Today I am going to talk about stress. Again! Mainly because it is therapeutic for me to discuss with I am going through this week at work. But also because stress has a large impact what you eat. Let me tell you cookies and smoothies help in the moment but then you are let down later. Plus you have the guilt you put on yourself for over indulging. It is very complex.

So what is happening to cause all this stress. I can easily identify the source this time. It is work. Our network has crashed every afternoon this week. In fact, while writing this post I am fully expecting it to crash again. Now I am an applications support person, not a network guru. Clearly this outage is not my responsibility. But it is my responsibility to commutate with my users on what to expect. How long will we be down? What are the downtime procedures? What do we tell the patients? Do we reschedule them and sent them home?

Now many of those questions are a matter of hospital procedure. I just facilitate making the decision to implement them. This outage is so beyond my position that there is an incident command center and a call-in number for updates. But get this the phones went down too. The call-in number was overloaded. What a mess. And again while this is not my issue to fix, I am the face of IT for the user. So I get the brunt of their unhappiness/fury. Okay so it goes with the territory. I sort of signed up for this kind of treatment. But after 3 days of constant outages it take it toll on me.

I have tried breathing exercises. Going for a walk. That darn phone vibrating the whole time with new messages. I have tried talking it out with co-workers and using humor to get through. All of these things work to a point. But then the pantry wins and I am eating cookies again. Dinner gets postponed because I am still working. We go out and I eat a bowl of chips waiting for my burrito. Or we order a pizza. Yikes.

So what can be done. Sometimes we just have to go with it. It is okay. The best part is I am aware of it. I am conscience of what is happening and I am attempting to put a stop to the bad behavior. But ice cream is calling from the freezer. "I can make it all better" says the Thrifty Rocky Road. The Oreos sing in harmony, "Eat me, you'll fell better." I am getting better at not listening to these voices. I have identified the culprit and it is actually me.

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