118: What Happens in Vegas... | Captain Influence

Welcome back to The Real Brian Show! Before getting started, I'll just take a quick moment to apologize for not communicating about no episode last week. It was on both our radars to blast something somewhere, but it got away from us! Brian made a trip to Vegas for HxGN Live (Hexagon International Conference) and will have some stories to share, and for good measure we're also throwing in the usual frivolity from Captain Influence.

In This Episode

• Yeah... about last week...
• VEGAS!
• A lesson in preparing trout
• Stress = Dizziness & heart palps??
• An emphasis on stress
• Lost in Space, Salvation, Altered Carbon

What Happens in Vegas...

Finding relief from stress in Vegas might not be exactly how you're expecting! Generally, the whole "let's go to Vegas for the weekend" bit is more specific to the casinos or endless nighttime entertainment. But in the case of our own Real Brian, the relief likely came on the heels of anticipation. Between extended alone time, dealing with crabby and rude drivers, and preparing for HxGN Live, stress bubbled up to the surface in the form of heart palpitations and a general uncertainty of health (and thus feeding back into the stress).

I don't usually qualify my posts, but I do recognize that talking about stress is very personal and provokes in us a feeling that no one really understand what we're going through. I just want to share some of what I've learned about stress over the last 20 years as my own symptoms have changed since childhood.

Stress manifests in different ways for everyone, and because of that... sometimes it's really hard to tell what's wrong or that you're even stressed out in the first place. When I was younger, my stress took the form of incredibly painful sores on my tongue. Any time I would get over-emotional (excitement, nerves, embarrassed, anxious) I could feel the sores start to come back. And then it would take forever for them to go away.

It's interesting because even as I'm writing this I'm only realizing that it was one of the contributing factors toward a strive for balance, melancholy and stoicism. I still come up against strong emotions, but there's an aspect to stoicism that changes my perspective about receiving these emotions. Sometimes it's unhealthy (suppression) and sometimes it's limiting (not getting excited about things), but until I experienced grief (which was totally new) I found that I wasn't surprised by my emotions. The lack of surprise was a considerable help in managing stress.

At the beginning of my grief, these tools were helpful. But at a certain point, my reactions stopped maturing and it became mostly suppression - which then began to manifest in TMD. Three years later... I'm definitely suffering the long-term effects of not adjusting my dose of stress relief accordingly.

So Brian is totally correct when he says that this is a cyclical process and we keep learning and keep adjusting. And he's right that I was going to say as much! This is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating aspects to human nature, because we expect consistency in how we anticipate things, but it is so easy to neglect the third parties that feed into our circumstances. Society changes, people change, we ourselves change... and thus circumstances are constantly in flux. We recognize pain and stress, find a way to deal with it - we focus in and make sure it won't happen again - only to be shocked by another aspect of that experience which causes us stress.

Stress relief is multilayered and transitory. It is a theory that can be applied, but also must be applied appropriately, with varying degrees of emphasis, and then adjusted and tested for every future use. Otherwise we'll just end up being frustrated that the old methods to relieve stress don't work and find ourselves in a vicious cycle of being dominated by our circumstance.

The most difficult aspect of stress relief, for me, has been trying to find the motivation to dig down deep for the root of my stress AND make the necessary adjustments to relieve it. Sometimes it's easier (or it SEEMS easier) to just push through. But the long-term effects can be incredibly damaging. So I'll leave you, at the end of this long-winded diatribe, with a little encouragement to take the time to deal with it when it comes up... don't let it get out of hand, no matter how uncomfortable it might be.

Links

• The Wunder Boner
• The Super Bass o Matic
• Hayley Williams - Still Into you (Acoustic)