You're listening to TED Health. I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. I've worked in busy ERs, and I can tell you,

they are chaotic. And I've often wondered, how do ER doctors stay so cool in high-pressure situations?

In her 2019, TEDx-Naperville talk, emergency room physician Darya Long, takes what she learned from managing

life and death problems in the ER to a strategy anyone can use to go from feeling overwhelmed

with a million daily tasks to feeling prepared, calm, and collected. By prioritizing and designing

for the process, she believes we can all learn to be

ready for the many demands life throws at us. 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

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