Mind Your Antennas
Loud and chaotic environments are full of energy. Kinetic stimulation and potential abound. This is frequently desired and created with intention in many circumstances. Sporting events, concerts, parties, and celebrations of all kinds.
The less obvious catch here is that as human beings we also need recovery cycles. You can think of them as companions to the party bus. Moments in times to quiet things down, rest, get your bearings, and reset yourselves for whatever comes next. It’s part energy management and part psychological and emotional reset.
Without recovery cycles you find fatigue gets too high, you suffer some crazy form of adrenal burnout, and over-absorption of all that positive energy can become a detriment to your own physical, mental, and emotional sustainability and performance.
When in high energy situations, you can sometimes refer to those circumstances as high-signal environments. Think of signals as external inbound information that is captured by your senses. Your senses act like environmental antennas.
Sometimes, when signals don’t stop, they can create a kind of signal fatigue that your internal signal processing center in your brain can find overwhelming and it translates into your body. Have you ever woken up form a dream that was intense, a bit Jackson Pollock in nature and full of random and colorful nonsense. That’s your brain working away at the end of each day to sort through all of it. The sounds, visuals, smells, touch, and all the rest. It’s quite remarkable and amazing that this experience occurs every day but not much attention is given to recognizing it and how it works for you.
Every individual person has their own unique wiring and capacitates related to the manner and speed at which they perceive and process all of the signals in a given day. One person can be ready to keep the party going and another person can be looking for a nearby offramp to some quiet solitude. It’s all quite normal and variation should be expected if not celebrated.
In the end, we all have differences in our antenna sensitivity, tolerances, as well as processing and recovery practices. My hypothesis is that highly perceptive people expend large amounts of their reserve energies on filtering signals and formulation of responses. These are likely your insightful friends who may be better at listening than entertaining one-liner jokes but also compliment others you know who have a gift for simplification and spontaneity.
Sometimes we think we need to insist on and drive everyone to be the same but there is value in embracing the diversity. So slow down the tendency for comparison for sameness and explore the possibilities of deep insights while taking care to reenergize along the way.