Daniel Levitin

 

I chose to watch the video by Daniel Levitin on how to stay calm when you know you will be stressed.

There are two main points that I got from the video, the first one being, that when your stressed, its almost already too hard or too late to talk straight. Daniel mentioned that when your stressed, your brain releases cortisol which clouds your judgement, making it near impossible to properly convey your ideas, in an interview scenario, this is akin to being asked a difficult question which you have the answer to, but panic causes you to blank out said answer, similar to an exam that makes you panic leading you to forget most of the things you already know.

So, what is the solution? The second point, which is to make it easy for yourself by assigning important topics into keywords, Daniel mentioned in his story about not losing important objects like his keys and passports, that he puts these objects in the same area, and he assigns this area in his brain, as the specific area that houses these important objects, and without memorizing, the brain immediately recognizes this area as the “important documents” area, and within our brain, we can do the same, we can assign groups of information and assign them with specific names, therefore, when we get asked about said information, our brain automatically opens the appropriate groups very easily, instead of having it try to remember the many pieces of individual information which may lead to panic.