Calm Down.

I can be an emotionally responsive person. I usually don’t realize how emotionally responsive I can seem because it comes naturally to me. I don’t know that I fly off the handle at the drop of a hat, but when my mood is in a certain space and the circumstances are in a certain place, I can get loud. I usually try to restrict this sort of behavior to my alone time but my family occasionally gets to see the best of it. It’s not something I’m proud of.

I never used to swear. I don’t remember my father swearing that much; I think my mom would occasionally swear around us kids. I didn’t really pick up the habit until I worked at the radio station where you needed to drop a few f-bombs to get anyone’s attention. Screaming and yelling and swearing was the normal course of action for speaking at any sort of meeting while I was working there, so I adopted the tendency as a matter of survival. When you work at a place where people throw knives (wish I was making that up), you sometimes need get rowdy. Again, not something that I’m proud of.

As I was going through my work email this morning, I found myself yelling out loud in my office. “What the F^!K did you think, numb nuts?” Now I don’t know if this person has numb nuts. Since the email in question was from a woman, I kind of hope that she doesn’t have nuts, period, but that’s her business. To each their own. I started firing off a snappy email when I decided to just close my eyes, count to 10 and then reassess the situation.

It really wasn’t worth raising my blood pressure over. You see, after I counted to 10, I realized that the world was still spinning and that nothing had changed, other than my blood pressure subsiding a bit. This prompted me to send out a simple tweet this morning:

I should probably stop calling other drivers “flea-bitten whores.”

Now I wasn’t driving at the time and actually the thought was completely random (that happens a lot with me), but it is something that I am going to remember via a sticky on the dashboard of my Jeep.

Since counting to 10 worked so well for me this morning (and my day has been just fine since), I decided to see if there was a way to remind myself that I should just take a deep breath. Of course, there’s an app for that.

Introducing CalmDown. Now when I get a bit riled up, I have the little ying-yang symbol in my menu bar to click on and remind me to calm down just a little bit. Yeah, it costs a buck but sometimes you have to invest in yourself. If this will help me lower my blood pressure and be a little more rational about things, then it’s worth it.

Now, if I could just stop the fucking swearing. Jumpin’ Mice.