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My dad used to go to a beautiful old Gothic church built in the 1920’s, and I loved singing in the church choir there. The grand, echo-y sanctuary, the stained glass windows – you couldn’t beat it for majestic atmosphere. Well, there might be a scientific explanation for the sense of community I felt when I joined my dad in the tenor section. Apparently, there’s a study that shows that choir members’ heartbeats sync when they sing. Researchers in Sweden monitored the heart rates of singers as they performed a variety of choral works, and they found that as the members sang in unison, their pulses began to speed up and slow down at the same rate. Scientists believe the synchrony occurs because the singers coordinate their breathing. Dr Bjorn Vickhoff, from Gothenburg University says, “The pulse goes down when you exhale and when you inhale it goes up. So when you are singing, you are singing on the air that you are exhaling so the heart rate would go down. And between the phrases you have to inhale and the pulse will go up. If this is so then your heart rate would follow the structure of the song or the phrases.” The scientists studied 15 choir members as they performed different types of songs. They found that the more structured the work, the more the singers’ heart rates increased or decreased together. Slow chants, for example, produced the most synchrony. The researchers also found that choral singing had the overall effect of slowing the heart rate. This, they said, was another effect of the controlled breathing. Perhaps that’s why it was such a great release for me.
What I Learned Yesterday:
Have you ever been confronted with a monumental task that you’ve procrastinated on for so long that as more time passes, the job keeps getting bigger and bigger? Perhaps you have a backlog in your filing at work, or maybe you have a dripping faucet that you just haven’t gotten around to fixing, or you’re dreading the prospect of having to call a plumber. Perhaps you’ve let the bills pile up and some of them are past due, and you can’t seem to get ahead of the deadlines, making the financial burden worse than it would have been.
The stress of an unfinished project can be paralyzing, and the obstacles in your way are as varied as the examples I just listed. Sometimes, your schedule is just so busy you don’t know when you’re going to find the time to tackle the task. Other times, money is the issue, and timing things in your monthly budget would require an MBA. But most of the time it’s just the sheer magnitude of what you’re trying to confront that becomes too daunting to mentally get past. You want to knock out the entire task and be done with it, but it’s just too darn BIG!
This happens to me both at work and at home all the time. Recently, at the school I work in, we lost a special program that employed a handful of teachers, and when they left their positions, they left a ton of equipment behind. Suddenly, I found my TV studio filled with large carts, obsolete overhead projectors, and giant televisions – the tube kind not the nice flat screens you see nowadays. It was mostly just junk that other teachers either didn’t want or already had.
Every morning during our school announcements broadcast, I and my students had to weave between the bulky carts and equipment just to set up for our news program. Each time I saw the piles of junk blocking our way, I cringed. When I was I going to get a chance to re-purpose this equipment or send it to the school system’s warehouse? Filling out paperwork and recording serial numbers was not high on my priority list. Plus I already had a few shelves worth of obsolete computer equipment and broken VCRs to send in. How was I going to find the time to write up or reassign all this stuff and clear out the mess?
Here’s the real problem: I was overwhelmed by the thought of completing the entire task, thinking I had to get it all done in one fell swoop. But over time I realized it didn’t need to be completed in one massive stroke. So I thought to myself, maybe if I just warehouse the TVs, which are taking up the most room, I’ll feel like I accomplished something. So one day, I went back to the studio with a post-it pad, wrote down some serial numbers, came back to my desk, filled out the form, got the principal’s signature (usually a massive hurdle in itself), and sent in the paperwork. Boom – done! A week or so later, the big, burly guys from Warehouse showed up to take the TVs.
In successive weeks, I did finally get around to the other stuff, but the point is I tackled one small part of the problem to make forward progress. It was like taking a manageable bite of a vegetable I didn’t like rather than trying to choke down the whole thing. There was no reason for me to do the entire task all at once, and there never would have been an opportunity to dedicate the amount of time it would have required to do all of it in one sitting.
Now, this doesn’t work with every stressful task, of course, but perhaps you can apply this bite-size approach to something on your to-do list. Can’t weed your whole garden? Try just doing one section. Do all of your family vehicles need oil changes? Fine, take one of them to Jiffy Lube and don’t stress about the others for now. I have to say, though, cleaning out garages, basements, or closets are the perfect example. Don’t try to do it all in one go! Take it one garbage bag full at a time.
Here’s what I learned.
Life can be overwhelming, even with the most quotidian elements of our day-to-day, but usually the stress that comes from dealing with these mundane tasks can be confronted by having a certain mindset. Our minds have a hard time wrapping themselves around a sizable, time-consuming duty, but if we force ourselves to compartmentalize the task, it’s not only more likely to be doable bits at a time, it’s also more likely to get done in general. Being paralyzed by stress can cause more of a delay than doing something in small bite size pieces over time.
Going back to the bite size idea, think of it another way. Your friend walks in with a piece of birthday cake and says, “Eat this last slice before it goes stale.” In response, would you be likely to stress about it going stale before you can eat it? No. Would you shove the whole piece in your mouth out of worry that it might go stale and end up with a stomach ache? Not likely. You’d take one bite size piece at a time. So why should less desirable chores be any different?
I’m Michael Ahr, and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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