Guy Winch, Ph.D.: Emotional first aid and how to treat psychological injuries

We experience work stress, most of it, actually outside of work because when we're at work and working, when you're absorbed in your work, you're not conscious about whether you're stressed; you're just doing it. It's when you stop, and you're driving home, or in my case, walking home, or you're sitting at dinner, or you're trying to fall asleep at night that all those worries and, you know, ruminations come. And if you're not diligent about managing them and limiting them, they can really take over.

95% of people who have a customer service complaint with the product don't voice it even though they're very upset. Why? Because they feel and they fear that it will be too difficult, and too time-consuming, and too aggravating to do that. Instead, and this is the part that's fun, they will tell 12-16 people, on average, about that incident, spending way more time getting aggravated each time, all over again, and getting zero result.

The event that moved the dial more than anything else, by far, is the pandemic—by far. Because there are very, very few people untouched—and I don't mean by illness; I mean by stress, by anxiety, by grief, by loss, by loneliness, by tension, by relationship rupture, by fear, by depression. Very few are left untouched.

You can't direct yourself to not think about something. You can redirect your thoughts to think about something else—and that will work to the extent that the other thing that you're thinking about requires concentration and is absorbing.

I work with a lot of successful people. They don't think of themselves as failures ... They just don't think of themselves as successful because they've only made $20 million, and they're looking at the person who made 50.

For most of the industrialized and Western world, probably, we are at a point where we need to think about our emotional well-being—even because it has a huge impact on our physical well-being, and our longevity, and health. So, even if that's the priority, just staying alive, we know that many emotional and psychological conditions can actually contribute to you dying much more quickly than you might have otherwise.

If the emotional piece is not working, at best, you will continue to do okay physically and just be miserable, which strikes me as the definition of torture, or at worst, you'll have all of that plus an impaired physical existence. So, either way, if you're emotionally broken, I think you're in for a very difficult life.

The training of the therapist, the credentials of the therapist, all of these things probably don't matter as much as the rapport that is built between the therapist and the client.

Once you really understand someone, once you really see the world through their eyes, two things happen: number one, you have compassion for them, and number two... you like them—because when you really get someone, there's a fondness that gets triggered, at least for me.

The sexiest thing you can do with a PhD is finish it.

I think any mental health professional these days has to think of themselves as an ambassador because there is such ignorance that we have about our emotional and psychological states, and how we operate, and what matters.