I'm Guy Winch.

I'm here to speak to you about emotional first aid.

And so first of all, thank you for having me back.

It's great to be back here at Google.

So let's get going.

I'm going to assume that within the past few weeks some

of you have had a cut or a scrape.

And you've used antibacterial ointment, or

you've used a Band-Aid.

And some of you might have had a cold and rested up in bed.

And some of you might have sprained a muscle

and used an ice pack.

And I say that because we get these kinds of physical

injuries all the time in life.

And when we do, we know exactly how to treat them.

We know exactly how to ease our aches and pains.

And we know exactly what steps to take to prevent them from

getting worse.

Well, we sustain psychological injuries all the

time in life as well.

But when we do, we do not know how to treat them.

We do not know how to ease our aches and pains.

And we do not know what steps we need to take to make sure

they don't get worse.

And that's what we're going to discuss today.

We're going to talk about seven common psychological

injuries that we encounter in daily life--

failure, rejection, guilt, loneliness, brooding and

rumination, loss and trauma, and bouts of low self-esteem.

I do hope we'll have time to get to all of them.

We will also talk about the surprising ways in which these

things impact us.

Because they do it in ways which are unexpected.

We'll also look at the science.

Because for scientists to study these things, they have

to recreate these human experiences, in

essence, in their lab.

You can't grow rejection in a Petri dish.

And so that's a difficult thing to do.

We'll look at how they do it.

And I'll give you a hint right now.

It usually involves lying through their teeth to the

poor subjects who sign up for these experiments without a

clue about what they're getting themselves into.

And lastly, we'll look at why and how we should apply

emotional first aid to these kinds of common

psychological injuries.

And we'll look at a few examples of how we can

actually do it.

Now I want to get back for a moment to the comparison

between how we think in general of physical injuries

versus how we think of psychological injuries.

Because it's so obvious to us that we need to monitor our

physical health.

We need to monitor our bodies.

That's very, very clear to us.

But it's not clear to us at that we need to monitor our

psychological health.

And when we are riding a bicycle or our skateboard and

we wipe out, the first thing we'd think to do is to check

ourselves for injury.

But when we have a really bad rejection or a really bad

failure, we don't think to check ourselves for any kind

of injuries.

We just go on.

And the other thing is that we know what kind of injuries

require treatments, when they're physical injuries, so

they don't get worse.

We know that if we don't-- we know that

a cut can get infected.

We know a cold can turn into a pneumonia.

So we know we need to attend to that.

We don't know anything about what psychological injuries

can get worse or how they can get worse.

And lastly, when it comes to the basic physical injuries we

sustain in daily life, we can pretty much treat

all of them at home.

We have our medicine cabinets with our

pills and our ointments.

And we can pretty much do all of that at home.

And when it comes to psychological injuries, as I

say, we don't know how to treat diddly.

But that means we really have no clue

about what we're doing.

And it isn't just our physical bodies that we're

prioritizing.

It's even our teeth, if you really think about it.

Because look, we know our teeth need

constant care, right?

We know that.

We brush and we floss.

And we do that every single day.

And not only that, if we have a pain in the tooth, we

immediately take action.

We go to the dentist because we know that cavity can turn

into a root canal.

So we know to do it.

And we even teach our children to brush

their teeth every day.

Three-year-olds know to brush their teeth every day.

So if you really think about it, we put more care into our

teeth than we do our psychological health.

And I'm sorry, but it really irritates me

that that's the case.

And I'm not suggesting you neglect your teeth.

That's not my point.

And I'm not resentful.

I don't hate the American Dental Association.

I think teeth are great.

I have teeth.

I'm all for teeth.

What I'm saying is that there is a strange

favoritism that we have.

Whereas, our physical health and our teeth are like the

step-sisters in the Cinderella story that get all the love,

and all the care, and all the affection.

And our poor psychological health is as ignored and as

marginalized and as neglected as Cinderella, left to sweep

the floor with the mice and the birds.

That's Freud, you see.

Because it's very hard to depict

psychological health in a picture.

So I use-- and you can see the cigar.

That's the hint.

All right, so anyway--

so my point is that that fairy tale is not going well.

But here's the good news--

happy ending.

Here's your fairy godmother.

And here's your Prince Charming--

I don't mean the picture of me in the flap.

But here's your Prince Charming.

Because what you can do is you can start to help the

psychological health catch up a little bit and help take

care of it.

So look, as I said, psychological injuries impact

us and in more ways than we realize, in surprising ways.

So I want to show you how.

And I'm going to start with a really

common injury, failure--

something we certainly all do.

And when I tell people, oh, that's going to surprise you.

They're like, no, it's not.

I know what happens to me when I fail.

I fail, and my ego gets bruised and I get demoralized.

And my motivation goes.

And all of that is true.

But failure also impacts us in ways in

which we are not aware.

And here's an example of a study people did.

They took people to a field with a football post.

And they had them kick an American football over the

post 10 times.

And it was 10 yards away.

It was an unmarked field, but it was 10 yards away.

And then they had them, when they were done, say, right.

Well, how far and how high is that goal post?

And everyone wrote down how far and how high

that goal post was.

But then when they looked at the results, they divided them

into people who succeeded and people who failed at the toss.

And the people who failed at kicking the football over the

goal post estimated it to be much further and much higher

than the people who succeeded.

Now they're all standing on the same field.

It's not an eyesight issue.

They're looking at the same thing.

But that's what failure does to us.

It can distort our perceptions, our very

perceptions, of the goals we have, so that they seem to us

to be further away and further out of reach.

And that is an unconscious thing.

That's an unconscious way in which that happens.

But failure can also impact us in other ways.

It can also change our perceptions

of our actual abilities.

I'm going to give you one other example of an

experiment.

This one was done quite a few years ago.

And they were curious about how people respond to failure.

But they did the experiment with dogs.

Some of you might have heard of it.

It's not a new one.

They put dogs in a cage with a low barrier in the cage.

And one part of the cage was wired up for

an electrical shock.

And they say it's an electrical shock, not a

painful one for the dogs, though whether they

interviewed the dogs and asked them if that was uncomfortable

or painful, I'm not sure.

But so they put the dog in that part of the cage.

They zap it.

The dog jumps over the barrier into the

safe part of the cage.

Part one done.

Part two, they put the dog back in the cage.

But this time they put a harness on the dog.

They tether the dog so the dog can't move.

Zap the cage.

Dog tries to jump over the barrier--

can't, whimpers.

Done with part two.

Part three, remove the harness.

And then they zap the cage again.

And the dogs were free to jump over the barrier.

And an alarming number of these dogs didn't jump over

the barrier.

They just stood there and whimpered.

Because they actually thought, we're incapable, even though

they weren't tethered.

They were free.

And so the scientists were like, wow, we wonder if it

works that way with people.

But it turns out, ethical committees frown upon putting

people in cages and electrocuting them.

So they did it differently.

What they did was they gave people a test.

And they said, oh, this test actually measures your

intelligence.

But what they did is half the people got a

test that was passable.

And half people got the test that was impossible.

They were going to fail.

It couldn't pass this test.

And then they gave them another version of the test

after that.

And this version, everyone could pass.

And again, an alarming number of the people who are given

the impossible test and failed it, failed the one they should

and could have passed.

Because they believed that their abilities

weren't up to the task.

And it turns out that when you believe your abilities are not

up to the task, you can't use them.

It's as if you don't have them.

And so what happened was that the failure distorted their

perceptions of the basic fundamental abilities.

And that's what failure can do to us.

It can take one experience, one small experience, and turn

it into something much bigger that impacts our lives going

forward in ways in which we are unaware.

And that's why I consider failures to be emotional chest

colds that become psychological pneumonias, or

can become psychological pneumonias.

And I want you to think about times in your life where you

were convinced you couldn't succeed at something and maybe

you need to rethink it.