omg?
Hanukkah star trek style as requested by ample-nacells. I had no idea how to make Bones look like he was saying the blessings so he ended up looking more like he was criticizing Kirks ability to light candles.
The Ao3 Tag of the Day is: …Is the teddy bear implied and on fire, or is the fact of the fire implied?
a trick for reducing paralyzing anxiety about an upcoming job interview or major exam
that has helped me personally, and when I’ve suggested it to other people who were facing down something similar, I have often been told it helped them
(but that you should manage carefully if you’re also dealing with depression)
fear is your brain being on high alert because it knows there is the *possibility* of disaster looming, which is… look, it’s *trying* to help out? it is only a small bag of chemicals doing the best it can in these uncertain times, same as any of us.
You can’t remove the “disaster” part of that, but you can trick it about the “possibility” part.
you say to your brain, “I am going to *definitely* fail at this event. It is not a possibility, it is a certainty,” (and you have to believe it, at least a little)
and then you make a concrete plan about the next thing you will do after you for certain fail, (eg, re-enroll in the course over the summer, schedule a do-over exam, arrange an interview for the next job on your list) so there is no void of uncertainty about what happens *after* the failure.
and now your brain knows exactly how the future is going to go:
1. don’t do well enough on this exam to get into my dream school
2. accept the offer from my backup school, and find out who else from my class is going there
(or whatever.)
and because the uncertainty is gone, your brain can ratchet down the anxiety enough that you can breathe. And when it inevitably swells up again, you just remind yourself that yes, you already *know* this will end in failure.
and then, like
since you’re going to have to go through with this “practice exam for the one I’ll pass later when I retake it” or “chance to talk to some cool people in my industry” anyway?
Might as *well* prepare.
I learned this trick because I was very upset by exams for a while
and then one day I had a exam that I knew with 100% surety that I would fail. (Nothing is 100%, you say? If you knew what test it was, and how ill prepared *I* was, you would take that back.)
so I crammed, and took the test, and failed spectacularly, and at no point was I anxious. A little sad, maybe. Mostly I felt relieved.
and then I wondered if I could replicate that without *actually* setting myself up to fail, and the answer turned out to be yes, to a point
(brains are dumb)
I pull the same trick! I use more of an “if-then” method (to cover situations where there’s more than one Everything Terrible Forever outcome), but wow is it helpful to have a mental map of what you’ll do if you get, like, spontaneously fired and then flunk out of school.
Hee, sounds like you’re rocking the full astronaut life.
I can only hope to one day be so prepared.
deepintheshadyglen