Self-reflective blog

                                   How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed

The video show about the story of Daniel Levitin and he was neuro scientist by profession. He narrated his story with a fluent and distinguish way. The story was when he returned home from somewhere else but when he was at home, he forgot his home keys on the table and there was no any ways to get inside as all the doors and windows are locked. He crawled through the basement and broke the basement window and cleared all the grass and covered that broken window with some cardboard so as on the way to airport tomorrow morning he could call his contractor and ask him to fix it. As it was far better and expensive than to call the locksmith in the middle of the night. 

As he was neuro scientist by training and he know a little bit about how the brain performs under stress. It releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds you thinking. On the other day, after waking up he was still thinking about the hole that he made on the basement window and recalling  about a welcome note to the contractor to repair it. As he went to the airport counter for check-in , he forgot his passport. So, he drove 40 mins back to home to get the passport and drove back to the airport on time.

After this incident , he realise that there are some certain things that could make the bad things happen will minimize the likelihood of it being a total catastrophe.

He shared his incident with his colleague friend who was a noble prize winner and after hearing all that his friend shared him about the practice he has been working on called prospective hindsight.

He share some ideas like around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost and this sounds like common sense and it is and there are lots of science associated with it which is based on the way our spatial memory works. There is the structure in the brain called the hippocampus that evolved around thousand of years and is used to keep track of the location of important things.

We need to train ourselves to think ahead to these kinds of situations. I think the important point here is recognizing that all of us are flawed. We all are going to fail now and then. The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be to put systems in place that will help minimize the damage or to prevent the bad things from happening in the first place.

When he get back from the trip, his contractor install a combination lock next to the door, with a key to the front door in it, an easy to remember combination. As from his story we can say he is not completely organised but we can see his organisation as a gradual process and he is getting there.