I grew up with my identical twin. He was incredibly loving brother.
now, one thing about being a twin is makes you an expert
at spotting favoritism.
if his cookie even slightly bigger than my cookie, I have questions,
and clearly I wasn't starving.
(laughing)
When I became Psycologist, I began to notice the favoritism of different kind.
and that is how much more we value the body than we do the mind.
I spend nine years at University earning my Doctorate in Psychology.
and I can't tell you how many people looked at my Business card and say,
Oh, a Psychologist, so not a real Doctor.
as I such say that on my card.
(laughing)
This favoritism we show the body over the mind.
I see it everywhere.
I Recently was at a friend's house,
and a five year old was getting ready for bed.
He was standing on a stool by the sink and brushing his teeth,
when he slipped, and scratched his leg on the stool when he fell.
He cried for a minute, but he got back up,
got back on the stool and reach out for a box of bandage
to put one on his cut.
Now this kid could barely tie his shoe laces,
but he knew you have to cover a cut, so it doesn't become infected,
and you have to care for your teeth by brushing twice a day.
we all know have to maintain our physical health
and have to practice dental hygiene, right ?
We know it since we were five years old.
but what do we know about maintaining our psychological health?
well, nothing.
What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene?
Nothing.
How is it? We spend more time
taking care our teeth than we do our minds.
why is it our physical health is so much
important to us than our psychological health .
You know we sustain psychological injuries
even more often than we do physical ones,
Injuries like failure or rejections, or loneliness,
and they can also get worse if we ignore them.
and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways.
and yet, even though there are Scientifically proven techniques
we could use to treat these kind of psychological injuries .
We don't.It doesn't even occur to us we should.
Oh, your feeling depressed, just shake it off, it's all in your head.
can you imagine say that to somebody who broken a leg,
just walk it off, it's all in your leg.
(laughing)
It's the time we close the gap between our physical and our psychological health.
It's time we make them more equal. More like twins.
Speaking of which, my brother is also a psychologist.
so he's not a real Doctor either.
(laughing)
We didn't study together though.
In fact, the hardest thing I ever done in my life
is move cross Atlantic to New York city to get my doctorate in psychology.
we were apart then,for the first time in our life, and the seperation
was brutal for both of us. But well ,
He remained among the family and friends.
I was alone in a new country. We miss each other terribly .
But international telephone was really expensive then.
and we could only afford speak for 5 minutes a week.
When our birthday rolled around,
and it was first we would spending together.
we decide to splurging,
that week we decided to talk ten minutes.
I spend morning, passing around my room.
Waiting for him to call , and waiting, and waiting, but the phone didn't ring.
given the time difference, I assume
ok, he 's out with friend, he will call later .
There were no cell phones then. but he didn't.
and I began to realize, after being away for over ten Month,
he no longer miss me the way I missed him.
and I knew he would call in the morning, but that night was the
saddest and longest night in my life. I woke up the next morning.
I runs down the phone ,and I realized I had kicked it off the hook
when passing the day before.
I stumped off bed, I put phone
back on the receiver,and it ringed a second later,
and it was my brother. and boy he was pissed.
(laughing)
It was the saddest and longest night in his life as well.
I tried to explain what happened, but he said
I don't understand, if you're sorry I wasn't calling you,
Why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me.
he was right. Why din't I call him?
I din't have answer then. but I do today,
and it's simple one. Loneliness.
Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound.
one that distort our obsessions
and scramble our thinking, and it makes us believe
those around us care much less than they actually do.
It make us really afraid to reach out. Because why set yourself up
for rejection and heart ache, when your heart is already aching
more than you can stand.
I was in the grip of real loneliness back then,
but I was surrounded by people all day,
so it never occurred to me.
but loneliness, it defined purely , subjectively,
it depands solely On whether you feel emotionally or socially
disconnected from those around you. and I did.
There's a lot research on loneliness
and all of it is horifying
Loneliness won't just leave you miserable, it will kill you.
I am not kidding.
Chronic loneliness increase your lively hood early death
by 14 percent,14 percent.
Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high chlosteroral,
It even suppress the functioning of your immune system,
make you vulnerable for all kinds of illness and diseases.
in fact, Scientist concluded that taken together,
Chronic loneliness poses a significant risk
for your longterm health and longevity than a cigaret smoking.
Now cigaret pass the warnings saying this will kill you,
but the loneliness doesn't. and that 's why it's so important
we prioritize our psychological health. we practice the emotional hygiene .
Because you can't treat a psychological wound
if you don't even know you are injured.
Loneliness isn't the only psycological wound
that distorted our perception that misleads us.
Failure does that as well.
I once visited daycare center where I saw three toddlers
play with identical plastic toys,
you have to slide the red button, a cute dog would pop out.
one little girl try pulling the purple button, then pushing it,
then she just sat back and looked at box with her lower lip trembling.
The little boy next to her, watches this happen, and then turn to
his box, and bust it out without even touching it.
mean while, another little girl tried everything she could think of
until she slid the little red button
and the cute dog pops out, and she squealed with delight.
so three toddlers with identical plastic toys
but very different reactions to failure.
The first two toddlers was perfectly capable of sliding the red button,
the only thing that prevent them from
succeeding was their mind tricked them into believe they could not.
Now, adults get tricked this way as well all the time.
In fact we all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that gets tricked
whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks, are you aware
how your mind reacts to failure? you need to be.
Because if your mind tries to convince you that you are incapable of something
and you believe it, like those two toddlers,
You begin to feel helpless, you stop try it too soon or
You won't even try it at all. then you will be even more convinced
that you can't succeed. You see, that's why so many people
function below their actual potential.
because somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure
convinced them they couldn't succeed,
and they believe it.
once we become to convinced of something,
it's very difficult to change our mind.
I learn that lesson the hard way.
When I was a teenager with my brother
We were driving with a friend down a dark road at night,
when the police car stopped us. they had a robbery in the area,
they were looking for suspect. The officer approach the car,
and shooting the flash light on the driver, and my brother in
the front seat, and then me, his eyes open wide,
and he said where I seeing your face before,
(laughing)
and I said in the front seat.
(laughing)
but that made no sense to him what so ever.
so he thought I was in drugs.
So he dragged me out of the car, he searched me, he marches me
to the police car, Only when he verified I don't have a police record.
and I show him I had a twin in the front seat,
but even we were driving away, you could see
by the look on his face, He was convinced
I was getting away with something.
Our mind is hard to change once we become convinced,
so it might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated
after you failed.
But you can not allow yourself to be convinced
that you can't succeed.
You have to fight this feeling of helplessness
You have to gain control over the situation,
and you have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins.
Our minds and our feelings, they are not the trust worthing
friends we thought they were, They are more like a
really moody friend. Totally support one minute,
and really unpleasant the next.
I once work with this woman who has twenty years marriage
end extremely ugly divorce was finally ready for her first date,
She has met this guy online, he seems nice and he seems successful,
and most importantly, he seems really into her.
She was really excited,and she bought new dress, and
they met at upscale New York city bar for a drink,
10 minutes into the date, the man stands up and says,
I'm not interested and walks out.
Rejection is extremely painful. the woman was so hurt,
she could't move. All she could do is call her friend,
here's what friend says, well, what you expect,
you have big hips, you have nothing interesting to say,
why would a handsome successful man like that
ever go out with a looser like you.
shocking why a friend would be so cruel.
but it would be much less shocking if I told you it wan't a friend
who said that, It was the woman said to herself.
and that's something we all do.
Especially up to a rejection, We all start to thinking of
all our faults and all our shortcomings what we wish we were,
what we wish we were to be called ourself's names,
Maybe not as harshly, but we all do it.
It's interesting we do, because our self esteem is already hurting.
why would we want to go and damage it even further.
Why? we wouldn't get physical injury worse on purpose .
We wouldn't get cut on your arm and decide,
oh, I know, I am going to take a knife and see how much deeper I can make it.
But we do that with our psychological injury all the time.
Why? Because poor emotional hygiene. Because we don't priotize our
Psychological health. We know from dozens of studies,
When your self-esteem is lower,
you are more vulnerable, distress and
to anxiety that failures and rejections hurt more,
and it takes longer to recover from them.
So when you get rejected, the first thing you should be doing is to revive
yourself's esteem, not join fight club and beat it into a perk.
when you are in a emotional pain,
treat yourself with same compassion you expected to make truly good friend .
We have to catch our un-healthy psychological habits and change them.
One of un-healthiest most common is called Rumination.
To ruminate, means to chew over. It's when your boss's yells at you,
or your professor makes you feel stupid, In class, you have big fight
with your friend, and you just can't replay the scene in your head for days,
sometimes for weeks then. Now ruminating about upsetting event in this way
can easily become habit, and it's very costly one.
Because by spending so much time focus on upsetting, negative thoughts,
You are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing
clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders and even cardiac vescular
Cardio vesicular disease. The problem is the urge to ruminate can feel
really strong, really important, so it's a difficult habit to stop.
I know this for a fact. because little over a year ago,
I developed the habit myself.
You see my twin brother was diagnosed
with stage III Non-Hodgkin's lymphomaďź
his cancer was extremly aggressive ,
He has invisible tumors all over his body.
and he has to start harsh douse of Chemo-Therapy,
and I couldn't stop thinking about what he is going through,
I could't stop thinking how much he is suffering. Even though
he never complained not once.
He has this incredible positive attitude.
His psychological health is amazing. I was physically healthy,
but Psychologically i was a mass. but I knew what to do.
Studies tell us, even a two minutes distraction is sufficient to break the
break the urge to Ruminate in that moment.
So each time i had worrying and upsetting
negative thought, I force myself to concentrate on something else
until the urge passed, and within one week,
My whole outlook changed, and became more positive and more helpful.
Nine weeks after he started Chemo-Therapy, my brother had Cat-scan,
I was by his side when he got back his results.
All the tumors were gone. He still has three more Rounds Chemo-Therapy to go.
But we knew he would recover.
this picture was taken two weeks ago.
By taking action when you lonely,
by changing your response to failure,
by protecting yourself esteem,
by battling negative thinking,
You won't just heal your psychological wound,
you will bulid your emotional resilience, you will thrive.
You know hundred years ago, People began practicing personal Hygiene,
and life expectancy rates rose by over fifty percent in
just matter of decades. I believe our quality of life
could rise just as dramatically if
we all begin practicing emotional Hygiene.
Can you imaging, can you imaging what the world would be like
if everyone was psychologically healthier,
if there were less loneliness, and less depression.
If people knew how to overcome failure,if they feel better
about themselves, and more empowered,
if they were happier, and more fulfilled, I can, because
That's the world I want live in, and that's the world
my brother wants to live in as well. If you just become informed,
and change a few simple habits, well
and that's the world we all can live in.
Thank you very much.