Healing Emotional Wounds with Guy Winch | Jim Kwik

welcome back quick brain your question for today how do you heal emotional wounds I mean even the word wounds it's like you're injured it's like maybe you have a broken arm but if not something your heart is different at least with your arm you know after a few days you're like okay but these emotional meal ones sometimes they linger and I'm excited to have back a very special guest doctor guy winch he's written multiple books that have been translated into 26 different languages his TED Talks are they went viral millions of people watched you around the world and he's psychologist and we're gonna go you know something very important for us it's not just about mental intelligence yes using our techniques you learn languages facts and figures of lightning speed but it's not just mental intelligence it's about mental health also as well and that's so important right now so I'm welcome back guy thank you very much for having me yeah so we're talking about emotional wounds I mean we've talked about in previous episode about the wound of rejection about how do you fix a broken heart like a kind of wounds that you see some of your ear clients hear patients dealing with nowadays so I like the term wounds because when we experience things like rejection as you said or failure or even loneliness there's an emotional wound there in that same sense that there's something that hurts something that can get worse if we don't address it and something that's actually impacting us in all kinds of surprising and unconscious ways that we're not aware of but actually there's a big impact and it's affecting us and so unless we think of it as a wound will brush it off we'll say oh you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps or just keep going and ignore it and it's a bias we have right in the sense that you'll never break your leg and go to ignore that but when we experience emotional wounds we our first thought is like oh let's just move on with things but there are ways to address them and to make sure that they don't impact us in unconscious ways that are detrimental because there could be a huge negative ripple effect and we know in terms your productivity your peace of mind or your level of prosperity even in fact like the I fight last year I tore a rotator cuff mmm you know so I go to the doctor and they they do an x-ray and such and I could look at it no I know how to treat it but people don't do that when they have maybe emotional heart there's no emergency room if you want maybe there's they can see you probably not an emergency basis but yes look you know it's an interesting thing we have we have a finite amount of intellectual and emotional resources and emotional distress of any kind takes up a significant amount of that leaving less for us to use for work for engagement for productivity as you said and there are certain things like that that have a big impact and only give you one example of a study that they did they asked people who are not lonely to imagine being lonely in five years time and then they gave them an IQ test and they saw massive drops significant drops in IQ just from an thought experiment about imagining being lonely and what's illustrative about that is it really makes the point that when we are in emotional distress it is impacting our ability to think to process to think creatively to function in the most basic ways it's not the way non-functional but our functioning can drop by significant percentages that's something we would want to be aware of that's something we would want to be able to address and that's why I think this topic of emotional wounds is so important we talked about in a previous episode about fixing broken heart how our heart gets sometimes hijack our mental faculties and that I know that loneliness going back to loneliness can increase your chance of dementia forty percent and so which is which is which is hard so the heart brain connection if you will people could see my shirt as hard also and a brain on it they're there they're deeply related loneliness is actually a really dangerous condition a year ago the American Psychological Association issued a press release in which they said that loneliness was a bigger public health risk and danger then smoking and obesity combined now cigarette packs come with warnings they say to you oh this is this can kill you but loneliness can increase your likelihood of an early death by 14 to 25 percent depending on on the study you will die sooner you will get sicker if you're chronically lonely it's an actually dangerous condition to have and we do not think about it that way if there were other things that could increase our likelihood of death in that way we'd be like oh we need to know that and we need to know how to address it and yet when it comes to emotional wounds we don't so loneliness is a very dangerous thing for people to experience and ironically when it comes to smoking cigarettes if you're a smoker and I'm your friend I can say to you once hey you know maybe quit with the smoking that's pretty much all I can do it's up to you to do something about it and it's the same with obesity loneliness is something that actually I can impact if I'm seeing you experience it I can connect with you I can initiate dialog I can deepen our relationship and so loneliness is something not only the people who are lonely have to take very seriously but don't those around them can be empowered to assist to do something and it's our survival right as a hunter-gatherer we're drawn to community because that's how we stay alive right in our hunter-gatherer past you couldn't survive outside of a tribe because you needed you know the protection of the tribe the warmth of the hearth the sharing of the of the different duties in order to survive and there's still a part of us now I want to be clear about something there are people who are loners there are people perhaps are more introverted and who don't feel the need from you know a lot of social connection and there's nothing wrong with that those are not lonely people the definition of loneliness is purely subjective it depends solely on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you and that's why we also see that a significant proportion of people who are lonely are actually married or in relationships or in families but there's this disconnect you know they come home this one's on their screen the other ones on their screen the the station's transactional did you get the milk she pay the electric bill did you talk to the kids there's no real connection and people can experience significant loneliness and be unaware that that's what they're feeling so they're surrounded by individuals they might even have a partner and yet they feel like they're alone yes and and that feeling of loneliness again it's subjective defines them as lonely and then you know has a cascading effect for their mental health and their physical health that can be extraordinarily damaging and it's is this something that's on the rise I mean you think you have your social media and you're so you're flipping through is there a connection there or is it there is a we think there's a connection because it's very much on the rise with social media people are connecting to all kinds of different people and might it has the appearance of I have all these friends but these are not actual interactions that you're having with someone and to the extent that they are interactions they're not sufficiently meaningful you're liking someone's post is not a meaningful interaction at all the other thing that we know about social media is that a lot of a lot of studies that show that this can make us feel lonely or depressed but it's more nuanced than that it depends how you use social media if you use social media very passively you're just scrolling through other people's feeds seeing their lives liking something once in a while that is putting you more at risk for feeling depressed over feeling lonely because you're not really engaging if you're posting if you're commenting if you're having conversations if you're using social media more actively you're less at risk for that the problem is when we're feeling lonely then we are very risk-averse and so we don't reach out and and start a dialogue because what if that person doesn't respond so we're much more likely to scroll passively which is which makes it self-perpetuating because more lonely you feel the more your and isolate yourself and that can be a challenge and it comes with a real hook that's that's very devilish and that is that loneliness induces two perceptual distortions perceptual like on the level of perceptions we experience the people around us as caring less about us than they actually do we minimize that you know people who love us and now they don't really care they don't really care as much and the second one is that we devalue the relationships unconsciously in a way that relationship wasn't worth that much it's not gonna be that great seeing that person and those two things just sat on motivation to initiate contact to reach out and we're already risk-averse we really we're feeling so emotionally raw we certainly don't want to set ourselves up for rejection so assuming that the person doesn't care why should I reach out or assuming that even if I do it's not gonna be worthwhile those are the things that really trap people so keeps us stuck what's what's one thing you would recommend to our listeners who might be experiencing this themselves so to break out from loneliness it's really a leap of faith you have to take the action and you have to initiate the contact even if you feel they're not interested they're not likely the problem is when you feel that you're likely to reach out in a way that's either too self-deprecating or too hostile why haven't I heard from you in a month or you probably don't have time for me both are not inviting and so I have one suggestion which is stupid but it's actually effective and that's emojis in other words I had a smiley face at the end of the sentence because ambiguous sentences you know like I haven't seen you in a month there's a little unpleasant to begin with but if there's a smiley face at the end it actually reads like and I want to see you without the smiley face it looks accusatory so I know like so many is a graduate school and that's my that's my go to emojis but but I do believe that you know look at the electronic communication not how you interpret it how it might be interpreted because we misinterpret those things all the time and then reach out in a positive way think back to the last time you hung out with that person and the fun thing that you did and when there's a smile on your face then message them right because somebody can receive a message and if they're in that state and they have that altered perception they can misinterpret it certainly their life story delete something right this person really does care about me so I guess an emoji is worth a thousand words and sometimes and the same thing with the spouse in other words if you're sitting side by side and you've got your noise cancellation earphones on and you're looking at this and they're looking at that take them off and just move scooch up next to them and take their hand and say let's watch that together now they're gonna be horribly suspicious right because what's it like what did you do to the car what happened they're like and you're like no no no the car's fine I didn't crash the car I just it's been a while since we've watched something together let's do that so initiate even with a spouse like a move to closeness say let's close all our screens and have a conversation you know you see these couples at dinner I see them all the time around me they're sitting there and there's nothing nothing is being said surely you have something to say find something in the news newspaper comment on the food like do something but but initiate a contact that's deeper and that's more meaningful go back to the discussions you used to have ask questions about how they see the future or what they reminisce about from the past get a little deeper there and start to forge those connections in a deeper way curiosity goes a long way asking questions seeking first understand what's going on so feet they see people it's so interesting because the Cure could really the be taking an interest in somebody else and taking the focus off of us and on to somebody else make sure they feel seen and also feel heard what about you mentioned you mentioned loneliness what about failure how how do you heal that emotional wound what is failure so look when we fail all the time it's part of how we learn when we grow up it's by repetition by failure by you know trial and error but as adults when we fail at things that are significant to us and not talk about failing a level of candy crush so you'll see some people smash their phone down in frustration from that but but as adults when we fail to get this promotion or we failed you know we we pitch this presentation or work and and we fail to happen or we fail to get a round of funding you know for our startup there's a big consequence that happens in the more meaningful to failure the more meaningful the consequence and the and one of the first things that happens to us and they said - 80 % of people roughly is they begin to feel powerless and they begin to feel helpless and their experience in which they gave college students faller to anagrams that were impossible to do now they seem possible because they're four letters and then they give them another round of anagrams that was very possible and they fail at them because even though they were very much within their ability to do you know doable for their to anagrams that first experience told them I'm not good at this I can't do this and so they weren't able to bring forth the the intellectual resources to master a challenge that was very much within their ability and that's what failure does it teaching us it teaches us that we are not up to the task potentially all these people that you know people say I'm I fail at so many diets say you know people said to me a lot and I'm like great tell me at what point do you fail and there's usually a very specific point at which they fail and that's not about the diet then that's about their system you know it's the same if you have a kid who's in school if they didn't get the grade they wanted to get it doesn't say a thing about their intellectual ability it says only something about their system of studying not being sufficient so it's not something we need to take personally it's something we need to look at us something in my approach wasn't successful let me find what that is and fix it but it's hard to do when you're feeling paralyzed and sometimes when you're in the jar it's hard to see the label on the outside we deal with this a lot with our with students because they all feel like they are they are a failure and they don't realize it's not a failure of self it's just a failure of a system we have a system for studying or for reading or for focusing and when you put it on a system there are two benefits it's not you know start using self compassion it's not you're not beating yourself up on that subject but also on the second thing there's something you could do because a system implies it's there's a process or a recipe to be able to empower yourself and be able to and the tricky part there is that what most people do their default is yeah you know I'm gonna try again and that means I was gonna do the same thing I did but harder in some kind of way and no no don't do the same thing you did that system you know maybe if it was an issue but probably not just effort that was the issue there was something about how you were going about it you need to do it differently you need to and I always say do it like a detective right because then I don't know detectives but I'm assuming they don't go to a crime scene with outrage but can you imagine that blood spatter pattern on the wall it just note it and you need to note it in that same way analyze where those failures happened in a way that's not self critical because that's gonna distract you from actually understanding where the failures happened what didn't I do adequately what could I do differently and then think creatively about it some people say I can't get a promotion my boss doesn't like me and I'm saying then the challenge is how to improve your relationship with your boss in other words there's always a way around hurdle you just have to define what that hurdle is and then brainstorm how you get around it amazing so we talked about loneliness we talked about failure and at a high level we're saying that there's hope there's not only hope that there's there's help if people are suffering from emotional wounds that they don't have to just be a victim they could step up but it does require effort and maybe even being a little kind to yourself and understanding that the curiosity of even coming out and just thinking about it's interesting why I think this way or why I'm behaving this way and that doesn't lead to that judgment self judgment leads to self growth self-awareness potentially even some self improvement self esteem maybe all of those things are very very true and I would add one thing to them to deal with emotional wounds by definition you are going to have to be emotionally uncomfortable what's comfortable is to withdraw what's comfortable is to avoid what's comfortable is to not address things that's what's emotionally comfortable it's not a great emotional place to be but wading into that bog is emotionally uncomfortable and you have to be able to tolerate it and say it is worth it for me to really get into that even though it might be emotionally uncomfortable even though I might need to use a lot of self compassion to kind of get through it because it's self compassion peace is very important because that's where the answers are that's where the band-aid is that's where I can get better and move fool that's where the growth is that's where the treasure lies yes really and what we're of what we're avoiding or we're scared correct Colin and so on the other side that even if someone's going through a storm right now that there are if people persevere if they put on the effort if they just if they feel lonely or depressed and they go for a nice walk and they do some self-care because you know falling in love with that person in the mirror who's been through so much but it's still standing acknowledging yourself for to give yourself credit and taking little actions little tiny little steps to be able to create a different direction or maybe even different destination if you will and doing it with the right mindset with lonely people they often say to me like I know I should be going to the party but I went and no one spoke to me now if you see them at the party they they parked themselves by the by the hummus and the dip and and they with a scowl on their face they look scary and I've seen these people they look at no one's going to approach you you look scary so just going for the sake of it is not sufficient you have to go with the right attitude you have to go with the right mindset and you have to build yourself into that mindset pump yourself up like you were before a a big game in a way like you know remind yourself of all the good interactions you've had with people remind yourself of how of all the people that do care about you remind yourself at that time you told that hilarious joke whatever it is pump yourself up and then go with that attitude even if it's brief I'd rather somebody go and hold it together for 20 minutes smiling and chatting at people work the room and leave then stand there for now on the side looking like this exactly because you're just going to see more evidence to put that just sighs you're staying and so maybe that we could even dream a little bit bigger for ourselves and have something more inspiring that it's not just our current reality that we don't downgrade to our current reality our dreams but we upgrade with our discipline with our effort with our attitude with our skills something we desire and something we deserve this is extraordinary my challenge for everybody here is take a screenshot of this episode or of this video tag guy on social media whether it's on Facebook or Twitter Instagram and myself and share your big aha remember when you teach something you get to learn it twice it doesn't stay just information or inspiration it becomes implementation and integration which is really the goal because knowledge by itself doesn't change anything at all it's when we apply it and becomes more part of us that we could really benefit guy how would a people stay in touch with you they can find me through my website guy went comm and they'll have links to social media to talks to books to other things and specifically for this one which one would you recommend emotional first aid emotional first day it's in 20-something languages should be available most places wonderful everybody get a copy of that book make sure you when you take a picture of it you know we have our one book a week club so hashtag one book a week and I'll repost some of my favorites and also I'm going to get a number of guys books and gift it out to some of our favorites out there as a way of just leaving no brain and or heart behind thanks guys thank you [Music]

Channel: Jim Kwik

Views: 40,382

Rating: 4.9479675 out of 5

Keywords: Jim Kwik, Kwik Learning, Kwik Brain, Guy Winch, mental health, emotional pain definition, emotional healing techniques, healing the wounded soul, how to heal emotional wounds, how to recover from emotional trauma, how to overcome emotional pain, how to heal yourself emotionally, how to get rid of emotional pain

Id: nq7P_L4SLX4

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019