The past few weeks at work have been very stressful. Not enough hours in the day to even stay caught up, much less get ahead. Add in the new responsibilities to my job and I was starting to cook in my own skin.
On a particularly rough day, it occurred to me that I was spending 8 hours on a computer at work and then coming home to another computer where I would “unwind” by blowing up and hacking apart monsters in a video game.
This is clearly not the best approach to de-stressing.
Years ago I had a room-mate that owned a free-standing punching bag and I enjoyed wailing away on that to de-stress. I was a little worried about how my arm would do, but decided to give it a try. So, I set out to buy one of these for my house.
And that simple trip turned into an ordeal of inconsequential depth. From the moment I left work until I finally got home was one tiny slight after another. Traffic, parking, sales clerks, other customers, that accursed woman at Wendy’s who couldn’t decided if she didn’t want tomatoes or mayo on her sandwich. “MAKE UP YOUR MIND!”
Over and over again, I felt myself get angrier and angrier. For really no reason – on their own, each slight was very nearly meaningless.
It was the cumulative affect – like radiation poisoning – that just kept building up. Several times, I took a deep breath and by force of will slammed a new perspective in place.
It didn’t last.
I was reminded of a form of torture and execution called The Death of A Thousand Cuts. This was from China and was legal up until 1905 – it was inflicted on only the most heinous offenders.
The accounts vary, but in most cases the guilty would be cut many many times by very sharp knives – death was usually by bleeding out.
A merciful executioner would make the first cut fatal and the rest of the cuts were to disfigure the body. The point of this was the belief that a person would enter the afterlife looking like how their body was. So, disfiguring the corpse would torment the person for eternity as a reminder of their crimes.
And each tiny slight in my day, each meaningless disruption, felt like a tiny paper cut.
Or a cardboard cut, those are worse.
I was mentally exhausted by the time I got home. I did get the bag set up and while I was filling the base with water I finally got myself settled down. I went after the bag for a bit and then took a shower and went to bed.
The next day I went from work to home to the bag and the physical exertion did way more for me than blowing up zombies on a screen.
I guess comparing a “day of being annoyed” to “execution by disfigurement” is not really the best analogy, but it sure felt like it at the time.
Things have finally settled down a bit at work – as I knew they eventually would – but I’m going to try to make the punching bag a daily thing.
When I worked on the computer help desk way back when, I imagined my patience was like a bucket that would get slowly drained over the day. Over-night I would refill the bucket and start the day again with a full amount of patience.
Now it feels more like I’ve got a bucket of annoyance that starts off empty and then fills up over the day. And the punching back should help me empty that bucket again.
I know – objectively – that I’m doing fine. I have friends that have much more stressful jobs or are facing job uncertainties and in the grand scheme of things I’m making a big deal out of a lot of little nothings. I guess what I need to learn how to do is to just as quickly get myself calmed down after getting worked up. Or maybe just not get worked up at all – though that seems unrealistic.
Until then, I’m going to show that punching bag who’s boss.