How to Calm Down

Description

Shifting Gears Is this you? At any given moment during a typical stressful day, does your blood pressure rise, your pulse rate hit 10 percent over normal, and your breathing seem to stop. If so, read on. Once upon a time, I worked all day at a hamburger stand and went to school at night. It wasn ’t a bad job, but after eight hours of dealing with customers and coworkers, I was in no mood to concentrate in class. I had one hour between the end of work and the beginning of school. I was agitated and needed to calm down, to shift gears. I just didn ’t know how. One day I tried taking a nap, and ended up missing school completely. Then I found another solution: two bottles of beer. I bought the beer at a store, parked my Volkswagen Bug in the school parking lot, and sat there drinking, all the while letting my mind wander. Random thoughts and worries ran their course through my brain and then left me alone. Sometimes I had to take deep breaths, because my belly was full of beer. Other times I would close my eyes and watch pictures play out in my mind. Or I would focus intensely on the cold, wet bottle, or on tearing the label off, leaving not a shred behind. The beer solution worked. I calmed down. Better yet, the problems of the day vanished so completely that I could go to school and really hear what the teacher was saying. Because I was able to concentrate, I started doing well in class. After a month, however, I had put on ten pounds. My clothes no longer fit, and I felt terrible. I knew I had to cut out my two bottles of beer, but I didn ’t know how to calm down without them. I then began asking other people how to relax. They told me to go to Las Vegas. Go fishing. Get a date. None of these ideas would have helped me during that hour between work and school. Other people ’s solutions were good for them, but not necessarily for me – something I ’d already learned at the hamburger stand. I ’d be standing there for so long that my feet would hurt. As a result, I was always on the lookout for comfortable shoes to slip my big, wide feet into first thing in the morning. Any time I ’d see someone in a nice-looking pair of shoes, I ’d ask if they were comfortable. The response was usually yes. Then I ’d go to the shoe store and try on a pair, but they would hurt my feet. When I realized that I could not rely on other people for advice on shoes or on relaxation, I started noticing what I did to calm down. Often I would smoke a cigarette, which seemed to help, though initially I could not figure out why. Smoking, it turned out, was an abbreviated version of what I had been doing in the school parking lot. First, I stopped whatever I was doing at the time – that is, I took a break. Next, my attention shifted from the jumble of thoughts racing through my mind to the one simple action of lighting a cigarette and taking a deep breath. Ahhh, relaxation. “Can I take a break without smoking a cigarette or drinking two beers? ” I asked myself. “Sure, but why? ” came the answer. “Well, just to calm down, find a moment of peace, ” I ’d say. That ’s all I was looking for when I began my quest for relaxation. I was frazzled.

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