My Quest Hub
Is your Librarian Stressed?
Is Your Librarian Stressed?
Winter 2014
Why do I react to something in a negative way when others just take it in their stride? It’s tough enough when you are stressed or anxious about something, but it’s worse if you then feel stupid or inadequate because everyone else seems to just deal with stuff without the stress!
Let me talk you through it.
From your first breath you are learning about your world. Stuff like what’s good to eat what’s not, what is safe to do and what will probably hurt you. The experts will tell you there are lots of parts of your brain that help decide how you view your world, well that may be but in the Hut we stick to two parts for ease! The front part – your conscious brain – the bit that processes the information around you, which you are aware of. The back part – the subconscious – that stores all this information and much more. The back part is a massive library – with thousands of boxes in it all labelled up so you can find stuff and of course your very own librarian! Now the librarian is the issue. He is an emotional soul!!
As we learn stuff it gets filed in these boxes marked good; brilliant; not so good and – you really don’t want to open this box again!! Your librarian labels the boxes and each of our librarians does this differently based on how your librarian feels about something your conscious brain sends through for filing. For example – my librarian does not like fish so that goes into a box marked – disgusting in my library! But your librarian might love fish and would probably file it in a box marked love it!! You see our librarian is the problem, in that he files stuff based on how he feels about it! He files stuff based on his emotional response! That’s why we react differently to things.
If the librarian gets bombarded by stuff he does not like he gets anxious. Rather than deal with the issue without emotion he just puts it in the ‘eeekk!’ Box. Well that’s like a kettle that gentle boils but the more stuff that goes in that box the more he gets stressed as the box begins to boil! Because that box is boiling and threatens to blow – it takes all his attention and so then the slightest irritation can be the difference between that box boiling and exploding! Yes our librarians can be real stress heads!
So what do we do?
Well fortunately it is our library – and we own it, so we get to say what’s what! When I feel my self-getting stressed I make my librarian tell me what’s in the stress box and together we decide if it really needs to be in there or maybe we can actually agree that leaving the lid off the tooth paste is not really a world ending thing and could be moved to a box called Slightly niggling! And maybe the kids constantly fighting could be moved to a box marked – things to let go, cos I was a kid once. Basically – every now and then I have to sit down with my librarian and have a look in that stress box and calmly talk him through how we could refile it simply by doing something – no matter how small about that particular item, so giving him permission to file it elsewhere. Just by taking some of the stuff out of the stress box we can bring it down from boiling point. That calms the librarian and stops him getting stressed over little things because he is so worried the stress box is getting full and could blow up his library! I guess my librarian is a very intelligent logical child- brilliant at his job until he lets his emotions over fill the stress box. So I just sit down and calm him down and together we deal with the business of re-filling stuff by taking the emotion out and by doing so clearing our heads to the fact that – the lid being left off the tooth paste is not cause for death con four! I guess he gets lonely – so I would recommend that every now and then you just sit quietly with him and do some refiling without his emotion. So it becomes a team effort – we deal with the little stuff so it doesn’t overload the stress box, allowing the librarian to file it some place other than death con four!
