This last week we spoke about how our bodies typically respond to stressors. Everyone is a little different and how we respond to stressors can change over time. I know for me it’s been interesting to say the least. I’ve been able to deal with higher and higher levels of stress as I’ve deliberately exposed myself to job that create high stress situations. One of the main reasons I took my last job was to expose myself to a situation that was particularly stressful and unpleasant the first time I dealt with it. When I was working in the North Dakota oil field, I held a position with my first company that required me to help offload pneumatic semi-trucks that were full of sand. We used a high-pressure air system (pneumatic) to blow air through the tanks and unload the trucks into another system. The system we offloaded into looked like a larger semi-truck trailer that you would see driving for Walmart or some other type of freight company, but only they were about 30% larger. They were a little wider and a bit taller than a normal trailer and had 4 separate bins with in them that held frak sand. The job required me to inform the drivers as to which bin they could connect to and when they would be able to offload the trucks. This was very time consuming and inefficient due to a lack of space on location. The Location was very small and they required a very large amount of sand per stage in order to frak. I was only able to off load 3 maybe 4 trucks at a time for a total of 240k pounds of sand at most. It would take me at least 45 min to offload these 4 trucks. Each stage that they would frak took 550k pounds of sand and they would try to do a stage every hour. So, it would take me a minimum of 2 hours and 15 min before I would be able to get enough sand for one stage. Needless to say, I was under a lot of stress because I was not able to perform at the level that the location required. Couple that with issues with other crew members that only made the situation worse due to a lack of motivation on their part. So needless to say, the company that I worked for lost their contract and we were then told to not go to that location for that company any more. Out of the 6 people that were a part of that crew, I was the only one that kept my job. It was a good learning experience but it was extremely stressful. I stayed with that company for another year and half, but decided it was time for a change and signed up with the company that took over after my company was removed. Over the next 10 months I was able to pick up and learn a lot about what was wrong and how to do better. Considering that I never had any training with working with pneumatic trailers before the second round went much better. Not only was I able to perform much better than I had during my first attempt, I was able to actually keep up and get ahead of the fraking location. Where before, the stress was out of control. I learned a few tricks to help me deal with stress and to help me to keep it from derailing my efforts. This was the main reason I wanted to take that job. So, I could learn and improve on an experience that was so very unpleasant. I got to a point where there was no more stress with the work and I had developed a routine to that allowed me to succeed. Learning how to calm myself down when things got crazy, and even more important, getting ahead of the stress before it became a thing I had to deal with. It’s much easier to get ahead and stay ahead of it rather than trying to play catch up. It’s possible to recover but a bit harder than staying ahead of it. Of course, long term stress is never a good thing as it has long lasting effects on our bodies. It can even impact our DNA which is never a good thing. Though it can give you a super power, unfortunately the super powers it gives are always unpleasant and cancer causing.