Grounding My Symptoms
/I learned two important lessons at line school:
Electricity will take any available path to ground.
Everything is a conductor for electricity; some things conduct better than others.
Every wood and concrete overhead utility pole along the road has a copper pole ground running to the Earth, which is attached to a ground rod that gets driven into the dirt. All to provide excess voltage resulting from faults and lightning strikes a more convenient path to the ground.
Copper is an excellent conductor. Rubber is an awful conductor. So it gets the fancy name of "insulator,” and it’s why I wear thick, rubber gloves while working on or around energized wire.
If we give the electricity some intent — it much prefers to speed along the lovely copper highway than trudge through the rubberized back roads to get where it’s going. Both materials conduct, and electricity usually takes the path of least resistance. The utility industry took advantage of these properties in building and maintaining our transmission and distribution systems.
While conversing with a good friend of mine, I casually mentioned how good this intensely physical job has been for my health. Even on bad mental health days, after a few hours being physically uncomfortable my mind returns to a healthy baseline. He said: “So you’re grounding your stress through easier pathways?”
Great feelings of anger swelled within me — “I’m supposed to have the witty insights into mind!” Then I laughed and realized that grounding symptoms is novel way to describe what my ongoing therapy and new work does for my health.
Consider the fairly common anxiety symptoms:
Tense muscles
Shortness of breath
Racing thoughts
Through Cognitive, Dialectical, and Constructive psychotherapy along with meditation, breathing exercises, and acupuncture I’ve learned numerous ways to deflect the stress along different pathways until it dissipates:
Tense muscles - cold showers and progressive muscle relaxation
Shortness of breath - focus on the present and loving kindness meditation
Racing thoughts - thought records and physical activity
In my old work, when my thoughts raced and I felt on the verge of panic I’d excuse myself and find a quiet stairwell for some yoga and a gentle meditation. If that failed to calm me down then I’d go for a brisk walk and try to catalogue all the physical sensations I experienced. Identifying the different colors on plants, have a staring contest with a squirrel, or feeling the sunlight on my neck. After returning to my desk, I’d usually be in a good enough mental place to do whatever work needed doing.
The stress from my anxiety was shunted along more conductive pathways until it went away enough for me to get back to work. I had to put in the effort at my old office jobs to mange my panic, but almost all of the therapies I use are practically in my job description as an apprentice lineman. I’m never not on a daily walk, and there is always something to move or clean. Anxiety at its core is the fear of an unknowable future. While I’m predisposed to fearing more than most, my new work has given me more immediate fears that are overcome much more readily. Instead of worrying about delivering a quality online course in six months that has dozens of moving parts and depends on the collaboration of thirty people, I worry about setting a new pole in a safe fashion with four coworkers by the end of the day.
Granted, the longer I stay in the industry the more responsibility I’ll earn and the more my worries will increase, but all of it feels more manageable than anything I ever did. It takes forever for my anxiety to spike while on the job because I’m moving and focused on the task at hand while sweating and feeling the sun beat down on my neck.
I’m getting 40 hours of anxiety-proofing every week, and I’ve gotten so used to it that my most anxious days are now Friday to Sunday! Fifteen years of my life was spent learning to craft grounds in my mental and physical systems, and in six months I spent the majority of my waking hours utilizing them while barely noticing. Quality of life is a unique property with different definitions for everyone. For me, finding work that significantly decreases my anxious symptoms and allows me to think more clearly has been one of the most pleasant discoveries of my life.
Want to ground your symptoms? Here are some handy tools:
