Guy Winch: Why we all need to practice emotional first aid

                              

TED 2014

Guy Winch: Why we all need to practice emotional first aid (transcript)

Summary

This is really true that we are inclined towards our psychological health. We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones. For example, they're like failure, rejection, loneliness. We are ignoring them but our mind is hard to change once we become convinced. Then in our mind, one of unhealthiest and most common that is rumination occurs. It means to continue chewing over and again. You think that you don't do that though you just can't stop replaying the scene of psychological injury in your head for days, sometimes for weeks on end. Now it can easily become a habit and it's very costly. You'll spend so much time for upsetting and negative thoughts, it leads you to putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders and cardiovascular disease. That’s why we all need to practice emotional first aid. The solution the speaker tells us is to break the urge to ruminate. It can do by just having even a two-minute distraction. You force to concentrate on something else until the urge passed and your outlook will be changed also you become more positive and more hopeful.

You can't see your psychological injuries and you don't know where you put a band-aid on. However, you, this time, know that you have to take care of your emotional hygiene and your body. Especially by building emotional resilience, your quality of life can rise dramatically.

Words in this story

rumination / act of regurgitating food and re-chewing it, act of chewing cud.

demoralized / despairing, having the characteristic of a low morale, given up.

inclined / have a tendency to do something. likely.

distraction / a thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else. interruption.