The one thing that makes this man stand out in my memory is that whenever we parted ways, he would say “make it a good day”. I usually said “you, too”, or something similarly uninspired.

What he was saying finally struck me one day. He was not telling me to have a good day. He was telling me to make it a good day.

As nice as the sentiment sounded, I didn’t really see how it applied to me. My job sucked, and it was causing me all kinds of stress – even to the point of visiting the emergency room. I experienced a lot of anxiety and had a few panic attacks.

I got to the point where I reacted badly to everything that happened at work. I can remember telling my manager more than once that decisions made by upper management were going to cause me to have to take another trip to the hospital. He finally got tired of my complaining and told me that work was not causing me stress; it was my reaction to work that was causing stress. That was not the answer I was looking for, so I added him to my mental list of stressors.

Fast forward a couple of years to a new job. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m now leading a pilot project using an agile process (Scrum). For the first several iterations everything annoyed me. My developers couldn’t follow simple instructions. They couldn’t write good code. They had to be constantly prodded to keep them going. Every day had its share of “what now?” moments.

For some reason I started thinking about the man at the gym again. This time, it paired perfectly with my old manager’s advice. Despite my annoyances, work continued to get done and things were working. It wasn’t the work that was bothering me. It was my reaction to work.

I’ve been trying to be very mindful of how I’m reacting to things at work. I still get pulled in a lot of different directions, and I’m still having trouble getting my team involved in the process. What I’m not doing is worrying about it. I’m learning to be more aggressive about my time management. Instead of wondering why my team can’t grasp simple process concepts, I’m asking them how I can explain or demonstrate it better.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a million things I’d like to change about my environment and my team every day, but instead of waiting for a good day to just “happen” to me, I’m becoming an active participant and “making it a good day”.

In the last several weeks, I’ve noticed that my anxiety level has plummeted, my stomach is not upset every day, and I’m sleeping better. That’s good enough for me.

Fast forward to the present. In an unforeseen chain of events, all of the programmers at my company all sit on one side of a newly erected wall, and QA/Services/Helpdesk sits on the other side. We have decided as a team to leave the lights off on our side of the wall, and it has made a tremendous improvement. Lighting related headaches and nausea are practically nonexistent.

I’ve noticed lately that the number one search term that brings people to this site is "flicker vertigo", sometimes combined with "aspartame". It seems time to revisit this problem.

Flicker vertigo, annoyingly, is a topic that doesn’t seem to have a lot of information behind it yet. Sure, there are lots of hits on search engines, but if you look at the content excerpts, most of the pages seem to be copied from one another. Almost all of the results involve aviation. The most unique results I was able to find are the following:

• http://www.iflyamerica.org/flicker-vertigo.asp – Anecdotal information from flying a single engine propeller airplane.
• http://www.narcap.org/PerceptualDisorders.htm – Article from the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) including a couple of paragraphs about flicker vertigo. Again, mostly anecdotal evidence from single engine propeller airplanes and helicopters.
• http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/callback_issues/cb_268.htm – More anecdotal evidence from a Boeing 767 captain affected by the strobe on top of a fuel truck.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_vertigo – The Wikipedia entry. Just a stub for now, since it appears to have been created 10 November 2006. I find it strange that it took so long for flicker vertigo to make it onto Wikipedia.

None of the above links contain much of any information about flicker vertigo. The prevailing opinion seems to be that it only happens to those involved in the aviation industry. One commonality in the sources is that they consider a flicker between 4 and 20 Hz to be the cause of "standard" flicker vertigo. (Of course, most of the article reference the NARCAP info at some point, so that may be why they all use the same numbers.)

One cause of flicker vertigo that I didn’t find mentioned was one that gets me every time – driving on a tree lined road at a time of day where the shadows are falling on the road. The sun "flickers" in and out of the trees with a frequency that’s probably very close to 20 Hz. I can only tolerate this for a minute or two. Any longer than that and I get a splitting headache, dizziness and nausea. I’m sure there’s some term for this that would turn up more hits in a search engine, but to me it’s clearly flicker vertigo.

I mentioned that some of the searches that hit my site include the word "aspartame". In my original post, I stated that evidence had been found that aspartame was linked to an increase in flicker vertigo among (you guessed it) pilots. I still have not been able to find the study (or studies) that this information came from. There is an article on the Flight Safety Foundation’s website, but you have to be a member to access it. I didn’t feel it was worth US$280 for me to become a member just to read the article.

One of the biggest frustrations in trying to find anything associated with aspartame is the sheer number of sites on the Web that are devoted to misinformation and FUD. I mean, how am I going to take anything seriously on a website that declares aspartame to be the "Thalidomide of the ’90s"?

It’s entirely possible that aspartame has some kind of effect on flicker vertigo. My own experience doesn’t seem to bear it out. When I wrote the original article, I was drinking one drink a day that contained aspartame and experiencing vertigo. Currently, I have three to four drinks a day with aspartame, with no vertigo effects. It’s possible that the single drink I eliminated was not what stopped the vertigo. The more likely explanation is that I made some other change that was the real solution – less sugar, less alcohol, etc.

I’m not saying that aspartame is innocent. It’s a man made substitute for a natural substance, so the body is going to process it differently. Does this mean it might cause health issues? I’m not going to say it won’t, but I can’t say that it will, either. I didn’t pay enough attention in organic chemistry…

I will go out on a limb and say that for the majority of the population aspartame has nothing to do with flicker vertigo. If you are already predisposed to flicker vertigo, maybe aspartame can aggravate it, but it certainly doesn’t cause it.

technorati tags:flicker, vertigo, flicker vertigo, aspartame, dizzy, health

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One of the key parts of the article was a chart detailing the 12 Steps of Burnout. It was disconcerting to see how many of the phases I fell into, but I scoffed at the 12th stage – the physical effects.

Fast forward to the wee hours of the morning on September 13. In a series of events that involved scaring the hell out of my family, an ambulance ride, and some time in the ER I experienced my physical effects stage.

Having never spent any time in a hospital as anything other than a visitor, this was a new experience for me. I’m still wearing a portable heart monitor, but it looks like everything cardiac-wise is perfectly normal. It just seems that I may be under a bit of stress. (heh)

technorati tags:health, balance, stress, anxiety, burnout

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