Count Your Blessings #97 – Warning Signs

Over 10 years ago now (probably over 15 years I can’t quite remember) I walked into a doctors surgery. Sitting down I explained to the doctor that I had been suffering from a tights chest and wondered whether I was suffering from asthma or something like that.

This particular doctor was an old school doctor, dressed in a suit and looking over the top of his glasses. He asked me an interesting question: “If I shouted at you right now would you burst into tears?”

Sometimes someone asks a question that is unexpected, but to which you immediately know the answer, and the answer was “Yes”.

He then proceeded to get out a pencil and a piece of blank paper and draw me a diagram similar to the one below:

He then went on to explain.

He explained how a certain level of stress was something we needed to motivate us to do things. Without any impetus we get nothing done. The stress doesn’t need to increase very much for our productivity to increase rapidly. We can live in the area of normal working stress all of the time with just the normal breaks.

He also acknowledged that there were times when we needed to sprint for something. “Sprinting” increases your stress even further, but doesn’t deliver that much extra productivity. You can only sprint for short periods of time before you have to relax.

The problem with sprinting is that it quite quickly pushes over the top and our productivity starts to decrease.

If you try to sprint all of the time then your productivity actually goes down and the more you push the faster it goes down. This is where the real problem comes in, sprint too hard and for too long and you can’t go back up the curve. It’s a steep curve and the only way back is to start back at the beginning. You have to take the straight line to the bottom left hand corner, and there are no short-cuts.

This is where my tight chest came in. It was a warning sign. My body was telling me something. It was telling me that I was on the way down the slope. I had been sprinting for too long.

The doctor told me to go home and not to go back to work for a week. It was a gloriously sunny week and I spent all of it in the garden reading. I went back to work knowing a new warning sign.

Last week I went on a “Defensive Driving” course organised by my employer. This course was a full day with a driving instructor being taught how to drive more safely. We started the day with the mandatory classroom training. Part way through this training we were shown a set of photographs of road scenes and asked to explain the significant information in the picture. On the first few photographs we highlighted one or two obvious things, the instructor would then point out another ten or fifteen things we should have noticed. Quite often the things we did see had more significance that we were aware of. On various occasions he would say things like “See that light there, that means that there has probably been a fatality at this junction.”

A learnt another set of warning signs.

On Friday last week I had a tight chest and would have happily burst into tears, the warning sign was back. It was time to do something. This weekend I took the opportunity to stop. We went walking in the countryside and enjoyed the sun on our backs. I heeded the warning sign and I am already feeling a bit better. This week I will try to control my diary so that I have some space for relaxation.

Warning signs are a blessing, but only if we heed them.