At work, I was trying to figure out performance issues in our application. To aid in finding out the root cause, I analyzed our monitoring tools and found that our application transaction times had “spikes” throughout the day.
These can indicate potential problems such as:
- Usage is significantly high during certain periods of the day and the servers are overutilized
- There are sub-optimal operations in the application that cause slow response times or consumes too much server resources
These spikes, if left unresolved, can result in degraded user experience and increased cost as your application needs more servers or a higher CPU/memory allocation to function efficiently.
In the end, the issue was resolved by fixing the optimization problems in the code and in the database. This means we no longer need to add more servers and at the same time, also improved the user experience.
Life Spikes
In life, we also experience these “spikes”, particularly in our emotions. For example, a reckless driver cut you off in traffic. Your coworker said something that triggered you. Someone did not perform their job and you have to clean up their mess.
It makes your blood boil. You see red and think of unpleasant thoughts. These spikes not only manifest emotionally, but physically as well.
These events should be expected. As Marcus Aurelius, once the most powerful man in the world, said to himself each morning:
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
Meditations
Life is not a smooth ride. No matter how much thought and planning you put into something, it is guaranteed that something or someone will derail it. Our life is like an ocean, sometimes calm, but mostly full of waves.
What do we do when we encounter these waves? More often than not, we dwell on it. We let the anger and negative emotions impact our mood for hours on end. When the anger is starting to subside, we relive the moment, prolonging the effect of the spike.
What do we gain from this? An elevated blood pressure? There is nothing beneficial for us by dwelling on negative emotions. It certainly doesn’t solve it. In fact, it makes it worse by making us reflect that negativity on others. Your entire world becomes clouded by this mist and prevents you from going past through it.
“But“, you say, “these emotions are part of being human! Suppressing them is impossible for normal people.“
And you would be absolutely correct. Let’s look at an extreme example. People think that monks, or those who internalized their spirituality for many decades, have this ability to control how they feel and not feel any negative emotions. But is this accurate?
“Do you get angry?” was someone’s curious question to the Dalai Lama. Surprisingly, the ultimate monk answered in the affirmative! However, although he admits that he gets angry sometimes, he does not dwell on that anger and comes back to to a normal state after a while.
You never stop getting angry about small things. In my case, it’s when my staff do something carelessly, then my voice goes high. But after a few minutes, it passes.
Dalai Lama
Instead of your emotions lingering through the day, you should try to normalize it as soon as possible, so it looks like this instead:
Muting our emotions is close to impossible. But you can acknowledge what you are feeling at the moment and allow yourself to react to the event. Then afterwards, you let go. There is no need to hold on to it, to use it as a weapon, to fling it back to others.
While we may never reach the level of emotional control as that of monks, we can use some concepts to help us back to our default state and bring down the “spike”.
Hope for the best, but expect the worst
Marcus Aurelius embodies the concept of Premeditatio Malorum not just in events, but in people as well. He knows he is living in an imperfect world, and every day he will encounter people that are rude, selfish, self-absorbed, and abrasive. Expecting these people lessens the impact they make on you when you encounter them in your day.
Behaviors are a reflection of one’s self
When people get mad at you for an unknown reason, this anger is actually towards themselves. If everything is going well in your life, do you lash out at others? Of course not. If people are acting negatively, they are dealing with problems of their own. That problem is not yours to resolve.
Study philosophy
People have been dealing with trouble and negative emotions for as long as humans existed. The ancients already spent countless lifetimes pondering, analyzing, and discovering ways to properly handle them. Some of these wisdom can still be found in today’s world, you only need to reach out and study them.
We cannot control everything. But one of the few things we can control is our reaction to what is happening. Perhaps this is why “spikes” happen to people: since we cannot control others or nature, we go overboard with what we can actually control, which is our reaction.