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SPEECH #4

I was 21… interviewing for my second full-time job out of college.  It was going well.  I was feeling good.  Then the question: “What do you do when you get stressed?”  I still can’t believe my answer.  Actually, the disbelief arose the second the words left my mouth.  I looked that lady straight in the eye – no blinking, no faltering – and said, “It … doesn’t… happen….”   

She was asking about FEELING STRESSED, and what I heard was FEELING PRESSURE.  There’s really a fine line between the two.  I work very well under pressure – actually I can hardly function without it.  Some people choose whiskey.  Not I.  Pressure is my poison.  It’s speed – but free, invisible, and internally produced.   

Who here, as a student, never waited until a couple of days before a term paper was due to start it?  Kudos to you!  Of the rest of you, how many remember the rush you got when you did have that time constraint?  That’s the high.  That’s working under pressure.   

I know it’s not just me.  I met a woman a couple of months ago who wrote her master’s thesis like this – and did better than she did on any other paper she submitted beforehand!  You see, besides the high there is a certain level of clarity – and that’s what hooked me more than anything else.  Whether your instinct is fight or flight – and even though the “danger” is self-imposed, artificial – you’re focused on getting back to safe ground.  It is, at once, both self-destructive and self-constructive, but up to a certain point – at least for me – the latter outweighs the former.   

Stress comes at the breaking point, at which the focus becomes so acute that it actually turns in on itself and reason takes a walk.  It’s replacing all food with sugar-high junk and, eventually, forgoing even that for a bottomless cup of coffee, and carrying this out for days...  It’s sleeping fitfully because in every dream, you live out a very realistic … very convincing… crushing failure.  It’s waking up at 4 am in a panic and not being able to get back to sleep, instead lying there wide awake – desperately trying to keep track of all the thoughts racing around inside your head – too afraid to try to write them down because if you turn on the light, they’ll all disappear – all this even though you know the alarm is set for 5 and you’ll be too tired to function in the morning if you don’t get… some… sleep!   

The key here is to keep yourself under maximum pressure – maintain peak clarity – without crossing over into STRESS.  The trick is that that point is in constant flux.   

For example, I’m less likely to calmly face an all-nighter if I just pulled one the night before.  The point has shifted inward, albeit temporarily, and I am more sensitive to pressure, more susceptible to stress.  It can work the other way, too.  If I’m having a particularly good week – getting enough sleep, exercising, spending time with family – I’ll probably breeze through an all-nighter – no problem. 

From my experience, more permanent shifts tend to be outward.  Your psyche adapts to pressure just as your body adapts to exercise.  Some people have a relatively high tolerance for it.  These “Type A” people are not born.  They’re made.  These people are so comfortable under pressure, they actually go out and look for ways to keep it going.   

So, given a fluctuating tolerance level, how do you ensure that you don’t cross it?   Let’s go back to the psyche/body analogy.  Consider your mind a muscle.  The more pressure it can withstand, the fitter and stronger it is.  To increase muscle strength, lifters overload and then allow time for recovery.  To increase your tolerance for pressure, overload yourself by stepping outside of your comfort zone and then allowing time for recovery.   Maybe I’m preaching to the choir here.  I mean, you’ve already done this at least once by joining Toastmasters – more than once if you’ve given a speech.  

Remember that some caution is required here, as with physical exercise.  I started with allowing myself only a couple of days to write that term paper.  This is probably where I should have ended as well and turned to other ways to keep myself under pressure.  By the middle of college, I wasn’t even breaking a sweat a couple of days beforehand.  And if I wasn’t breaking a sweat about one thing, there were other more pressing – more immediate – more sweat-inducing matters to attend to first.  Sure, I’d map out a timeline for each new assignment, but the work I did turn out before crunch time was never more than half-hearted.  It lacked focus.  But, come the night before or… the morning of…, there was no stopping me.   

Now this worked out alright in the end – I graduated and all – but it was a little like working on upper body strength by hanging off a cliff.  You must remain realistic and test your strength before putting yourself in a potentially life-changing (or ending) situation.   

So, the answer is four years late but… “I try to avoid stress by knowing where my limits are and safely working to stretch them further.  However, when I do get stressed, I make lists – lots and lots of lists (and undersleep and overcaffeinate).”   

Madame Toastmaster.

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copyright Erin O'Neill 2006
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