Why What We Feel Matters More Than What We Think. | Natasha Sharma | TEDxStMaryCSSchool

[Music] [Applause] have you ever made a bad decision we all have most of the decisions we make are based on how we feel overeating cheating on an exam maybe staying in a bad relationship or ending a good one the majority of our decisions are guided by our emotions so it's important that we understand this we make about 35,000 decisions in a single day now I don't know how many how many of these are bad ones but what I do know is that the most most of them are guided by our decision our emotional process people say funny things to me all the time they say things like I'm not an emotional thinker and they say funny things to other people like this have you ever been called an emotional person I'm not an emotional person but that always seems very funny to me because all human beings are emotional people it's part of being a human and yet we hear this all the time here's something else funny that people say they say that when they get old they they're okay if their body breaks down they're fine if they need help going up and down the stairs they need a little assistance getting in and out of bed but they want their minds to be intact ever heard that they want to be of sound mind and yet how many of us actually take the time to become emotionally fit I've never met anybody who's older who actually wishes that they knew how to play more Sudoku but I have met people who are older who wish that they've connected more with other people who wish that they'd experienced more of what life has to offer and yet we don't learn about how to become emotionally fit we take care of our bodies all the time we go to the gym we put protein in our shakes we wear little devices on our risks that track every single movement that we make in a day and we put to work in our lattes we drink tumeric lattes but what do we do for our own emotional health our own emotional fitness unfortunately we're not actually taught to live in the world emotionally we're taught social skills we're taught lots of important things but our parents never came around and said all right guys gather round table we're going to talk about how to manage our emotions today it just never happened at least not in my house what we're taught is important things how to read how to write how to talk and walk how to make friends how to not piss off your boss but we're not taught about our emotional health now I've conducted in my career close to 500 psychological assessments and this basically involves me running a bunch of tests and I measure things like IQ and attention and academic knowledge and social-emotional functioning in memory and then I deliver the results and there's always one score that everybody wants to know and they're like I don't care about the rest of the scores just tell me my IQ I want to know my IQ that's the one they want to know the most especially when they think it's high and that's because we still have a very strong association between conventional smart or conventional wisdom and success and happiness in life and it's just not the full picture IQ plays a portent an important role but actually people and this has been shown and proven through studies people who show higher levels of emotional fitness they're much likelier to be happier and successful later in life than those who have lower levels of emotional fitness and higher IQs but we don't learn this things are actually getting tougher in the world and emotional Fitness is going to be more important and not critical for all of us going forward but especially you guys and here's why the pace of the world is changing at a rate that is faster than it has ever changed in the past and our brains ability to process this world which we're doing all the time we're constantly modulating interacting trying to make sense of it it has not increased to the same rate and this is just getting worse we're having a faster more automated world and a brain processing speed that can't keep up the result more stress and more anxiety so it's going to be more crucial than ever to be able to manage our emotions and we know life can get tough and it will get tough and for young people in some ways it's going to get tougher the average income for people aged between 18 and 35 has gone down for the past 25 years meanwhile the cost of living has gone up the majority of jobs that are created now a part-timer contract student debt is the highest it's ever been and wealth disparity is also the highest sever been so we've got some problems anybody here seen the movie Inside Out great movie great great movie there's so much going on in that movie when I took my husband to see it halfway through he looked at me and he's like this is a psych movie and it is because it talks about the five most basic primal emotions that we all experience in life and by universal what I mean is they look the same on our faces across all countries but there's only three emotions that matter the most when it comes to our decision-making process because these are the ones that drive our emotions in our story our decisions more than any other emotion and those are love hate and fear so if you can understand that love hate and fear will drive your decisions more than any other emotion you're already on the road to emotional fitness let's talk about love all since the beginning of time we've had the desire for love and it made a lot of sense because to be loved and approved of it would ensure our survival right if we got into trouble someone would help us and even today there's lots of benefits to being loved companionship support help so it's very natural that we desire it as long as we don't take it to an extreme and this is where so many of us run into trouble we've got this idea in our minds that we have to be loved we need to be loved in order to be happy and somebody else has got to give it to us and we see this in books and TVs and films magazines everything turn on the television watch a commercial you'll see the product or service that's being advertised the message isn't very subtle by our product or by our service because you need it be better and if you're better you'll be loved and if you're loved you'll be happy and we listen to this as teenagers and our music the lyrics think about some of the lyrics in our music I need your love I'm nothing without you you're my everything and my personal favorite you're nobody till somebody loves you the message we we listen to countless hours of this as young people especially it's amazing how much consumption of this kind of these lyrics that we expose ourselves to and the message is very clear you can't be happy unless somebody loves you and that's just not true so what we need to do is make a distinction between needing love in order to be happy and desiring it because we all have a natural desire and a natural drive to be loved and that's great because it's amazing to feel connected to another human being but do we absolutely need to be connected to another human being in order to feel happy no we don't let's talk about hate and anger this is a really motivating emotion now it can be helpful in some ways it can help us create boundaries and teach people how to treat us it can give us the courage to confront an appropriate boss or deal with an abusive family member but it can also make us do very foolish things like drive dangerously behind the wheel punch somebody in the face I could write a nasty comment on social media from behind our computer screen at some point or another in our lives we will all have felt as though someone wronged us some past injustice that someone has done to us we've all felt that way somebody wronged us and they've got to pay for and it's that feeling of hate and anger it keeps us stuck stuck on that idea that someone wronged us stuck in the feeling of anger and hate and we need to let that go and the only way to let it go is to let go of the hope and the expectation that the world is a just and equal place all the time because it's not sometimes it's not fair sometimes people hurt us it's part of the human experience and if we can understand that and come to terms with that a great weight is lifted off of us whoever it was that wronged you in your life your sister shady co-worker former friend let go of the idea the need to expose them as a wrongdoer to the world now we're all searching for the same thing in life or we're all trying to go for the same thing but same achieve the same goal and that is to avoid as much pain and suffering as we possibly can and sometimes we'll elect to choose or we'll choose to feel misery over feeling afraid as a lesser of two evils because it's easier to feel afraid it's a sorry it's easier to feel misery feeling afraid is hard and we feel afraid we're afraid of failure we're afraid of getting hurt we're afraid of the unknown and so we stay in situations we stay in relationships or we vote for a certain person because we're terrified and it motivates us to inaction as much as it will motivate us to action in all my years as therapists I've learned one thing there's only one way to deal with fear and that's to look at straight in the face and invite it in you can't think your way out of fear you have to act your way out of fear you've got to stare it down in the face like you would the barrel of a gun you have to invite it into your life you have to confront the very thing it is that you feel afraid of and you have to allow yourself to feel the fear in order to get over it if you're afraid of flying you'll have to get on a plane if you're afraid you're crazy new idea for a product or an app isn't going to fly launch it anyway fall flat on your face if you have to because at least you won't look back later on and say I wish I had ten years ago I was very afraid I made a life-changing decision but it didn't come easy I just finished my undergraduate degree in McMaster had been working in the corporate world for a few years and I was living in London and I was working for one of the biggest cosmetics companies in the world and I was doing a lot of things that a lot of people would think are pretty fun things like traveling around the world first class meeting celebrities making a ton of money and I was miserable and I was very afraid I was afraid that if I left people would think I was a failure and I was afraid that if I left I would think that I was a failure but I knew something had to change so I quit packed up my stuff and I moved back to my parents house into my old bedroom that was a low point and I spent the next year just dealing with the emotions that came from making that change some of them are positive but a lot of them were negative and instead of running away from those negative emotions the way I normally would instead of distracting myself and figuring out ways that I didn't have to deal with them instead i sat with them I let myself feel them I didn't push them aside I made myself get acquainted with them I became friends with them I took the longest walks of my life I turned down invitations to go out with people and stayed home on a Saturday night so that I could sit alone in the silence of my own thoughts really getting to understand Who I am and what I really needed what I really wanted and it was doing that that finally led me to the emotions that I needed to feel in order to make what I think was one of the better decisions in my life and those feelings were hope excitement and confidence and the decision I made was to go back to graduate school full-time and I had to start from square one I had to leave a career that I had built up and I had to go back to scratch starting from the very beginning of a brand-new career and I was scared but I did it anyway and I've never read it it because since then I have truly never worked a day in my life the time for you guys to get emotionally fit is now I'm going to tell you what nobody told me which is that you can actually learn this this is a learning you can become more emotionally lean and if you start now it's going to be that much easier for you and life gets tough down the road and it will it probably already has but it's going to get tougher our problems just get more complex as we get older and if you're emotionally lean you're going to have the cushion and the buffer to bounce back from those stresses much more easily you can learn this so do this and when you learn it teach it teach it to your children your emotions rule to learn to rule your emotions thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 274,567

Rating: 4.8437648 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Life, Achievement, Behavior, Behavorial economics, Benefit, Big problems, Brain, Childhood, Creativity, Depression, Emotions, Empathy, Grit, Personal growth, Psychology, Social Change, Society

Id: DsDVCQnqcy4

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2017