As human beings, I think we all have certain responses to life the tend to dominate our emotional states. This is particularly true when we find ourselves in positions of stress.
Slow Down!
For pretty much my entire life, my response is to high stress situations has been to slow way down. Sometimes, even grinding to a complete halt.
From the vantage point of "observing myself," I recognize this as a response to the fact that the more rushed I feel, the more mistakes I make... which only makes something that is "taking too long" take even longer.
This has often been far from convenient, because I also seem to have been gifted with a temperament that gets me to feeling overwhelmed rather easily. During my brief stint in the IT industry, it became painfully obvious that high-pace, stressful situations were not my friend!
But Not ALWAYS!
If only I were actually that predictable!
The strange thing about it is that if I know precisely what is needed of me, and I am very familiar with that task/action... well, then I am actually better under a stressful situation than most people. Probably 99% of people.
Way back in the very early days of computer games, I would play Tetris quite often, and whereas it took me a long time to make sense of the game, and a long time to be any good at it... I gradually became quite elite level at it. Because it was familiar.
The same was always true for work related tasks... under "crunch time" with something familiar, I was good, under crunch time with something UN-familiar, I would pretty much freeze.
Why am I even writing about this?
Well, as I alluded to in earlier posts, @cosmictriage and I are going to be spending our Friday, Saturday and Sunday at a Ghost and Paranormal Conference some 30 miles from here, where we will have a vendor booth with our creative wares.
I'm realizing that getting ready for an event, keeping up with the household because Mrs. Denmarkguy has been in Seattle (housesitting for our daughter) and also trying to keep up with my work and this writing challenge on Hive is starting to make me feel a bit overwhelmed.
Thankfully, we have been to enough such events that it's not a huge amount of preparation because we keep all our "show stuff" permanently packed in big plastic bins... which is a great time saver.
Anyway, I have more on my plate than I am generally comfortable with... but you gotta do what you gotta do!
Hopefully we'll have an enjoyable and profitable weekend!
Thanks for stopping by and having a look!
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Graphic by @traciyork
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — NOT posted anywhere else!)
Created at 2023-11-09 22:11 PST
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