2-7 Bad Grades and Barb's Hands – The Value of Mental Tricks

So it was at age 26 when I started to try and retrain my brain from being a linguist to becoming more technical. I worked very hard at this, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to keep having adventures. A couple years into my brain retraining exercise, I had the opportunity to go to the Bering Sea and work as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers. And then the unexpected opportunity arose for me to work as a radio operator at the South Pole Station in Antarctica. Exciting times, except for one thing. All this meant that I took about a year off from the electrical engineering program I just worked so hard to be accepted into. The semester I finally returned to the university after my adventures, it might be no surprise to learn that I struggled. I’d lost some of my newly acquired fluency with math and equations. After all, I’d been away for a year. When I got to my end of semester grades, I was distraught. In fact, I was so disappointed in myself, that I kept feeling upset and stressed for weeks. Have you ever noticed my hands? They’ve got, let’s say, a kind of interesting twist to them. This is because when I let stressful emotions take over my life, I open myself up to disease. I was only 29 years old at the time, but right in the middle of my stressful reaction to bad grades, I acquired rheumatoid arthritis. Allowing yourself to react inappropriately to stressful events can open the door to serious disease, including not only rheumatoid arthritis, but even cancer. It’s not like it’s just a temporary thing. Obviously these kinds of diseases can affect you for the rest of your life or even shorten your life. Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman makes a vital point when he observes nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you’re thinking about it. This is a very useful thought to keep in mind to help put your life into perspective. Unfortunate things happen to everyone. But if you react badly, you can end up making those things even worse. At that time, I just didn’t have the cognitive tools I needed to be able to handle stress better. I didn’t realize that simple mental tricks can be invaluable not only in reducing stress but also overall in helping me to be more effective, productive, and happy in my life and my learning. So what kinds of mental tricks am I talking about? First, let me give you a little background. Let’s say you’re visiting a zoo and you see a snake in a cage. No big deal right. But now let’s imagine that you see that snake outside the cage slithering towards you, very different. You see, the context with which you view something makes an enormous difference. If you learn to put a mental cage, a better frame, around your stressful thoughts it can help you move forward in a positive way. Anyone can learn and develop mental tricks to help them reframe negative thoughts in a more positive way. In the next video, we’ll learn some of the most powerful of these tricks.