HoW

I grew up with my identical twin, who was an incredibility loving brother.

Now one thing about being a twin is, it makes you an expert at spotting favoritism.

If his cookie was even slightly bigger than my cookie, I had questions.

And clearly, I wasn't starving.

(Laughter)

When I became a psychologist, I began to notice favoritism about different kind, and that is, how much more we value the body than we do the mind.

I spent nine years at university earning my doctorate in psychology, and I can't tell you how many people look at my business card and say,
"Oh -- a psychologist. So not a real doctor."

As if it should say that on my card.

(Laughter)

This favoritism we show the body over the mind. I see it everywhere.

I recently was at friend's house,
and their five-year-old was getting ready for bed.

He was standing on a stool by the sink, brushing his teeth, when he slipped and scratched his leg on the stool when he fell.

He cried for a minute, but then he got back up, got back on a stool, and reached out for a box of Band-Aids to put one on his cut.

Now, this kid could barely tie his shoelaces, 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 how to maintain our physical health, and how to practice dental hygiene, right?

We've known 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 of about our teeth than we do our minds.

Why is it. Our physical health is so much more 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 rejection, or loneliness.

And they could also get worse, if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives and dramatic ways.

And yet, even though, there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds psychological injuries, we don't.

It doesn't even occur to us that we should.

"Oh you're feeling depressed?
Just shake it off, all in your head."

Can you imagine saying that to someone with a broken leg?

"Oh just walk it off, it's all in your leg."

(Laughter)

It is time we closed the gap between our physical and our psychological health.

It's time we made them more equal.

More like twins.

Speaking of which, my brother is also a psychologist.

So he's not a real doctor, either.

(Laughter)

We didn't study together, though.

In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology.

We were apart then for the first time in our lives and the separation was brutal for both of us.

But while he ramained among family and friends, I was alone in a new country.

We missed each other terribly, but international phone calls were really expensive then.

And we could only afford to speak for five minutes a week.

When our birthday rolled around, it was the first time we wouldn't be spending together.

We decided to splurge, and that week, we would talk for ten minutes.

I spent the morning pacing around my room, waiting for him to call, and waiting, and waiting.

But the phone didn't ring.

Given the time difference, I assumed, "Okay, he's out with friends, he'll call later."

There were no cell phones then.

But he didn't.

And I began to realize that after being away for over ten months,
he no longer missed me the way I missed him.

I knew he would call in the morning,
but that night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life.

I woke up the next morning.

I glanced down the phone, and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before.

I stambled out of bed, I put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang a second later.

And it was my brother , and boy, was he pissed.

(Laughter)

It was the saddest and longest night of his life as well.

I tried to explain what had happened, but he said,

"I don't understand.

If you saw I wasn't calling you, why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me?"

He was right.

Why didn't I call him?

I didn't have an answer then.

But I do today, and it's a simple one: loneliness.

Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound, one that distorts our perception and scrambles our thinking.

It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do.

It makes us really afraid to reach out, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand?

I was in the grips of real loneliness back then, but I was surrounded by people all day, so it never occurred to me.

But loneliness is defined purely subjectively.

It depends solely on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you.

And I did.

There is a lot of research on loneliness and all of it is horryfying.

Loneliness won't just make you miserable; it will kill you.

I'm not kidding.

Chronic loneliness increases your likelihood of an early death by 14 percent.

Fourteen percent.

Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol.

It even suppress the functioning of your immune system and making you vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses and diseases.

In fact, scientists have concluded that taken together, chronic loneliness poses as significant a risk for your long-term health and longevity as cigarette smoking.

Now, cigarette packs come with a warnings saying,
"This could kill you."

But loneliness doesn't.

And that's why it's so important we prioritize our psychological health,
that we practice emotional hygiene.

Because you can't treat a psychological wound if you don't even know you're injured.

Loneliness isn't the only psychological wound that distorts our perceptions and misleads us.

Failure does that as well.

I once visited a day care center, where I saw three toddlers play with identical plastic toys.

You had to slide the red button and a cute doggy would pop out.

One little girl tried pulling the purple button, then pushing it, and then she just sat back and looked at the box with her lower lip trembling.

The little boy next to her watched this happen, then turned to his box and bursted into tears without even touching it.

Meanwhile another little girl tried everything she could think of until she slid the red button, the cute doggy popped out, and she squealed with delight.

So three toddlers with identical plastic toys, but with very different reactions to failure.

The first two toddlers were perfectly capable of sliding a red button.

The only thing that prevented them from succeeding was their mind tricked them into believing 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 get triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks.

Are you aware of how your mind reacts to failure?

You need to be.

Because if your mind tries to convince you that you're incapable of something,
and you believe it, then like those two todders, you'll begin to feel helpless and you stop trying too soon, or you won't try at all.

And then you will be even more convinced you can't succeed.

You see, that's why so many people function below their actual pottential.

Because somewhere along way,
sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it.

Once we become convinced of something, it's very difficult to change our mind.

I learned that lesson the hard way when I was teenager with my brother.

We were driving with friends down a dark road at night, when a police car stopped us.

There was a robbery in the area, and they were looking for suspects.

The officer approached the car, and shone his flashlight at the driver,
then at my brother in the front seat, and then on me.

His eyes opened wide and he said,

"Where have I seen your face before?"

(Laughter)

And I said, "In the front seat."

(Laughter)

But that make no sense to him whatsoever.

So now he thought I was in drugs.

(Laughter)

So he drags me out of the car,
he searches me, he marches me over to the police car, and only when he verified I don't have a police record, could I show him I had twin in the front seat.

But even as 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 very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail.

But you cannot allow yourself to become convinced you can't succeed.

You have to fight feelings of helplessness.

You have to gain control of the situation.

And you have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins.

[Stop Emotional Bleeding]

Our minds and our feelings, they're not the trustworthy friends we thought they were.

They are more like a really moody friend, who can be totally supportive one minute, and really unpleasant the next.

I once worked with this woman who, after twenty years of marriage, and an extremely ugly divorce, was finally ready for her first date.

She had met this guy online and he seemed nice, and he seemed successful, and most importantly he seemed really into her.

So she was very excited, she bought a new dress, and they met at an upscale New York City bar for a drink.

Ten 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 couldn't move.

All she could do was call a friend.

And here's what the friend said:

"Well, what do you expect?

You have big hips, you have nothing interesting to say, why would a handsome, successful man like that ever go out ever with a loser like you?"

Shocking, right, that a friend could be so cruel?

But it would be much less shocking if I told you it wasn't the friend who said that.

It's what the woman said to herself.

And that's something we all do, especially after a rejection.

We all start thinking of all our faults and all our shortcomings, what we wish we were, what we wish we weren't.

We call ourselves names.

Maybe not as harshly, but we all do it.

And it's interesting that we do this,
because our self-confidence is already damaged.

Why would we want to hurt her more?

I'll take the knife and see how much deeper I can go."

But we do this with psychological trauma all the time.

Why? Because of poor psychological cleansing.

Because we don't pay enough attention to our mental health.

We know from many studies that when your self-confidence decreases,
you are more  You are subject to anxiety and pressure,
you find failure and rejection more hurtful and it takes longer to recover from them.

So when you are rejected,
the first thing you should do is build up your confidence,
not join the "fight club" and destroy your confidence.

When you are in emotional pain,
treat yourself with the same kindness 
What you might expect from a loyal friend.

We have to identify our harmful psychological habits and change them.

And one of the most common habits is rumination.

Rumination means chewing again.

It happens when your boss yells at you,
or your teacher makes you feel stupid in class.

Or when you get into a big fight with your friend.

And you can't stop repeating the scene in your head for days,
sometimes weeks.

Rumination about sad events in this way easily becomes a habit.

And it's a very expensive habit.

Because by spending so much time focusing on negative and sad thoughts,
you're putting yourself at risk.

big which is that t Develop clinical depression,
alcoholism, or an eating disorder.

Or even heart disease and arteries.

The problem is that the need to ruminate can be very strong and important.

So it's usually hard to let go.

I know this for sure because about a year ago,
I personally developed this habit.

You see, my brother was diagnosed with grade 3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

And his cancer was very aggressive.

His tumors were visible everywhere throughout his body.

And he began harsh chemotherapy.

And I couldn't stop thinking about what he was going through.

I couldn't stop thinking how much he was suffering.

Although he did not complain even once.

He had this wonderfully positive attitude.

His mental health was great.

I was physically fit, but in worse shape psychologically.

But I knew what I had to do.

Studies show that a distraction of just two minutes is enough to suppress the urge to ruminate in that moment.

So every time a worrying, sad,
or negative thought came to my mind,
I forced myself to focus on something else until the urge passed peacefully.

Within one week, my entire behavior changed.

He became more optimistic and more hopeful.

Nine weeks after he started chemotherapy,
my brother had a CT scan,
and I was by his side when he got the results.

All tumors were gone.

He had three rounds of chemo until he left the hospital,
but we knew he would recover.

This photo was taken two weeks ago.

By taking action when you're alone,
by changing your response to failure,
by protecting your self-esteem,
by fighting negative thinking,
you'll not only heal your psychological wounds,
you'll build emotional resilience, and you'll thrive.

A hundred years ago,
people started practicing personal hygiene,
and life expectancy increased by more than fifty percent in just a few decades.

I believe that our quality of life could be raised in the same amazing way if we all started to practice purification.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if all people were mentally healthy?

If there is less loneliness and less depression?

If people knew how to overcome failure?

If they feel better about themselves and more powerful?

If they are happier and satisfied?

I can, because this is the world I want to live in,
and this is the world my brother wants to live in as well.

And if you become a little more aware and start changing some simple habits,
this will be the world we all live in.

Thank you very much.

(clap)