- The speaker shares a personal anecdote to highlight stress-induced cognitive failure, explaining how cortisol affects thinking.

- Encourages implementing systems and gradual organization to mitigate future issues.

- The speaker emphasizes discussing the number needed to treat and side effects with doctors for informed medical decisions.

- Suggested practices include designating specific places for easily lost items and keeping digital copies of important documents.

- Suggests thinking about quality of life and rational decision-making ahead of time, as stress impairs logical thinking.

- Prospective hindsight, or premortem, is a technique introduced by Danny Kahneman and Gary Klein to anticipate potential failures and minimize their effects.

How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed | Daniel Levitin | TED - Summary

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You're not at your best when you're stressed. In fact, your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking but potentially helping you survive, say, being attacked by a lion. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there's a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations, when your thinking becomes clouded — the pre-mortem. "We all are going to fail now and then," he says. "The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be."

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The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You're welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.

TED's videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy. For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at https://media-requests.ted.com

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