World of Wisdom: Peace of mind
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Keeping some peace of mind when the world around you is in turmoil is a great challenge. Mohammed finds it hard to maintain concentration, he sleeps 12 hours a night but awakes exhausted. He lives in Afghanistan, which is in a state of conflict, and spends a lot of time on social media. Sister Dang Nghiem offers advice on how to make your mind a beautiful refuge from the chaos and insecurity in the outside world. She discusses the North Vietnamese communists taking over Saigon when she was a child and the BBC’s Sana Safi compares her own experience of life in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC World Service. I am Santa Safi and welcome to World of Wisdom, |
| 0:06.1 | where we explore personal approaches to life issues that people are facing. |
| 0:20.0 | In this edition we will discuss how to keep some peace of mind when the world around you is in turmoil. |
| 0:24.4 | Mohammed contacted us about his troubles concentrating. |
| 0:28.2 | For a year and half now, he has found himself unable to read for more than 15 minutes without his mind wondering. |
| 0:35.7 | He sleeps 12 hours a day and when he wakes up he's still tired. He lives in Afghanistan so he has grown up in an insecure environment. |
| 0:45.0 | Sister Dang Niggiim is an American Vietnamese Buddhist nun, born in Saigon, Vietnam. |
| 0:52.0 | She's also a fully trained doctor. |
| 0:55.5 | Mohammed discussed his symptoms with her and explained that every day he spends a lot of time |
| 1:01.6 | using social media to follow events in his home country. |
| 1:06.2 | Okay my dear brother when we're our concentration is affected it has many many causes besides the physical conditions |
| 1:16.9 | there's also the mental conditions that can also affect your concentration |
| 1:27.1 | an ongoing war in a country, I mean I was born in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, so as a child I was also exposed to it and that even now 40 some years later I'm still affected by it. |
| 1:40.0 | The bad news can cause your body go through what we call a stress response. |
| 1:46.3 | That could be a fight response or a flight response or a freeze response. Some people they will respond by with the fight response. |
| 1:57.0 | It means that they will they may become very aggressive, hostile, and then in some of us it may trigger the flight response. |
| 2:07.0 | So in that way we want to just run away from the situation. |
| 2:11.5 | We can try to avoid by actually numbing ourselves also, by preoccupying our |
| 2:18.8 | mind with social media. So it's very important that we become aware, more aware of what is our stress response. |
| 2:29.0 | So when you consume social media, you said many things that may not be healthy for you, when we think, oh, I can escape something by consuming something else. |
| 2:41.0 | But imagine the mind is like a jug of water. If it's already halfway |
| 2:46.1 | four or two-third of the wave four, if you keep pouring in, it will just spill out, |
... |
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