slow brainwaves and fast emotions

Whenever I'm caught in the pantry at work with someone and am in need of some small talk, I fall back on speaking about my theory of caffeine. That it helps me think.

In college I learned that the theory behind Ritalin and ADHD had to do with the optimum brain activity level for thought. If your brain is of the type that runs slow it needs to be sped up, say by physical activity. Or a stimulant. Being that my productivity improves exponentially with coffee, I always put myself in this category of people.

What can I say; my brain is slow and runs on red bull.

(Some people are fine au naturalle and some need extra calm as well, but I am too busy drinking coffee to think about how they deal.)

On the flip side, going through the death of my employee last month left me wondering what kind of robot I was. It seemed that I got past the whole experience pretty quickly, and I worried that I was compartmentalizing or some such. Then it hit me.

I have a fast emotional metabolism. When dealing with emotions I just work through them more quickly than others. I burn through them like a SUV does gas.

Why not? Why can't we categorize how people react emotionally with their rate of reaction? It explains why I’m so often in a good mood. On a basic level I go through all the crappy stuff that other people do, it is just that for whatever reason I eat through it like lightning and then am back on stable ground.

Well, it is either that or I’m really good at rationalizing. Yeah. Hmmmm.