How to Stay Calm When You Know You Will Be Stressed

I watched a TED Talk by a man named Daniel Levitin. He talked about a few ways to stay calm for when you know you will be stressed. He started off with a story about how he returned home one night at around midnight. It was freezing cold and he realized he had left his house keys inside on his kitchen table. Stressed and cold he had no other option than to break in. He took a rock, breaking his basement window and crawling in. He expressed how he had an early flight the next morning so when he was headed to the airport, he realized he forgot his passport. He drove back quickly to retrieve it, making it back just in time to board the plane. Even though his seat was given to someone else and he had to sit in the back of the plane on a seat that didn’t recline for eight hours, he began to think about stress and how it affects the body. He goes on to say that he is a neuroscientist and explains how our body releases something called cortisol which is the stress hormone. When this happens our brain becomes cloudy therefore clouding our judgment and reason. He gave some examples to try and help the audience find ways to prevent stress. His first idea was setting a certain spot in place for particular items: your keys on a special hook, your passport in a certain drawer, or your cell phone on a certain table. If this is accomplished it will allow us to find items easier therefore reducing the stress we feel when we lose them. Daniel then started talking about how his friend named Danny introduced him to something called “pre-mortem”. This is when instead of finding the answer to a certain something after an incident, you find out or do certain things before to prevent an incident. He used the example of high cholesterol and the drug used to treat it. He explained that research showed that for every three hundred people that take the drug to lower cholesterol, only one person is helped by it and out of those three hundred people, five percent experience the side effects. This means that fifteen people would obtain the side effects whether the drug is helping them or not. People are then fifteen times more likely to develop a side effect than a good effect.

Daniel Levitin definitely used rhetoric in his speech. He used ethos by stating that he was a neuroscientist, therefore showing he knows significant information about the topic he is speaking about, making him a credible source. Throughout his speech he also states where he received his research and cited his sources.  He uses pathos by starting his speech with a story to grab the audience’s attention. Lastly, he uses logos when he talked about “pre-mortem”. It is logical to want to prevent stress since stress takes so much out of people and clouds their reason and judgment and he is encouraging his audience to take certain steps and think reasonably now to prevent unreasonable thinking later.