“i don’t understand how you just get so much stuff done under pressure and like don’t freak out” i just go into autopilot bro like i genuinely do not know what happens in high volume situations. i let my body deal with that shit. not for me
if you completely block off a whole portion of your mind you’ll find that it is actually quite peaceful and you can move very fast, almost ungodly so, and achieve a lot while feeling absolutely nothing
i have been informed that this is not how normal people process and handle stress.… . dam that shit’s crazy. sorry y’all have to deal with it in like a rational healthy way
So for the record as both a long-term user of this feature and someone who had what I’m about to talk about happen to her:
If you rely on this too much you are at ever increasing risk of it not working anymore, very abruptly, at a really horribly inconvenient time.
You are also at risk of it working less and less over time when you have no other coping mechanisms in place.
And finally even if it continue to work, you are doing continual damage to your ability to handle non-crisis situations! And increasing the chance that you will start unconsciously turning everything into a crisis.
All three of these options are Sub-Optimal, to say the least.
(this is because this method is essentially harnessing the dissociative capacity of the brain for moments of extreme trauma more or less At Will except the will involved amounts to convincing your amygdala to let go of the right juices by convincing it that the tiger is in fact right there. It can be a superpower! But it’s also, well. Risky. If you find yourself literally doing it for everything, be aware that it’s kind of like running an engine at max at all times without ever really replenishing the oil. Eventually you will start burning shit.)
I think there’s potentially one more option that occurs if you’re *especially* good at this, and it’s that your threshold for “crisis” unconsciously becomes higher and higher.
Oh, you wrote that paper in a week no problem? Now it’s not a crisis until three days before.
That worked okay? Now it’s not a crisis until the day before.
That worked out too? Hey, now the crisis point isn’t until *the day of*.
This is how I ended up writing a 30 page PhD level literature review in 12 hours—and presenting on it the next day—during finals week. And you know what? That sucked! It almost just didn’t happen!
Because at some point, your brain is going to just believe nothing is a crisis anymore. It fails to recognize pain. And pain is important, because it’s a sign that something has gone deeply, deeply wrong. If you believe that nothing is a crisis, *you will not know you’re in a crisis situation until you’ve fallen off the cliff of what is possible*. You will not recognize the pressure you’re under until it’s crushing you, and possibly not even then.
And this doesn’t just affect your work or school; you don’t recognize these signs in your relationships either, and it primes you to be able to take whatever others may do to you. It’s not even that it lowers your self esteem and makes you believe that you deserve it—you literally just cannot recognize when situations are harmful anymore. Have you ever told someone a “funny” story from childhood and they look at you and reply “holy shit, I’m sorry you went through that?” Yeah, that’s your whole life now.
If this sounds dire, it’s because it is. Do NOT let yourself get to this point if you can.
Excellent addition.
