Hey, I'm Elise Hugh and this is TED Talks Daily. Daria Long is an emergency room doctor,

and ER doctors are heroes. They've trained for everything, every kind of trauma, from patients

who come in gasping for air to the stress of multi-car pile-ups. In her talk from TEDx Naperville from 2019,

Dr. Long gives us the tricks of her trade

and shows us you too can be as busy as an ER doctor

without feeling crazy stressed.

Raise your hand and be honest. If you've used the phrase crazy busy to describe your day,

your week, your month, I'm an emergency room doctor, and crazy busy is a phrase you will never hear me use. And after today,

I hope you'll stop using it too. Here's why you cannot afford to use crazy to describe your busy.

Because when we are in what I refer to as crazy busy mode, we are

simply less capable of handling the busy. Here's what happens. Your stress hormones rise and stay

there. Your executive function in the prefrontal cortex declines. That means your memory, your judgment, your impulse control, deteriorate, and the brain areas

for anger and anxiety are activated.

Do you feel that?

Here's the thing.

You can be as busy as an emergency department without feeling like you're crazy busy.

How?

By using the same tactics that we use, our brains all process stress in similar fundamental ways.

But how we react to it has been shown by research to be modifiable,

whether it's emergencies or just daily, day in, day out

stress. Now contrast, crazy, busy mode with how I think of us in the ER, ready mode. Ready mode means

whatever comes in through those doors, whether it's a multiple car pile up or a patient

...