In Search of The Elusive Estonian Rageflea Extract…
Psychology on the brain lately.
There was an incident at work, a mild one, wherein a loose “if-I-can” deadline agreed upon for a large and unwieldy task became without warning a “must-do-today” deadline of another nature entirely. This transformation of duty took place at 6 PM on a Friday, as I was preparing to go home for the weekend.
“I am not pleased,” I said.
I put my head down, alone in my cubicle. There I was, my weekend sacrificed to some broken link in a chain of managerial duty. When faced with the new reality of my weekend evaporating before my eyes, I felt a fury slowly overtake my body. My thoughts, five minutes ago thinking of the walk home, became uncontrollable and curt, the stuff of revenge, of betrayal, of quitting right there on the spot. This idea was ridiculous then as it is now—quit a job over one bad day?—but blind rage pushed forward, knowing nothing but retribution, confusion, and fear.
Physically, I became agitated. If I held my hand or arm at a certain angle, say by cocking my wrist back to a half-tensed position, I could feel my muscles shuddering. My nervous system was a blast furnace. Staring at the screen and the task ahead, my lymph nodes felt like they might start swelling out of my body like balloons. A vein throbbed in rhythmic shrieks at the very top of my head.
I rested my hands on the wrist guard at the base of the keyboard. Others chatted nearby about their weekend plans, packing up their bags, summer jackets rustling amidst the creak of chairs. Sensing the distraction, I put my headphones on and cranked the worst music I had, something heavy and noisy and infused with adolescent mythology. Before long, while my rage refused to subside, my sense of reason came back, and the haze was swept away. Still furious, I began slowly to enter a state of flow. All physical distance, all false barriers, fears, hesitations, and psychological detritus that previously sat between myself and my work, crumbled away. I had channeled my anger into my quivering hands, and put them to the keys like alligator clips to the contacts of a battery.
My manager came back a while later to find that the task which was expected to take another half-day of work was almost finished. She stood at the wall of my cube, watching me. Scarcely aware that she was even there, I bored in deeper, furiously task-switching and hammering dialogue boxes, the pallid Windows XP landscape becoming terra cognita, its cursor becoming almost a physical extension to my body. My manager missed half of what I was doing because it happened so quickly.
The second it was completed, packaged up, and sent off, I hit Windows-L on the keyboard to lock the screen, picked up my jacket, and walked out. I didn’t even wait for the automated confirmation email. My anger was gone, forced out by a beaming pride.
It is more obvious than ever to me that productivity is a direct function of one’s physiological state. Fight or flight responses in humans are strong and potent even though the padded walls of our comfortable society often cause us to forget they exist.
More interesting to me: can this physiological reaction be invoked at will? I am not prepared to accept that in order to work as efficiently and single-mindedly as I did on Friday, some external agent will have to incite in me the same ire, the same infernal heat and noise and crashing, blinding mania. I am not willing to lean over a building ledge or be attacked by carnivorous apes every couple of hours to get through a productive workday.
But can I simulate the adrenaline state with a perceived stimulus? Or is adrenaline always beyond our grasp, left to external forces?
I have been reading about Martin Seligman‘s theories of Learned Helplessness, whereby we are conditioned to believe falsely, but instinctively in the nullity of our actions. By severing the relationship between cognition and its consequences, an erroneous or malformed belief about an action’s outcome reduces our motivation to act, making us prone to anxiety. We learn to disbelieve the causality of our actions, which teaches us not to bother trying.
I crave the opposite condition: a hyper-awareness of the causality of my actions, where I taste every consequence on my tongue before it happens, the forces set in motion by my neurotransmitters growing outward in jagged vines before my eyes. I want to see a clean line connecting a task—washing a dish, writing a paragraph, slicing and uploading a digital image—with its reward, no matter what manifestation it should ultimately take. Today, these rewards satisfy my rational mind, but not my physiology. The highs are diminished, grey, flattened-out. Worse still, there is a tendency to fall into the easier and more sustained highs of passive action, TV and movies and video games, the kind that end once you turn off the screen.
At times, it feels as though a distant word like physiology represented something practiced only in labs or universities, away from the safety of our daily lives. There is likely no non-chemical solution to the problem of willfully causing uninhibited concentration in your average subject. In any case, we are rewarded whenever life makes us aware that we operate on the basis of synapses forming networks, into which are poured habits, motivations, and beliefs, connected to our spinal column and our extremities, and blasting out of this pulsating evolutionary slag heap, like magma bubbling forth from the earth, comes the red-faced fear of having to work a late weekend.
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(3 comments)
Exactly what Guthrie – a true Seligman adherent – was warning us all with his triumphant ‘Problem with Solutions’.
“Everyone starts to look the same, if you softly whisper their name”
Think about it.
Well done, Dick. Say, how’s the Newfie-infused new apartment?
More like ‘Well Baked’!
As for the newfy infusion… I’ll let you know June 2nd.