you have, you're not alone. In today's lesson, we're going to help you put that feeling into words in English. Hey guys, it's Andrew here. Welcome to Chatterbox from QLips.

Chatterbox is our series for intermediate to advanced English learners who want to go beyond textbooks. Listen to real, natural conversations and sound more confident when they speak English. So if that's you, you're in the right place. Today, Anna, my co-host and I are going to talk all about frustration.

We look at what frustration actually is. The difference between two different kinds of frustration, internal and external, and how it connects with other emotions, like anger, disappointment, and regret. And we'll talk about how we deal with frustrating situations in our own lives,

and towards the end we'll also teach you several useful expressions that you can use in your English speaking next time you feel frustrated. If you're a Q of Smembers you can really level up your English by using the study materials for this episode. First listen to the episode once without reading. Then listen again with the interactive transcript and check any parts that you missed. After that, you can review the vocabulary explanations, do the quiz, and then try the speaking

and writing practice activities. Following these steps will help you remember everything really well and actually use it in your own life. You can also join the live speaking classes to talk about this episode with one of our awesome

Q-Lips teachers and other members who are really motivated and want to level up their English just like yourself. So it's a great chance to share your own frustrating stories, practice the new expressions, and get some feedback on your speaking in a supportive environment.

So if you're not a member yet and you want to study more seriously, sign up and become a member today by visiting QLips.com. Okay, it's time to get started. Here's my conversation with Anna all about frustration.

Enjoy. Hey there Anna, how's it going? It's going really well. Thank you, Andrew.

And yourself? I'm doing very well Anna. I'm not feeling frustrated at all. So I think I'm in a good mindset to talk about our topic today and we're going to get into

the nitty gritty details of what frustration is and we'll talk about when we feel frustrated, how we deal with frustration, all of these different things. But we'll begin with a definition and maybe you could do the honors. Could you let everybody know what this emotion is?

Frustration. Of course, let me lay it out for you guys and I have to admit that I didn't really know this before I had researched it. So this is really interesting.

But the definition for frustration and in psychology, frustration is a common emotional response to opposition. So you get frustration from perceiving resistance to the fulfillment of your will or goal. And you're likely to be even more frustrated when your will or goal is denied to you or blocked.

A really interesting thing as well to take away here is there's two types of frustration. Internal that feeding we have inside ourselves that are an also external as well. So internal frustration would be from challenges in fulfilling your personal goals, your desires, your drives, your needs, or maybe dealing with a deficiency that you think you have,

like a lack of confidence or fear of social situations, whereas external causes of frustration involve conditions outside your control, like maybe it's a physical roadblock, a difficult task, or maybe just the perception of wasting time. Okay, very good Anna.

Let me put that into layman's terms for everyone, because there was a little bit of a high level definition. And I will say guys that we did our research on Wikipedia. So if you want to go and read all about frustration in a more official scientific way, then Wikipedia is a great way to get some info about this.

But yeah, essentially frustration is just that feeling, not a motion that you get, when what you want to do is blocked. So you have a goal or you have something that you wanna do, you wanna accomplish

and you can't do it for some reason. And that makes you feel not so good, right? You want to do something and you can't do it. So you don't feel very good.

That is the emotion of frustration. And as Anna explained, there are two different types. There is internal frustration. And that occurs when there's something deficient in you

that prevents you from achieving your goals. like maybe you want to ace a test, ace an exam, but you didn't study enough and you don't know the answers and that's your fault, right?

That's your fault for not achieving a high grade on that test and you'd feel frustrated for failing the test. That's internal frustration. And then there's external frustration

and that's when something outside of your control affects you and blocks you from achieving your goal. So to take that exam example again, Maybe you studied hard for the exam,

you were prepared for the exam, but then there was a huge traffic jam, and you were stuck in traffic and you couldn't make it to the school on time,

and you weren't able to write your exam and you failed. You would also feel terrible, right? Maybe in a slightly different way, but that emotion would also be frustration,

but a slightly different kind. So, and I thought this was interesting because I didn't really know, I mean, I guess I would have known

about these two different types of frustration, but I had never really thought about it in this way before. So it was cool to read this article and find out about those two different kinds.

And I was wondering if we could compare frustration with some different emotions, because I think it's really hard, this is almost like to me talking about emotions.

It almost reminds me of when people ask native speakers, grammar questions, right? It's like something that you know intrinsically, but when you try to explain it, it's very, very difficult to pinpoint.