Detach — Blog — Healy Chen

I am stressed

“Is it stressful? Or do you just talk fast?”

And just like that, I regained some perspective. I was indeed stressed. A big thank you to the customer for asking. It was a packed day at work, with many items on the schedule. I felt the entire weight of it on my shoulders, that it was up to me to make sure it gets done. So perhaps I wasn’t paying full attention to each customer, merely trying to get through all of it to the end of the work day.

My reply was meek: “Probably a bit of both.” I do tend to talk quickly.

No matter how much training you do, stress can still creep up on you. No amount of sleeping the proper hours, eating the correct foods, exercising regularly, and studying philosophy, can prevent it. Doing those things only lessens the impact and severity when the stress does hit. A year ago I would surely have fallen apart.

After that interaction, I was able to slow myself down. Temporarily detaching from the situation - thanks the kindness of that customer - allowed for the realization that it has been a rather stressful day. I should have been able to see that for myself without external input. But, if it was that easy, my face wouldn’t still be breaking out in stress pimples, even as I’m well into my 30s.

Improvement comes incrementally: the ability to handle stress only comes with more doing and more experience. Unless I choose the life of an aesthetic monk living in the woods (sounds great, actually), stress is going to be a part of everyday life for the rest of time. I’ll be better at it as I go along.

Stop projecting into the future

Staying in “the present” can sometimes be very difficult.

The mind is a wonderful yet often uncontrollable thing, and when it wants to it’ll wander off on its own, down paths that you aren’t necessarily ready yet to confront. The more you try to control it, the more it slips away, as if it’s mocking you for your foolish attempts. Being able to focus on the moment and the direct task in front of you is a learned practice, because the mind puts up continual distractions, either from your pass, or the future.

I had such an episode yesterday morning: I was going about my usual morning routine when I received an email from my coworker that she will be out sick for the day. Obviously, the first mistake was checking work email during off-work hours; nevertheless, the message from my coworker took me completely away from what I was doing at that moment, and right into a rather negative chain of thought.

It’s quite selfish, too: my mind immediately went to creating scenarios where the my coworker’s absence meant an increased burden on me. Perhaps work will get super busy, and the lack of personnel meant I’ll be running around like a madman, not getting a moment to breathe. What if today was the particular kind of day that everything at work goes to hell, and I’d be the one stuck plugging the hole on the damaged dam? I’d better get mentally prepared for such scenarios.

Mind you, this was at 9 AM in the morning, and I didn’t start work until 2:30 PM. What a monumental waste it is to worry about something that isn’t yet to occur, to negatively project outwards into the future what might happen. What if things turn out to be okay? None of it is in my control until I get to work, so it’s rather futile and stupid to ponder on the possibilities and be stressed over them. There’s really no utility to it, but the mind is going to do what it is wont to do.

It takes practice to be able to snap out of such thought processes, to detach and evaluate from a macro level. Does this matter right now? If the answer is no, then I know to stop worrying and return to what I was doing. It’s hard, don’t get me wrong; I’ve a bad tendency to create worst case future scenarios for myself, and it’s a constant struggle to calm myself down, to not be so attached to outcomes that most of the time won’t even materialize.

As always, it’s a work in progress.