Chronicles of a Wayfarer

Stressed? Who? Me? Nah, I’m merely performing magical triage tricks… Honest. I do solemnly swear and all that…

Nevertheless, one day while perusing the web, I stumbled upon this Time article on how to cope with stress. “Maybe there is something to stow away in my bag-o-tricks for rainy days (horrible mix of metaphors, I know).”

Then I came across this one particular paragraph of note in the last page of the article:

Here’s how the experiment works: if you provide mice with an escape route, they typically learn very quickly how to avoid a mild electrical shock that occurs a few seconds after they hear a tone. But if the escape route is blocked whenever the tone is sounded, and new shocks occur, the mice will eventually stop trying to run away. Later, even after the escape route is cleared, the animals simply freeze at the sound of the tone–despite the fact that they once knew how to avoid the associated shock.

The scene sounds altogether familiar. Reminiscing on the not-so-good old days, I remember that many of the difficulties I had was due to my inability to manage conflict. Unfortunately, my old response to dealing with stressful situations was to freeze. Think of me as the real-life Neville Longbottom being immobilized by Hermione Granger with one of her incantations… (I don’t remember which Harry Potter it was, off hand).

So, I wasn’t unlike these lab rats who weren’t able to see an escape route. Though in my case, the escape route wasn’t literal, merely a viable alternative/solution to the challenging situation I was facing at the time.

On a different tangent and to extrapolate the points being made in the article, what surprises me (and bear in mind I am using myself as an example) is the fact that humans and animals indeed respond to stress quite similarly. So, tell me again, how far are we in the evolutionary ladder, really?

In any case, though the article merely rehases most of things I already knew, the added insight it provided me about my own response to stress definitely made it worth blogging.