What doesn't kill us...

Though it frequently works out this way, I still don't cease to be amazed by how educational a lousy period in one's life can actually be. This week, which was lousy for any number of reasons, I learned not only that it is possible to function on three hours of sleep a night and that few things feel better on an empty stomach than black rice pudding, but that I am even more like my father than previously thought.

Aside from a last name, workaholism (if that's not a real word, I just made it one) and large eyebrows, my dad and I also apparently share the same stress response. When something particularly horrendous goes down, we'll both let it run around our brains so much that the rest of our bodies, namely our stomachs start to follow suit (thus the pudding). This week, I, the healthy 23-year-old graduated to the same gastric reflux medication regimen as my 57-year-old father. Aren't we cute.

What's a little cooler though (and much less embarassing) is how similar our coping mechanisms of choice are. When things got significantly more stressful in his life this year, my dad, the good Catholic, started praying the rosary much more frequently. He keeps one nearby when he sleeps and gets through at least a decade (one loop around the beads) when he runs each day. While I'll admit that I haven't prayed the rosary nearly as recently as my dad has, I do knit, and pretty obsessively when the rest of my day has been crappy. During the last seven days of craziness, if this gives you any idea of the scale of things, I knit an entire 5ft by 2ft shawl. There's a pretty big gap between knitting and praying, I know, but here's the thing: In a talk I went to last week, I learned that repetitive, relaxing activities such as meditation, praying the rosary and knitting can increase the length of time that theta waves are present in the brain. Theta waves are the ones our brain produces when we're daydreaming; our normal self-criticisms and internal censors turn off, and we're more likely to let ideas flow. This is why people feel like they come up with their best ideas right before they fall asleep, for example. And if you're in the middle of a stressful situation, getting yourself into theta state can help you work through whatever's going on in your head without giving yourself massive gastric reflux. My dad and I were dealing with the shittier parts of life in the exact same way, and we didn't even realize it.

Granted, stumbling upon this information isn't going to fix whatever my dad or I may be going through, but when outside forces already have you feeling crazy enough, it is nice to discover that the way you're responding isn't so far-fetched. It may even bring us closer, assuming we each survive this. Thanks for the worry-genes, Dad.