Short fuse, long fuse, everyone has one. There is no person on earth who doesn’t have a limit before getting irritated and then becoming angry. The only interesting question is how come someone’s reservoir of patience is much deeper than someone else? How come one gets irked and blows up from a sound of cat’s nails tapping on the hardwood when another one can take Chinese water torture for days and still keep their cool?
You might point out the obvious – patience! But patience is a finite resource. Besides, if one is not experiencing any irritation from an obvious trigger then what’s there to be patient about? The answer lies within our nervous system (NS). It is our NS that determines how comfortable we are in our bodies. In scientific terms a nervous system is responsible for “sending, receiving, and interpreting information from all parts of the body; it monitors and coordinates internal organ function and responds to changes in the external environment.”
In simple terms NS is intricately linked to our perception of things whether we’re aware of it or not. My past three years of struggle with health and insomnia has definitely taught me many lessons about the role that our nervous system plays in self control. Insomnia, especially, hits the NS like a bulldozer and makes one into a walking zombie. This is where I had the fortune to put all of my thus far accumulated “anger mentor” wisdom to the test.
It didn’t take long to notice that following a sleepless night my fuse was extremely short. I basically already got out of bed irritated and pissed for having gone through [click to continue…]
