Don't panic

How do people deal with adrenaline? It doesn't appear to be something I cope with terribly well. Today at work I had to launch a minor but important project that I'd finished a couple of weeks back. I'd practically tested the thing to death, but I still had a horrible feeling that something was about to go horribly wrong. And such is the nature of my self-fulfilling prophecy that it did indeed go horribly wrong and I then spent the next four hours frantically scrabbling around attempting to discern exactly what had happened. Naturally it turned out to be a completely trivial problem to fix, but unfortunately I was misled by a error in the logs and had started chasing red herrings all over the place.

And all the while I was I becoming more and more stressed.

I hadn't even realised it at first. I become very single minded when things aren't going my way, to the point that I'll ignore just about everything else that's going on, including myself. I worked straight through lunch without realising I was hungry. It was only when someone asked me to explain where matters currently stood and I noticed I was talking about twice as quickly as I do normally that I realised I was losing perspective.

It reminded of a time several years ago when I'd ended up in a similar situation, trying to fix a problem against a deadline that was approaching entirely too fast for my liking. I got myself worked up to the point that my manager took me aside and told me to take a few deep breaths and to relax for a few minutes. He was quite polite about it, but he was essentially telling me to calm down. I learned a valuable lesson that day, even if I do occasionally fail to put it into practice.

I think I managed to managed to calm myself down before I spun too far out of control , but I'm sure I inadvertently told several people to go away and leave me along (or words to that effect) without even turning to look at them or considering the tone of my voice. I suspect I shall have to make several apologies tomorrow...