by jwc0846 » Tue Jun 18, 2019 7:54 pm
Hmmm . . . here's my best guess of where it comes from and how it might fit into your strategy for dealing with it.
Your autonomic nervous system has the job of controlling how revved up your nervous system is in any given situation. To get a good night's sleep, things need to be running pretty slowly. To do something that requires attention and effort, you need to stay alert so it is more active. If you are running to get out of a burning building that is falling around you, it's likely running over the red line.
The better the state of your automatic nervous matches the demands of the given situation, the better you perform.
The problem is that in the modern world, the levels are rarely as simple as sleeping, focusing, or running. We perceive threats and requirements from all kinds of sources: deadlines, bills, news, relationship, illness.
Much of that wasn't allowed for in the original systems and as a result, over time our "idle" tends to creep up so to speak, but the danger zone above which we get less effective and finally burn out stays in the same place. This is what is referred to a chronic stress.
Untended chronic stress makes us more sensitive to new stressors that may come along. Most likely, the effect that I was describing earlier is getting amplified by your system already running fast to try to cope.
This is where relaxation or meditation or exercise can be very helpful to the degree that it can lower how revved up your systems are before a specific stressor it comes along . . . like an upset that you can't finish a job on time and you can't do anything about .
I guess it's like "the straw that broke the camel's back" story and the lesson is to keep the load as small as possible while you can, because stuff happens that you can't control, so have some leeway to work with.