The wonderful school years have flown by, all the control and dictations have been written … But, as adults, we now and then face various trials. And every time we experience, despite all the accumulated experience. Why? How to learn to treat all sorts of checks more easily?
Desires or circumstances again and again bring us into situations where one way or another we will be judged. We master new professions, participate in a competition for a position, defend a project in front of a customer…
23-year-old Ksenia recalls how she passed on a driver’s license: “I was so nervous that I completely forgot everything, confused the pedals, the engine stalled. And the traffic police officer also joked about the woman behind the wheel. Horror!”
And 32-year-old Arseniy reacted to the same exams with humor: “I went there as if to study, and passed the 15th time. I told traffic cops that it’s cheaper for me to travel with them than with an instructor.”
Why, in the same situation, someone trembles like a leaf in the wind, while the other maintains Olympian calm?
nature and experience
Whether we will worry depends on many of our features, including innate ones.
“First of all, our excitability in a stressful situation is influenced by the type of nervous system, how information transfer processes take place in our neural networks, how quickly neurons are excited and a signal is transmitted,” explains humanistic psychotherapist Alexei Stepanov. – Second, reactivity depends on how significant this event is for us.
The world we live in is a competitive environment. Sometimes we enter into a struggle for a place under the sun even unconsciously. And then there are personal attitudes, beliefs associated with previous experience. And with how we are focused on assessing others, how stable our self-esteem is.
If this support is shaky, then the situation of external evaluation will rather provoke us to experiences.
Real life is not a casino: failure leaves us in the same place where we were
45-year-old Vladimir is a musician, poet, producer, performs with a group and solo, holds festivals. However, he can’t do anything with his insecurity: “Every time I wildly worry about how the performance will go. I don’t sleep the night before, it seems to me that everything is not ready, everything is done at the last moment.
And really, I don’t remember a single concert being perfect. Either the microphone is not working, or the speaker is cracking, or the cellist will be late, and the responsibility is on me.”
It does not happen that in some situations we are iron, and in others quivering.
“If we were worried during school exams, then perhaps we will react the same way to tests in adulthood, this is a question about our own anxiety,” notes Rimma Maksimova, a systemic family psychologist. “But good preparation, rehearsing for exams of any kind, acknowledging your anxiety, and knowing that if you fail, life doesn’t end, help reduce anxiety.”
However, transfer is not always possible.
We choose, we are chosen
On a dating site, 27-year-old Lilia found a nice young man. “I was so worried that before the date, my girlfriends gave me a sedative to drink. Because of this, I don’t even remember how it all went.” But the young man did not reappear.
“Some of us perceive acquaintance as an all-in game, when a loss means a collapse,” notes Alexei Stepanov. – Such an attitude greatly enhances the experience. But real life is not a casino: failure leaves us in the same place where we were. We don’t win, but we don’t lose either.
There is a myth that a man remains calm in any situation: it is not for him to be nervous, it is “forgivable” for a woman. Is it so? “In my experience, this is more of a stereotype than a fact,” says Alexei Stepanov. “Gender differences in our responses are small, if they exist at all.”
52-year-old Sergey is ready to bet: “I read Castaneda and agreed that habits limit us. I’m not looking for affection. If a girl refuses me, then I don’t excite her, that’s all.
And yet the differences are more likely to be explained by cultural or ideological attitudes.
“Someone chooses a stoic philosophy for themselves and takes the blows of fate for granted, but the question is, why do they need it? Rimma Maksimova suggests thinking. You can’t freeze feelings selectively. By turning off excitement, we turn off both empathy and joy.
Someone denies the importance of the moment: just think, so what! It’s his way of dealing with anxiety. But there are other options: for example, a confidential conversation during a date. It helps relieve tension and establish sincere relationships.
Personnel issue
If on a date we are evaluated by one person, then when applying for a job, we sometimes encounter a team of “examiners”.
Large companies often practice cross-interviewing with several experts at once. Or the applicant will have to go through several filters before he is given a final verdict. And some HR deliberately ask tricky questions to test the future employee for stress resistance.
“Employment anxiety is our adaptive response, as ancient as those of our ancestors who took to the battlefield. Some excitement in such a situation is not considered a negative sign for a candidate,” Alexei Stepanov reassures.
If the employer is interested in a potential employee, then they create comfortable conditions for him to prove himself.
“Even a self-confident person is anxious at an interview: if I get this job, it means that it is important to me, I need money, this position. And here we are not assessed, – emphasizes Rimma Maksimova, – not how we withstand such strange tests, but our competencies.
If the main criterion for compliance with the position is our calm reaction to provocations, resistance to stress, it is worth considering: “How suitable is this regime for us, do I really want to be in such an environment?”
There are people who are like fish in water in situations of stress, am I the same? Perhaps you should listen to yourself and give up the position.
Who takes the exam
There are moments when we are not taking the exam, but we are more nervous than the examinee himself. We are talking about the notorious OGE and USE.
“It seems to me that Ilya will not pass mathematics, although he has been going to preparatory courses for three years now,” sighs the 44-year-old mother of this year’s future graduate Raisa. And now the son has an additional tutor: just to have time to invest in his head the amount necessary to get the required number of points.
It is difficult for a teenager to resist pressure from all sides: teachers come from the left flank, who throughout the year train high school students to pass the test. On the right are the parents, who seem to put everything on the line, as if it were their life’s project.
“For them, this is a test of how we raised children. We present the child to the world, we are concerned about how this world will see him, how he will be accepted,” says Rimma Maksimova. “Maybe I didn’t hire tutors for him?” Maybe he didn’t drive much? Maybe passed it on? Have we done everything that is supposed to be a good mother and father? There are a lot of questions in my head that are difficult to answer in hindsight.
“Our excessive excitement is connected with rigid beliefs that I must do everything at the highest level, no matter what. Otherwise, I am a worthless person, worthless, ”explains Alexei Stepanov.
It takes a lot of courage to admit your imperfection and the right to make mistakes. Sometimes you need to go through more than one test before realizing that life is not only ups, but how I get out of the downs is my development. Failures make you think: have I been going there all this time and where do I want to end up?