“Hey Trudy?” I asked as I walked into the dining room to retrieve my (lost) cup of coffee.<\/p>\n
I had this theory, and I wanted to confirm it with my fair and industrious spouse.<\/p>\n
My theory was that there’s some kind of energy conservation principle<\/em> at work in moments of duress — that I turn inward, shutting off the outside world, giving myself strength to focus on the task at hand (say: nausea from chemo, radiation burns, incisions, lack of sleep… the setback and humiliation of failing a certification test). My theory was that somehow my brain knows it’s stressed out and unconsciously chooses to conserve energy. That was my theory. I was curious whether or not it squared with Trudy’s observation.<\/p>\n She didn’t look up from her phone.<\/p>\n I took a sip of lukewarm coffee and continued. “Would you say that I react to the stress of a test like I react to the stress of being sick?”<\/p>\n Her head instantly jerked upwards, and her eyes opened wide. “No!” she said. “You did not<\/em> react the same as when you were sick!”<\/p>\n We looked at each other.<\/p>\n “You do fine<\/em> when you’re sick,” she said, “but you were massively<\/em> stressed out from this test!”<\/p>\n So much for my theory. I guess that for many reasons it’s really fortunate that I passed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Hey Trudy?” I asked as I walked into the dining room to retrieve my (lost) cup of coffee. I had this theory, and I wanted to confirm it with my fair and industrious spouse. My theory was that there’s some kind of energy conservation principle at work in moments of duress — that I turn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5020"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5024,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5020\/revisions\/5024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}