Elsa Punset: "Our brain searches for, exaggerates and memorizes the negative better than the positive"

• MIND The 10 most listened to healthy living podcasts on Spotify

• INTERVIEW The psychologist who jumped in a parachute to overcome the fear of flying: "Optimism is an attitude of life"

We live

.

In a fast pace.

As if everything was for yesterday.

We confuse being productive with filling ourselves with tasks that are impossible to accomplish.

Stress and anxiety are the great evil of our time.

We verify it every day from the media: every time one of these words is written in the headline, it generates interest among users.

Hence, the

to manage all those elements that raise cortisol, get to know ourselves better and feel in harmony are highly valued.

It's not just self-help literature that's growing.

On podcasts, many listeners who remain inertia discover how to transform their lives.

The writer and popularizer Elsa Punset (London, 1964) publishes on Audible, the Amazon platform,

and

These are small pills in two seasons to repair our

with the world to come.

Thanks to them, she says, you can change habits, customs and ways of acting that are no longer useful today.

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What is the reason for this permanent stress? Twenty years ago, who would have told us that with a mobile phone we could take high-resolution photos, talk to anyone in the world for free, or measure blood glucose and oxygen?

For decades, everything is accelerating.

Every decade, the rate of change accelerates.

To give you an idea: experts estimate that in this century, we will assimilate 20,000 years of changes.

This is very stressful for a brain evolutionarily accustomed to another rhythm of life.

What is the most powerful tool to live with stress? There is no single tool for such a profound change in the way of living, working and cohabiting.

But we can make reflections that help us take better care of our emotional and mental health, to work in a more sustainable way,

to better manage our interpersonal relationships and to understand our human needs. What good habits do you recommend to improve our lives? It is not something fixed: each life, each person, has its own circumstances and requires its own habits, which will also change over time. over a lifetime.

The question would be: "How do I change my habits to adapt to a changing environment?"

For example, it is no longer worth studying and working in a single field all your life.

How are you going to adapt to the four or five fields of work that you are likely to meet in the next few years?

Why is it so hard for us to change and why do our January resolutions last 15 days? The truth is that we are creatures of habit, and habits are stubborn and difficult to change.

Often, we are not even aware that we carry a certain habit.

And precisely what costs us all the most is how to develop new habits.

A suggestion?

Avoid the "all or nothing" mentality.

If you need new habits, make them very modest and specific.

Give an example... Do you want to stop eating meat?

Don't try to be a strict vegetarian right away.

Focus on something simple, like "I'm going to eat meat twice a week."

If we all did it, the planet and the other species would suffer much less.

Once we establish a small habit, we can improve until we achieve a more ambitious goal.

From the outset, it is not necessary to be radical: it is necessary to advance.

The hardest thing is the first step.

Most of us stay with good intentions for not knowing how to take that first step. Lately there has been a lot of talk about mental health,

although going to the psychologist has always been very stigmatized.

Do you feel more valued after the pandemic? The 20th century was the century of physical health: we learned to take care of ourselves physically, to go to the doctor, the importance of a good diet, sleep, hygiene habits... But what we now take for granted took us a long time to learn.

Still, we learned to take care of ourselves physically, but we abandoned ourselves emotionally.

For a few decades we have been talking about mental health as an objective and fundamental component of our overall health.

With the pandemic, both our mental vulnerability and the few resources we have to take care of ourselves and manage our mental health came to light.

So I imagine that psychologists feel more valued, I hope so.

They are a very important part of our well-being.

Do you perceive it in consultation?

Do more people go to the psychologist? Hopefully many people can agree to take care of their mental and emotional health, but the health system still does not reflect, at all, the essential contribution of psychology to our health.

Attention to mental and emotional health is something still pending in our public health system.

But I am optimistic: I believe that the 21st century will be the century of mental and emotional health. We have a big problem with technology.

Are there difficulties in children to relate?

Do ICTs generate addiction and positive reinforcement in the form of 'likes' that make our young people more vulnerable? We are social beings, above all else, others generate us maximum happiness and unhappiness... For this reason,

we depend on the approval of others and use comparison as a measuring stick to make sure we are in a good place, socially speaking.

In this sense, social networks take advantage of these characteristic human traits to hook us and make us dependent on others through anonymous networks and that provoke some of our most difficult traits: cruel criticism, constant comparison, envy, the desire to being envied... and of course, the addiction to the chemical and emotional fluctuations that all this causes. Any parent or teacher will wonder what we can do. We are the first generations that are part of a huge social experiment about which we still lack a lot of data .

But I do not doubt that in a few years, we will better understand what effect, for better and for worse,

generates dependence on networks and how we have to manage them in our lives with care. Happiness is the great word that we all want to achieve in our lives, but does it really exist in global terms or is it rather a succession of good moments? Happiness It is an individual and subjective perception, that is, what can make me happy, another person may be indifferent.

In any case, we are not biologically programmed to be 100% happy constantly.

What's more, to survive, our brain drags a backpack that carries an overweight of those so-called "negative" emotions: fear, anger or sadness.

They are the emotions that nature thinks can help us make it through the night alive.

And that is why the human brain is like Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive. Is happiness more in being than in having? To generate more happiness, we must make a conscious effort to focus and memorize the positive moments, to prevent them from slipping.

It is also important to make room in our lives for joy, consciously generate it.

What are the keys to having better relationships with those people who surround us in professional environments and also at home? The secret of the American psychologist John Gottman: trying to provide our relationships with what he calls "the magical balance": an exchange of five positive emotions for each negative emotion.

The key is not to eliminate conflicts and negative emotions in relationships, but to enhance the positive:

words of encouragement, a smile, an act of service, constructive verbal language, etc.

This works both in relationships and in work teams. What is the way not to suffer in the 21st century? In this fast-paced century, I like to start with the suggestion of the Buddhist monk Thích Nht Hnh: "Smile, breathe and go slowly."You have a degree in Philosophy, how do you see this return to interest in classics such as the Stoics and this debate about the loss of philosophy in the classroom? It is no coincidence that so much is being said about the Greek philosophers today: they believed in philosophy as a tool to live and coexist better.

In fact, some speak literally of the need to make our "toolboxes" practical for life.

Namely,

There is a huge difference between philosophy for living and academic philosophy that tends to build abstract theories far removed from people's life experience.

I believe that young people need a living, vital philosophy that guides them and transmits the wisdom of so many generations, and also, together with these schools of philosophy and wisdom, they need to understand what their brain is like: practical classes in psychology and neuroscience.

Otherwise, living is like driving a car that you don't control the controls. Inflation, war, rising interest rates... How to be optimistic in the face of so much negative news? Every day, we can be overwhelmed by bad news.

There's a lot.

But I insist: our brain is programmed to survive, remember that it is like Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive, search,

exaggerate and memorize the negative better than the positive.

Sometimes life is very difficult and suffering is inevitable.

But many times, we simply do not see things as they are: we forget the joys and beauty that exist in the world.

We let ourselves be overwhelmed.

In these cases, the best remedy for negative emotion is to generate an emotion of the opposite sign and, for this, there is a breather, an opportunity to look at the world with hope and admiration.

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