How to keep calm and avoid stress



O
ne always wishes to either prevent bad things from happening in his or her life or dodge them by one way or another. This always brings oneto think about whether there are possible things that you can do or systems that you can put into place that can prevent bad things from happening? Daniel Levitin, Neuroscientist, gave a solution to this in one of his Ted Talks.

Y
ou can always practice pre-mortem which consists of assessing the situation before hand and figuring out what all can be done to prevent the things from going wrong in future. Pre-mortem is also called Prospective Hindsight which can easily be practiced in our day-to-day life.

Practicing Prospective Hindsight

  • In this process, you look ahead and try to figure out all the things that could go wrong
  • Next, you figure out what all you can do to prevent those things from happening
How can you practice Prospective Hindsight?

  • Around your home, designate a place for things that are easily lost. For example- bowl for car keys, drawer for passports.
  • This way you know where a particular thing is and you'll find them whenever you look for them.
  • This will possibly prevent you from panicking and would help in stress management,
Understand that under stress you are not going to be your true best and you should put systems in place in order to prevent any kind of possible future stress.
Accept that certain failures ought to happen but you can minimize the damage by being a bit more organized . Effective stress management could actually do wonders.

Save yourself froma stressful situation

"Things which are ought to happen would happen no matter how much you want that to not take place, the only thing you can make sure is to do your practice and think ahead about situations and what all can go wrong," he said.Once you analyze things from this perspective you can not only reduce the amount of things that go wrong but also save yourself from being in a stressful situation.


Note: This blogpost is based on a Ted Talk delivered by Daniel Levitin. You can access the full talk at-


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jPQjjsBbIc