Sans Fig Leaf
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"As serious as..."
29 November, 2007
I was on my way out the
door to work, just slinging my backpack over one shoulder and snaking
my other arm into it's loop, when I felt a sudden pain at the top of my
sternum.
It wasn't a sharp pain. It
wasn't like a muscle strain, either. It was a blunt pain, almost like
someone had pressed--not poked--hard with their thumb. Having been
recently apprised by my doctor that at my age, with my family history,
et cetera, et cetera, that I should not ignore chest pains, I paused.
It stopped.
The doctor had said the
thing to do was to jump up and down or climb some stairs or something.
Which sounds counter-intuitive, at first. What he said was, getting
your heart rate up is not going to cause any more damage than ignoring
cardiac event and trying to get on with your day. But if it gets worse
immediately, you know to seek medical attention. Whereas most
non-threatening causes of pain, discomfort, or odd feelings in the
torso will let up with some physical activitity.
So I jumped a few times.
Each time I jumped, I felt
a poke in the same place. But it was definitely a poke, now, and
definitely from outside. A quick examination revealed that by chance,
the spot where I had stopped the zipper on my leather jacket had lined
up perfectly with one of the buttons of my polo shirt, which was lined
up perfectly with the spot where the V of my v-neck t-shirt came
together.
Because of the way the
t-shirt's collar is made, that means there are about five layers of
cotton overlapped and stitched together at that point. And that
particular polo shirt's folding and hemming around its collar made even
thicker layers of cloth along the buttons. And when I'd stretched to
get into the backpack, it had pulled the jacket tight along the line of
the end of the zipped portion of the zipper.
A few extra layers of thin
cotton, a ordinary button, and a large metal zipper, all pressed
together to create a startling result.
It struck me as a metaphor
for stress. I often tell folks not to sweat the small stuff, by which I
mean don't treat small setbacks as major disasters. Some people might
misinterpret it to mean that we should just ignore small problems
altogether. But small stresses, inconveniences, and disruptions add up.
We don't often think about the cumulative effect, which is why we can
feel very stressed or worn out and not know why. Nothing horrible
happened, after all.
We're even more likely to
disregard the small stresses when people close to us are going through
big, serious disasters. Which is only complicated by the fact that
knowing someone you love is going through difficulties, is stressful,
too.
Once I'd identified the
source of my chest pain, all I had to do was zip up the coat a bit
higher. Though for the rest of the day, I was aware of that spot where
the button and v-point met.
Dealing with real stress
in life isn't always so easy. For some, the first instinct is to vent
to someone we trust. Which isn't always helpful. Studies have shown
that for a lot of people, venting and sharing too much increases the
anxiety and stress. We get more worked up as we discuss. If we obsess
about it, going over it again and again, we're guaranteed to get more
stressed rather than less. Sometimes even one venting can make things
worse because the person we're discussing it with becomes a bit too
outraged on our behalf, which subconsciously gives us permission to get
angrier.
A lot of people just
bottle things up. Guys in our society are especially conditioned to
suck it up. It's okay to gripe about some things, but you're expected
to show a strong face and deal with it. Which is one of the reasons you
hear stories about men having serious heart attacks, and admitting
afterward that they'd been feeling chest pains for weeks or longer, but
figured it couldn't be anything serious.
Just as ignoring chest
pains for weeks can lead to a very unfortunate end, so can allowing all
the little stresses to build up inside. I'm lucky enough to have a
husband and many close friends who will listen to my venting, and
usually make me laugh about the situation.
Laughter always defuses at
least some of the stress.
--Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
.