Mental Health TED Talks to Listen to
TED Talks are when different experts gives speeches on a variety of topics and give their own points of view and ideas.
Because mental health can be tricky when it comes to the best mode of treatment, we should listen to a number of people give their perspectives on how to live life with a mental illness and the stories they tell on how they get through it.
Neuroscientist David Levitin’s How to Stay Calm When You Know You’ll Be Stressed is about a time when he left his keys in his house on a cold night in Montreal and how he had to break a window to get them. When he went to the airport, he left his passport at home so he had to race back to get it. Levitin said that when we are stressed, our brains release cortisol which raises your heart rate, changes your adrenaline levels, and makes it hard for you to think.
Levitin believes we should be in “pre-mortem” where we prepare ourselves by thinking of the worst-case scenarios to prevent our rising stress levels. Keeping all important items in the same places will help you remember where they are as well as taking pictures of things that can be replaced such as wallets, driver’s license, passports, etc. With medical decisions, it is important to look into options in advance before talking to a doctor to avoid on-the-spot stressful questions.
Mindful Addiction Doctor Judson Brewer’s A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit is about using mindfulness training in order to break bad habits such as smoking and obesity which are both leading causes of death. He explained how the prefrontal cortex is what intelligently tells us what is right and wrong. Our prefrontal cortex tells us that smoking or eating junk food is wrong and when that part of the brain goes offline, we are unconsciously partaking in bad habits. The formula for a bad habit would be trigger, behaviour, reward. Seeing the food, eating the food, and then feeling good after.
Brewer suggests that we make ourselves aware of our actions in order to quit them over time. For example, he did a study where he made a subject aware of their smoking and the subject described smoking as horrible. We should take into consideration the advice of these two doctors as these methods are simple and can be helpful overtime.
Castle Craig is one of the most established and respected addiction rehab centres in the UK. Castle Craig can also help treat a variety of mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, ADD, PTSD, eating disorders, compulsive gambling, and compulsive relationships. For information, call our 24 hour free confidential phone-line: 01721 546 263. From outside the UK please call: +44 808 271 7500 (normal charges apply).
