How to Be Your Best Self in Times of Crisis: Susan David (Transcript)

I’d like to introduce the questioner in chief, my wonderful colleague, the TED’s current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS – TED current affairs curator

Thanks so much Chris and hello to everyone joining us all around the world. Chris will be back later to take part in this conversation. He will come with some of your questions.

And so on to our guest, as Chris mentioned there’s so happening in the media, so much conversation around the coronavirus. And oftentimes it’s focused on the things that our government officials are doing, the decisions that they’re making. So what’s happening to our lives physically, what are some of the changes that we’re experiencing as far as working remotely, social distancing.

But what often is overlooked is the social and the emotional toll that this is all taking on all of us, which is a really critically important and a very real part of how we’re all experiencing this pandemic. And so we’re really thrilled to be joined today by renowned author and Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David. She gave a hugely popular TED talk about emotional courage and the impact that understanding your emotions can have on your lives, on our lives.

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And so we’re excited to chat with her about how we can approach this as we’re experiencing this pandemic in this moment.

SUSAN DAVID – Psychologist

Thank you for inviting me to the conversation. I’m delighted to be part of it. I really appreciate it.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: Thank you so much for being here with us today. So we’re again excited to have you.

And I guess first and foremost how are you doing? How are you holding up?

SUSAN DAVID: Well, I think like everyone, we’re doing the best we can given the circumstances. My husband is a physician at MGH and it’s really a stark reality when one week you’re saying, you know, can you pick up groceries and the next week you’re exchanging emergency contact information if something were to go wrong.

So we’re all living this reality, and I think trying to find the inner resources to do that in the best way we can is just a profound importance right now. But thank you.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: Yeah, no definitely, I’m glad to hear that you’re managing and hanging in there. Your work is so focused around how we can best prepare ourselves emotionally and psychologically for these moments of change and complexity. And you have this really beautiful saying about: “Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility.” What does that mean and how does that apply to the current moment we’re all experienced?

SUSAN DAVID: Well I think we all know this internally at some level that there is this complex and intimate beautiful relationship between the beauty of life and the fragility of life. We love and then we lose. We are healthy until we are ill. We’re in jobs in which we need it until those jobs are no longer.

We might roll our eyes and yell at our kids and ask them to tidy their rooms. And then one day there’s silence where their child once was. They’re now making their way in the world. And so there’s this complex interplay between the beauty and the fragility of life that just is what makes the wholeness of life.

And yet so often in our narratives in society, we talk about focusing on success and being positive all the time and goal-setting, and you know there’s this whole… even our avoidance that we have really, I think, at a very broad level in society, our voidance of talking about what is the most common feature that all of us or common experience that all of us will go through, which is to die.

And yet so much of our society is constructed around preventing, avoidance, denial of this reality. And the circumstance that we’re in now is not something that we asked for, but life is calling on every single one of us to move into the place of wisdom in ourselves, beyond the thinking judgey county mind into the space of wisdom and fortitude and solidarity, community, courage.

And it’s a calling for all of us right now that I think is just so imish in what is in our absolute and in our reality, the fragility of life right now.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: Thank you for that. And I mean, and I think that for a lot of us when we’re thinking about how our lives have changed, and we are approaching this idea of happiness, so many of the things that at one point really did bring us a lot of joy, being able to go out with friends and socialize and spend physical time with loved ones. So many of those things have changed.

But I guess in moment how do you advise that we cultivate happiness and enjoy with everything that’s going on?

SUSAN DAVID: Well so just to be clear firstly I’m not anti-happiness, which you’ll understand why I’m saying this as I progress. I think though that often again we have this narrative in society that is about be happy and be positive. And whilst that may sound like it’s the right thing and it sounds like that is the thing that we should all be saying, you know just keep positive, or when people are experiencing cancer they’re told to just be positive, or when people are being marginalized or discriminated against, just stop being so angry.

We have in our society these almost judgments that happiness and joy are the most important emotional experiences that we can have. And on the other hand, the so called bad or negative emotions are frustration, anxiety, grief, loss, fear, sadness. And so what we do is we often become very comfortable with happiness and we become uncomfortable with those difficult emotions. And we push them aside.

But I think what so often happens when we try to pursue some idea of well, going out was what made me happy, or I can’t go clubbing this weekend and now I can’t be happy is, what we’re doing is we’re basically establishing the anchor point of happiness around expectations or goals.

And what we know actually when we look at the scientific literature is that when we overly strongly focus on happiness as a goal, we actually become less happier over time. And it’s this really interesting paradox, because we’re almost seeking something as opposed to just living our lives in a way that is I’m passionate and accepting.

What I would say is that rather than trying to find happiness, I think now for all of us is actually a space for us to come into ourselves, to come into our emotions, to not try to brush away the grief or the loneliness or the anxiety but to rather face into that. One of those stories that I spoke about in my TED talk which has really stuck with me my whole life was when I was about five years old, I became absolutely aware of the fact that I was going to die one day.

And this is very normal around the age of five or six years old. Children become aware of their own mortality. And I became aware of the fact that I was going to die. And that my parents weren’t going to be around forever. And I would find my way into my parents’ bed at night, you know squeezing between the two of them.

And I would say to my father and my mother: promise me that you won’t die. Promise me that you won’t die. And I was five and I was desperate.

And my father was so profoundly beautiful in the way he told me during those nights. He didn’t try to build some false narrative: Oh just be positive. I’m going to be around. Don’t worry about me; everything’s fine. He didn’t try to build some false narrative between me and reality.

What he said to me is: dizzy, it’s normal to be scared. We all die and it’s normal to be scared. And what we need to do is we need to not try do away with fear but rather to reach inside ourselves and to find the courage. And I think there is a message for our times, which is not to try rush aside or belittle or judge yourself. If you’re experiencing difficult emotions this is a tough time.

But rather we can use strategies to enable us to be with those emotions in healthy ways, which is the whole foundational experience of what I call emotional agility. This is ultimately what will enable us to bring the best of ourselves forward in every aspect of how we love and how we lead in these times, we parent, and how we come to ourselves.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: And I think that that’s exactly what we’d love to hear more about is this emotional agility that you just referenced. Maybe just first start there: What is emotional agility? What are the main tenets of this philosophy?

SUSAN DAVID: Well the first part of emotional agility which is really critical is moving away from, I think, what so many of us have. I did some research where I was asking people, you know when you have difficult emotional experiences, what do you tend to do with them? And I did surveys of around 70,000 people.

And what I found is that a large majority of us, may be driven by this narrative of I’ve got to be happy and positive all the time. What we tend to do when we have these difficult emotional experiences is we do, we judge them, we belittle them, we push them aside, or we get stuck in them.

So the language that I use is we often bottle our emotions. We rationalize them and we push them aside, or we brood on them and we get stuck in them. And what emotional agility is and I can talk about this in terms of its principles but also its strategies in more detail.

But really what emotional agility is it’s the ability to be with ourselves, our full selves, our full emotional experience in ways that are compassionate, because this is tough and these emotions are real. So we need to be compassionate with ourselves and others.

We need to be curious. You know what is my frustration telling me about what’s important to me? What is my guilt telling me when I’m interacting with my children right now? What is it telling me about what’s important? There are so many millions of people who are jobless or disenfranchised or in situations of profound difficulty right now.

And I’ve got anger towards that: what does my anger tell me about what I value? So if we can move into a space where instead of pushing aside these signposts that our emotions give us, and instead move into a space where we are passionate with them where we’re curious with them, and where we start saying how can I even in the midst of fear, I don’t need to do away with my fear, the fear just is. It’s my body, it’s my mind, it’s my emotions, doing their job.

Our emotions have evolved to help us and so when we feel fear that’s our emotion trying to help us. So the important thing here is not to do away with it but also not to get stuck in it. So to develop a sense of what our courageous steps that I can take even in the midst of a reality that I didn’t choose, and that isn’t of my asking, how can I bring myself forward in a way that’s courageous and connected?

So in brief: emotional agility is the ability to be with ourselves in our fullness with compassion and curiosity so that we can live in ways that our value is connected.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: That’s beautiful, and I think that for me that’s definitely really meaningful in thinking about how I’m personally experiencing a lot of this, and I imagine for a lot of folks. And so I’m curious in thinking about emotional agility pre-pandemic and today what are some of the differences between how you might have practiced that before and how are you practicing that now? What are some of the ways practicing emotional agility has changed?

SUSAN DAVID: Well I think the principles of emotional agility are actually fundamental principles of psychological health and wellness, regardless of the context that we’re in, regardless of whether we’re stressed in our job, or struggling to be with our children in a way that’s effective over dinnertime, those must have been the day-to-day realities that we’re experiencing.

And I think that all that’s really happened is the need for emotional agility becomes so much more profound and so much clearer. We also are deciding whether we let that narrative that is coming through the media own us, whether we’re going to let our emotions own us or whether we are going to exert some kind of empowerment and connection over these experiences and whether we’re going to own it.

And what always just comes to mind and it’s probably very off-used phrase but it really I think is so profoundly important right now, I think as I’m speaking of it, beautiful Viktor Frankl idea. Viktor Frankl who survived the Nazi death camps, who describes what I think is the most profoundly powerful human sentiment.

And it’s this that:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose. And it’s in that choice that lies our growth and freedom.”

We didn’t choose these circumstances. Often what happens is we get hooked, we get into an experience where there’s no space between stimulus and response. We either mindlessly go on to our Twitter feeds and we engage with the news and we catastrophize or we’re feeling so stressed out or we’re avoiding.

And so I think this is really a time of peering space between stimulus and response. We do that by being open to what we’re experiencing by saying what do I need to do here by being intentional and the particular strategies.

So I think in short answer to your question, emotional agility are basically the skills that are foundational to wellness within ourselves, to being healthy within ourselves every day. What’s happening in this context is we are needing to bring those skills with greater courage and strength to the situation that we face.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: I’m curious to, I guess and if we can look at some specific issues that people might be experiencing. I think one of the big ones with social distancing is that a lot of folks who at one point went to an office, are now working at home. They’re working at home, get sleeping at home, relaxing at home.

And so maybe in talking about that specifically, what are some of the ways this might impact us and then what are some areas that you think you can apply from emotional agility to this new normal?

SUSAN DAVID: Yeah, so and a very important point is I think when I talk about having more space to have these experiences, of course that doesn’t mean we are always alone. We might be as I am, I’ve got two young children who are now home from school. And I’m trying to do my work and I’m trying to look after them. And there’s a lot that’s going on.

But we aren’t spending hours commuting, most of us. We aren’t spending hours distracting or avoiding outside of the house. So we’re really starting to think about how am I using what I’ve got in the space in this context right now.

One of the things that I think is really profoundly important is when we think about social distancing, I think a better way for us to all be thinking about this… originally the media had used this language of social distancing. But actually what we’re thinking about here is physical distancing, physical distancing.

We can still if we are social creatures which many of us are, we still need to be able to look for meaningful quality interactions that are really critically important to us right now. So we know that we can be lonely in a crowd. We don’t need when we think about loneliness; loneliness is not just, oh I’m by myself therefore I’m lonely. You can be in a crowd of people and be lonely.

So what is it that we think about when we think about how do you mitigate against or how do you ameliorate loneliness? Loneliness is actually a function of whether our interactions are meaningful or not. So again this idea that emotions tell us a story behind our most difficult emotions are signposts to the things that we care about.

If you’re finding yourself feeling lonely as an example, what is that loneliness the signpost of? The loneliness is often the signpost that you value presence and connectedness and that you don’t have enough of it now. So that loneliness is telling you that there’s something that you value that you need to be moving more in the direction of.

And so you can start asking yourself: what are some small changes that I can make that are really important to me right now in this context of loneliness? Are there people that I’m reaching out to that I maybe haven’t spoken to for a few years? Is there a way that I… you know I have this really remarkable experience sometimes where I feel like even when we’re speaking to someone we’re speaking beyond the person.

There’s something beautiful that I do in one of my exercises, that I’ve actually done in some TED workshops before, where I asked people just to silently look at another person. There’s this beautiful phrase in South Africa: Sawubona; it’s a greeting. Sawubona means I see you and by seeing you I bring you into being.

And in the workshops sometimes what I do is I’ll stop people and I cue them and I say Sawubona and all I’m doing is I’m asking people to look beyond the eyes, to look into the soul and the love and the light and the hurt in the person that’s in front of you. And I’ve been doing that with my children. You know they don’t necessarily love it.

But instead of doing the quick hug when they’re at the computer trying to do their learning each day. I’m starting to say to them, you know let’s just look at each other. Let’s just connect with each other, let’s be the person behind the person.

So I think that there ways that we can, whether it’s an online meeting with our colleagues or phoning someone that we care about, or even how we look at a person there is meaning that brings us out of loneliness, and meaning that brings us out of social isolation, in ways that are really profound and beautiful.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I just wanted to nip in with a couple of questions from a crowd of people who were watching. So I’m thinking… especially I think some people watching literally in a situation now where they have spent days alone and it’s a fearful time .

And so one question is: What do you mean when you say reach inside of us to find courage? How do you actually do that?

SUSAN DAVID: Well firstly what we know is the way fear operates. So when people are feeling fearful or when the situation is ambiguous as it is right now, usually what we try to do and this is literally a cognitive reality for us, is that our mind tries to fill in the blanks.

So we don’t know the answers and we try to fill in the blanks. So we might catastrophize or we might develop huge amounts of anxiety or we go to our Twitter feed in search of the answers. And often what that does is it actually provokes the very opposite of what we need.

What that provokes is it often provokes more anxiety, more fear, and more… you know we talk about viruses and we talk about physical contagion. But we also know that people can experience very real levels of emotional contagion. Emotional contagion is when you in subtle ways pick up on the emotions of other people, because as human beings again we’ve evolved to pick up on these cues.

And so I think when I’m saying reach inside of yourself, when we think about intentionality, intentionality is this idea that rather than being mindlessly sucked into our experience which I have been too. This is a common, common human experience. We get sucked into our news feeds.

Instead we’re starting to ask ourselves questions of is this helping me, and is there some alternative way that I can be engaging? So I’ve had lots of people contact me recently just saying things that I’ve just taken such joy in creating a little garden for myself. I have gotten a list of books that I really wanted to read and I haven’t.

I’ve reached out a friend who I haven’t spoken to for years and where we had some silly argument about something and we can’t even remember what that argument was. But I now know that whether I’m right or wrong doesn’t matter more than a more important question which is is my actions serving me? Is it serving the person, the loved one, the human being that I most want to be?

So if we can start reaching inside ourselves and saying, what are ways that I can, if I’m lonely how can I contribute? How can I connect? What are ways that I can come to my experience, though that it’s intentional and its values connected?

And also if you’re feeling lonely, and so many of us are, also be compassionate with it. This is tough. We often live our lives as if we’re in a never-ending Ironman or Ironwoman competition, you know where we’ve got to have goals and be healthy and be fit and be… there’re all these things that we feel we’ve got to do every single day.

We’ve got to be the best leaders. We’ve got to be… I think just breathing into the experience is really important. There are other practical things that we can do in relation to this experience as well. And often we use this language: we say I am lonely; I am sad; I am angry. And it’s a normal default way that we describe how we’re feeling.

But if we think about the language of that, what we’re doing is we are saying: I am all of me, 100% of me is the singular experience. I am sad. So what are you starting to do when you use that language is… we do it unintentionally. But what we’re starting to do is we’re starting to define ourselves by our emotion.

We are not our emotion. We own our emotions; they don’t own and define us. So what we want to do is we want to show up to our emotions with compassion and curiosity. But we also don’t want to get stuck in our emotions.

So simple strategies that can be really helpful to people is instead of saying I am sad, label your thoughts, your emotions or your feelings for what they are. They are not fact, they are thoughts, there are emotions, they are feelings. So you might say something like: I’m noticing the feeling that I’m sad. I’m noticing the urge to shut down the conversation with my spouse. Or I’m noticing the urge to keep going on my social media feed right now. I’m noticing the thought that things are never going to get any better.

What you start doing when you… this is a mindfulness technique but what you’re really doing is you are labeling your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings as thoughts, emotions, feelings. And when you do this, what you start doing is you create that space that I spoke about between stimulus and response.

No longer are you defined if you are now able to see them for what they are, and then you can start saying: I’m noticing that I’m feeling sad. What is that telling me about what I care about and how can I bring more of that thing into my life and it’s going to be different for different people.

CHRIS ANDERSON: You mentioned there about contribution and about compassion. I wonder is it the case… two things: First of all, how can people help like practically, how can they help others when we’re all in this isolated world right now?

But secondly, can that process itself actually help people that shifting from feeling the pain to act to the sort of the agency and they’re reaching out and try to do something… can that make a difference?

SUSAN DAVID: Yes, it’s such an important question. It’s this thing of Sawubona: I see you. But in seeing myself I’m able to see others too. This profoundly important way of seeing others. And yes, finding ways that you can contribute, there are so many people in pain right now. There are people who are in their houses who haven’t spoken to another soul for days.

There are people who need help with essential groceries and services. They are shop keepers who are struggling. And so within our community, instead of spending our time trying to get stuck or trying to stop ourselves even from being in this vortex, which I think the so many of us is that experience is really thinking about what are practical ways that we can do it.

And what’s so true for us as human beings is we often think that in order to make a contribution, we’ve got to do something huge, it’s got to be grand, it’s got to be massive scale. But if we think about the need to belong, every single one of us needs to belong. And we know that we can half one other person’s pain just by being that person’s person today. That might just be a phone call.

But if we can reach beyond ourselves that’s healing for others and it’s healing for ourselves as well. And so this is often not about these big things; it’s often about what I call tiny tweaks, more values connected actions that we can take that are committed. And even being at home, being physically distant, there’s courage, there’s courage in doing that.

I mean we’re doing it because we know that it’s the right thing. But there’s also courage in looking inside of ourselves and owning that you’re doing that not only because you have to, but because that is something that is profoundly important that you care about others. And I think actually this is also a conversation to be having with children right now.

I think often what happens with our kids is we say well these are the rules. This is what we’ve got to do now. But what are we doing? We’re really trying to help our children develop their own sense of values and character. And so we can start doing this by showing up to our children’s emotions, how are you feeling instead of kind of you know say everything’s going to be OK, don’t worry about it and try brush over it.

Our children are feeling what they’re feeling if we can shut those feelings with compassion but then also ask our children: what are ways that you think you can bring yourself to your friends or to your connections, or how are ways that you are living right now connected with who you want to be as a person?

These are incredible times for us. We didn’t ask for them but we are developing our resilience and our character, and the character of those around us without a doubt.

WHITNEY PENNINGTON RODGERS: To your last comment about children and how you can really have conversations with them about what’s going on. A lot of them may be experiencing some of the same emotions that we’re all experiencing but maybe with a little more confusion, because they have less life experience.

And so how can we talk to children if there are parents out there about what’s going out there and how they can deal with their emotions?

SUSAN DAVID: The most important thing we know, I spoke about instead of saying I am sad, you’re noticing that you’re feeling sad. Another very very important part of being effective with our emotions is being granular with our emotions.

And what I mean when I say being granular is often we use very big labels to describe our emotions. People might say I’m stressed, I’m stressed. That’s the most common one that I hear. In my work and the work that I’m doing in organizations, very often people say I am stressed/

But there’s a world of difference between stress and disappointment or stress and overwhelm, or stress and yeah… and what we know psychologically is when we label our emotions in a more granular way, when we move beyond the I am stressed into what is this emotion really, then what it does is it helps us again to move into that space of ourselves and it doesn’t think really powerful in our brains, that starts helping us to understand what is the cause of the emotion and what is the pathway forward.

So we’re now moving beyond this: ah, it all feels stress into this is overwhelm. I can do something with overwhelm. I can create pockets of control, okay. If my stress is lonely I can look for opportunities to reach out. So emotion granularity is really important.

When it comes to children the same applies. We often, as parents, with really really good intentions, want to just jump in and say the child says mommy, I’m worried.

Don’t worry it’ll be okay.

And again I take that lesson of my father: It’s normal to be scared. What we know for our children is simply showing up to them, simply being them and holding space for them to feel what they feel is probably the most important way that children can develop a sense of security in the context of chaos. So that’s the showing up part.

The second part is again we are wanting children to feel that their emotions don’t own them. When we say to kids like: Don’t worry; everything will be okay or just be happy. What are we teaching? We’re teaching that some emotions are good and some emotions are bad. And that the bad ones should be done away with.

And so when we do that very often children don’t get practice with feeling what a difficult emotion feels like and they don’t then develop the strength and the capacity, the psychological resource that that builds.

So when a child is feeling what they’re feeling, that’s what they’re feeling. If we can show up to that with compassion, that in of itself is probably the most powerful thing.

Then another thing that we can do is we can start helping that child to label their emotions. We know that children as young as 2 or 3 years old are able to start differentiating between angry versus sad. I feel rejected or I feel it’s unfair. Okay so children are starting to develop this language.

And when our children are going through difficulties, we can help them to do that, like is it that you’re feeling stressed out or is it that you’re scared? Are you lonely? What is it that’s going on for you? So helping our children to step out of their emotions so that those emotions are data but they’re not directives. They’re data they’re telling us what we need but they’re not calling the shots.

And then we can start helping our children to say so what is it that you need right now? Do you need us to organize a Facebook conversation with a friend? But at the end of the day, all of us, every single person listening, every single person who will be listening, every one of us is doing the best we can with who we are, with what we’ve got and with the resources that we have available to us.

The most important thing that we can do with ourselves and it will then be role models to our children is to be compassionate with yourself. And that moves us into the space instead of of judgment and not enough and never enough into the space of being and resilience and grace and dignity.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Some people are asking almost not so much about fear and depression but about just focus, like people who have had their academic life, their year has been disrupted. What can I do to find any focus and to pay attention to?

SUSAN DAVID: Yeah I mean life is right now conspiring… conspiring against any kind of focus. And at the same time we’ve almost got all of us as a society like a forced time of needing to regalvanize ourselves.

And so I think for every person, first are you recognizing what are some of the things that you are doing that are unintentionally sucking, literally sucking the life out of your day? It might be the constantly checking the numbers. It might be going down a rabbit hole of epidemiological studies.

There are different ways that we are just having this conspiring against our attentional resources. And again trying to navigate what’s going on with children and with elderly parents there’s just so much going on. I think one of the most important things that we can do it is as far as you can try to establish pockets of control.

There’s lots that’s out of our control. We don’t control almost all of us. What can we control? We control how we respond. We can control how we connect. And we control how we are to the best of our ability able to segment our time off.

So if for you that means that your control that day is simply making a list of what food is going to be on the table, or whether that control is putting your cell phone in a drawer for an hour every day, or whether the control is shutting something else. So we’re family, we love music and we’re always dancing around the kitchen. And we love and you know that’s one way that we bring joy to our lives.

But I’ve actually been finding that there’s so much noise in general that for me the control is actually the control of exerting some kind of silence in the environment wherever it’s possible. I haven’t left the house for two weeks. And the first week was absolutely, it was chaotic with all of the stuff going on.

And I found for me being able to just think about, okay if this lands up being some kind of forced sabbatical that I didn’t ask for. But if that’s what it is, what are the three or four things that I need to be doing everyday that are going to create some kind of routine? And what are ways that I can think of other projects that I want to do?

So we created some kind of routine for my children and it’s not perfect. None of us is perfect. But it is what it is. It’s these pockets of control that give us back our sense of agency and that’s really critical.

CHRIS ANDERSON: So these conversations are very high on the Maslow pyramid. How do we who have the privilege to have these conversations support those who are out working on the front lines who don’t have the luxury of taking time for introspection?

SUSAN DAVID: That’s exactly right. Every single one of us has very very different circumstances. And like I’ve been thinking so much about individuals for instance who might be in situations of domestic abuse or where children are feeling physically unsafe, and where going to school was literally what was saving that child.

And this is where my heart goes to. You know this is where our connecting with others, there are things that we can do that can be helpful. There are crisis tech slides that are currently looking for people who are available to be a helpful ear to individuals. There are ways that we can support businesses.

Is there a way that we can buy gift cards to? But I mean these are very practical and micro suggestions but I think that they’re important because there is real suffering. And this is not just about how can I move myself into a higher plane of being and compassion and restoration because it’s not.

I mean the reality for many many many people is that I don’t have food in my house. And this is why us coming together as community and being values connected and saying how can we help, what are little big ways that we can help is fundamental. This right now is the marker of our ability as humanity to come together and to fight back against this pandemic.

CHRIS ANDERSON: So putting the camera back, and you as a psychologist look at this overall situation, you can see things going into two ways, because the world’s conducting this massive psychological experiment we’ve never had done before. Some people worry that we are going to drive each other crazy. We’re going to bring out so much fear and anger.

There’s already a blame game going on between nations, possibly between different communities that on some scenarios that gets very dark.

On the other hand, there are thousands and thousands of just amazing stories of help and love and creativity. But which way is this going to go do you think? Do you think overall we are going to find a way of this, persuading each other to be our better selves?

SUSAN DAVID: When we experience what in psychological terms is called mortality salience. Mortality salience is this idea that our death becomes… it’s moved from something that we can conveniently avoid to something that is much more at the periphery, even if we aren’t directly infected or directly experiencing something, it’s much more salient to us.

And we know that when human beings have this mortality salience, we tend to become much more as in them, we tend to become more biased, more stereotyped and lot of predictable psychological responses when we experience this.

But we also know that human beings have through time had a well of wisdom and humanity. And what I would just say is I think that what so often happens is we try to solve the world’s problems with our minds. And of course we’ve got them these minds out there working and they should continue working on it.

And I think this is a time where we actually need to move away from our minds into our hearts, into our breathing, our seeing, our compassion, our wisdom, our fortitude. And when I look at the research, when I look at the psychology of generosity and helpers and community and you see that through history that there is this experience of human beings coming together.

I believe with all of me that we can but it comes through the place of being able to see ourselves and to see the other and to do so with compassion. Even the person who might be hoarding toilet-paper, compassion doesn’t mean that you agree that that person is doing the right or the wrong thing.

It’s about moving beyond right or wrong and it’s saying what is this person experiencing inside of themselves that might be driving a particular response, that is this openness of the beauty of who we can be as human beings. And I believe that we can and we’ll do that. And that that is the sustainable way forward in what is a fragile and beautiful world right now.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Well, Susan thank you so much for that. Whitney thank you so much for the conversation there. And you guys online, it feels great to be engaged with you. So look tomorrow I’m going to be talking with Bill Gates. Needs no introduction.

You know five years ago, he gave a talk warning about the coming pandemic. If you watched that talk, google Bill Gates TED talk pandemic. Watch that if you can before tomorrow. It will make your blood run cold. I mean he’s so much of what the world is experiencing now, was laid out there absolutely crystal clear.

And clearly not enough was done. So it’s going to be so fascinating to hear from him what happened, why… I mean he’s a big powerful man. Why didn’t the world listen more? And more importantly what on earth can we do now? How do we scramble to get our health systems operating more effectively? How do we think about the future and then during the rest of the week there’s a wonderful lineup as well. And so if you check on Ted.com the full program is on there as to who’s coming.

We welcome suggestions for the speakers as well. Thanks everyone. Stay well, stay strong. We can do this. Bye for now.

MORE READING RESOURCES: 

The Three Secrets of Resilient People: Lucy Hone (Full Transcript)

5 Hindrances to Self-Mastery: Shi Heng YI (Transcript)

There Is Another Way: Eckhart Tolle (Full Transcript)

Have Courage, Be Fearless: Les Brown (Full Transcript)

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