Stress: warning symptoms


        STRESS: WARNING SYMPTOMS

Mind goes blank
«I am a good student. Study well, know my work. But last year I went to pieces at the exams. Mind just went blank. And as it went blank I got the jitters, terrible jitters. Kept thinking, what if I should fail? It was an hour before I got started. Then went like mad. It was too late. I did fail. Spoilt my whole record. I am repeating. I know my work. Know it well. What if I should do it again?»
The student whom I have in mind did not do it again. In fact he came top. During the year I had him practice meditation regularly. This gave him the calm and ease to ward off" another acute stress reaction. Some years later I had a letter from him from America, where he is pursuing a distinguished career in medical research, just to thank me once again.
There are others who suffer this type of reaction. We have all seen it in the unfortunate bridegroom. He rises to make the speech which he has prepared for weeks. But the occasion is too much. His brain is flooded with impulses. He is struck dumb. His mind is blank.

Distractibility
«My mind wanders off the subject. No. It flits off. Here and there. All over the place. Can't keep my thoughts on the topic in hand. I am attending to some simple, everyday business problem. There is some unimportant noise in the street. Then I find myself miles away from the matter I was working on, following up trains of thought about the noise in the street.'
'At lunch with two or three others, the talk is pleasant enough. Then find my thoughts have been waylaid on to something else.
'Mind is too active. Jumping about all over the place. Help me to use this activity. Help me to keep it on the one subject. »
Stress over-alerts our nerve cells. They fire off too readily with messages that are not relevant to the matter in hand. It is usually the observer, rather than the person concerned, who notices that the person under stress is not keeping to the subject under discussion.
Our brain has a complicated mechanism which allows our thoughts to flow freely. One subject of thought follows the next because it has a relevance to it in some way, logically, emotionally, or by similarity. And so the process of thought flows on. If our nerve cells fire off too easily, we become distracted from our main topic, and our stream of thought is diverted into quite irrelevant channels.

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ANTI-DEPRESSANTS
«Generic Medications»