What I do when I don’t eat out of stress?

Yesterday, at least, I sat in the restroom and held my stomach for half an hour. Uncomfortable, yes, but it was the only thing I could figure out to do when I was coming down from a stressful event.

One of my jobs is to help others improve their processes. One guy has been working here for 6 months, and last week he asked me to help him prove the hypothesis that he had based all of his activities on. The most fun part of it was it involved a lot of data (yes, I be geeky).

We gathered 20,000 records of data and I dutifully analyzed it in my engineer’s software. If it’s possible to get a little horny from data, I have to admit I did. It’s really rare in my job to get so much high quality data, and there was plenty to discover. I was totally involved in the data, even forgetting about lunch and snacks.

Things soon started to go south, though. His hypothesis could not be proven in the data. I searched and analyzed, and came up against a personal struggle - because I don’t get this much data often, I’m slowly losing my skills with the software. No fun.

Monday afternoon, even my colleague realized that his hypothesis was wrong. He even said he got this completely wrong, and that all of his work in the past six months was based on it. Yikes. I coached him to remember that it was valuable information, even if it’s not what he expected.

Come Tuesday I spent hours looking for trends that he could use to develop new theories. Later that day I showed him the trends I’d observed, and I gave him new guidance on what to do. We closed off this part of the project, and that’s when I got hungry. The stress stemmed both from having to tell him he was wrong and from ending the activity. I have a consistent issue with feeling good about completing any activity. The emotions were overwhelming.

What to do? I chose to run away and get some quiet time. Unfortunately at the moment the only thing I could think of was to take refuge in the bathroom. At least I had my palmtop so I could play hearts while my emotions got back to normal.

There was no rebound eating later, even when DH brought home a new chocolate-chili ice cream. Yay!