At a recent interview, I was asked, “How do you know you’re under stress? And what do you do about it?”

Interviewers, take note! That’s a really good question! That’s a question that should be asked of prospective employees more often! I was completely unprepared for it, and I think I bungled it a little, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s too late for that conversation, but it’s not too late to reflect and take away useful information for the future:

When I’m under stress – it’s not that I cut corners, but I don’t take enough time at the start to think through the process. I careen from one thing to another in execution mode, and arrive unprepared, and sometimes find myself backtracking or creating more work for myself. When I’m under stress my short-term memory is not awesome, especially physical and task-relational short-term memory, so I lose track of where I put things, I lose track of where I am in a process, I task-switch poorly. My reading retention, and listening retention, flags.

I don’t tend to miss mistakes when I’m under stress, which is lucky – rather, I’m hyper-aware of them, and often expend too much mental energy overthinking them. Or going back, double- and triple-checking, looking for mistakes where there may not be any because I can’t actually remember what it was that I did.  I either communicate poorly (busy, can’t talk, yes I’ll meet that deadline if you leave me alone and let me work!) or overcommunicate (let me tell you every detail of every step to reassure myself that I’m on track). I run on autopilot a lot.  It’s not in the doing the thing that I fall down under stress; it’s in the recording, recalling and processing the thing. That’s an important distinction.

The last year and a half has been a giant stressball, both at work and elsewhere, and I’ve had to learn how to take a step back and review, assess, re-orient, priority-check, communicate, and internalize. I’ve had to learn how to recognize the moment where I need to stop and do those things, before the moment passes and I’m in the weeds. I’ve had to learn to do better at taking a deep breath at the beginning, remind myself that doing the pre-processing will save me time in the long run, and let myself take the time. It’s efficiency self-care, and it’s absolutely necessary to perform, long-term, at the pace and level of excellence at which I really want to perform.

This is an insight that will be deeply valuable when I go back to fulltime work-plus-school. I’m ten years older than I was when I started undergrad, and “I’ll sleep when the semester’s over” and flying by the seat of my pants just isn’t going to cut it anymore.