Debugging a Case of the Post-Break Blahs

As its title suggest, this post is an expansion on my last post.  In addition to discussing the symptoms of the post-break blahs, I take the liberty to type at you about stress in my life, in general.  It is something that I have worked very hard to manage over the past year and while this may not be a complete summary of the stressors in my life, I try to cover both the primary and most amusing ones.

Because of my inactivity over winter break I now find myself incessantly stressing over a multitude of things, some of them directly caused by said indolence while others are merely exacerbated by it but ever present.  This is what I like to call "a case of the post-break blahs."  Two weeks, three weeks, perhaps a month spent doing not much more than that which is absolutely necessary to continue living; such is the life of a college student on break.  For most college students this is enough -- to be relaxed, to be content doing nothing.  For someone like me that bases his worth as a human being on how much he accomplishes -- whether that be the goals he set for himself or projects completed on a whim -- doing nothing for the entire break is gratifying at the time but every goal not achieved by the end of the break is a cinder block on his mind.  That isn't to say I can't ever allow myself to relax; like I said in my previous post, winding down every now and then for a period of time long enough to relieve stress but short enough so that it doesn't become a habit is a good thing.  It is when I do absolutely nothing for weeks or even days on end that it becomes a problem and leads to the post-break blahs.  And with each passing week of inactivity the "blah" gains momentum.

The blah-momentum gained over an entire break of lethargic wanderings from meal to meal smashes me into the next quarter like a fly that hasn't annoyed anyone into the windshield of an Infiniti EX37 traveling at top speed.  (For a more impressive statement, I was going to say a Bugatti Veyron instead of the Infiniti but my tuition isn't quite so high as that.  It only would have convoluted the simile even further).  I guess what I mean to say is this: the fact that I have to be a functioning, productive human being again after weeks of sloth-ing about is a bit of a rough transition.  I beat myself up for all the things I didn't get done in addition to now stressing over things that I need to do for school.

I'm sure I'm being too hard on myself and should instead focus on the things that make me happy in the moment and not care so much about keeping to such strict time limits on achieving my goals.  As nice as that sounds to me, it's not how I'm programmed.  Sure, I can go in and change some code here or there now and then to increase my overall happiness or what have you, but trying to make any really significant changes to the code will only result in some bug that creates more problems than what I had to begin with. #CSmajorProbs

Anywho, back to the blah.  When I get back to school the first thing I do is stress over getting everything unpacked and organized.  Usually organizing things is very relaxing but, for some unknown reason, following a break I go bonkers until everything is where I think it should be -- clothes are hanging up or folded neatly, food is arranged in the drawer corresponding to its proper meal, my backpack is filled with any binders, pencils, or notebooks I'll need for the upcoming quarter.  Once that's done I'm left free to worry about the first day of classes.  I don't think this has so much to do with the blah as it does with me always being slightly anxious for the first day of anything new to me.

A relatively recent development is that along with the stress -- or any thought that worries me, particularly those concerning the future -- my neck and jaw tense up.  This may be where my body has always stored my stress and I just didn't notice it until I started college but now whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed my neck and jaw get very tight, as if I'm cold; which, as a matter of fact, is how I started to notice this as a side affect of being stressed.  When I'm walking around campus with nothing particular on my mind and it's cold enough that my neck and jaw automatically tense up, I automatically start to think about something that stresses me out.  I don't know if this is because my body now associates stress with tension in the neck and jaw but it always seems worse at the start of a new quarter, especially winter quarter.  As the chill passes, so too does feeling stressed.

That's really all I can do: Wait until the stress passes while doing my best to not let it get the best of me; at the same time facing the stress, analyzing it, so I can type out a new snippet of code that covers the base case and recursively reduces the amount of stress associated with a certain stressor.

Now on to the fun part where I reveal the silly things that stress me out.  A brand new stressor from this quarter was the amount of food in my dorm room.  Looking at it now I don't think it's a particularly large amount (maybe because I've already eaten quite a bit of it) but when I first moved back in and got my homemade soup, lefse, butter, brownies, orange juice, milk, and various other perishables all organized I was honestly stressed about how I was going to eat it all before it went bad and, if I did manage such a feat, how fat I'd be as a result.  These are, of course, irrational things to be stressed over but at the time they were serious enough to warrant a tweet.

Just as silly though slightly more serious -- getting to bed by a certain time stresses me out.  I've always been fairly diligent about getting the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep (National Sleep Foundation) and if it seems like I'll need to stay up late enough that I won't get that amount I get stressed out.  Silly, I know, but true.  Instead of working on the paper or program that's keeping me from bed in the first place I'll sit at my desk all tight-jawed, not getting any work done, glancing at the clock every few seconds, calculating how many hours of sleep I'd get if I went to bed right that second; and that's if I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow -- a rare occurrence as my mind is usually too busy thinking about the contents of this post.

I've worked very hard this past year to not worry so much about the time I get to bed or any other stressor in my life; I simply focus on what I absolutely need to get done that day and after that do whatever will be relaxing and make me happiest -- such as staying up until 1:30 in the morning blogging -- even if it prevents me from getting as much sleep as I'd like.

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That's all for today.  I hope it's been as entertaining for you as it's been therapeutic for me.  To give you an idea of what my next few posts will be about, I'd like to resume where I left off (duh) in the story of "The Past One and a Half Years of My Average Life."  If you've forgotten where exactly in the story that is -- don't worry you weren't the only one -- you can go back to A Lahar of Tea and Fruit Snacks to refresh your memory.  I hope that by the end of the week I get caught up to the present day so that when I resume my normal posting schedule of once a week I'm free to blog about whatever catches my fancy.  Who knows, I might even get into the habit of blogging more and continue to post more often than just once a week.  We'll see.  For sure, though, I'd like to get back to writing sonnets because it's been too long.  I don't even have a terrible pun to leave you with today.  Oh well.  Thanks for reading! -NLD

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Unpublished material, ©2014 Neal Digre