The Importance Of Keeping Our Minds Calm Under Stress

We need to strategize clear paths of action, not muddied mixtures leading to even more uncertainty.

In fluid mechanics, the Reynolds number is commonly used to describe how a fluid is flowing in a conduit.

When the Reynolds number is below 2100, the fluid flow is considered laminar, and it flows in well-defined streamlines with a parabolic profile.

When the Reynolds number is more than 4000, the fluid flow is considered turbulent, and the parabola shape flattens out significantly.

The flow pattern is somewhat defined by its velocity. Look at how water flows out of a garden hose when you turn on the tap, for instance. The flow is leisurely and languid. However, when one wants to engage in a garden hose war with some friends, one of the most common techniques executed is to press their thumb down to cover part of the hose’s exit aperture, which then forces the water to exit the hose through a smaller cross-secional area at a higher velocity.

Anything in between 2100 and 4000 is considered as the “transition region”, where the flow can take on some charateristics of laminarity and some of turbulence. It’s not that well-defined in between.

In our lives and our minds, there are also laminar and turbulent analogues.

When our lives are operating in laminar mode, we are able to keep up with everything. Life is fine and sunshiney with a dash of unicorns.

However, when life gets turbulent (and we do sometimes even describe our own lives as turbulent) - everything seems to be in a mess, similar to a stormy coast where the waves are crashing about all around.

Which somehow brings us back to the Goldilocks principle:

Because we don’t want to live our lives on either of the extreme ends.

While we may look forward to rest days where we can be lazy and do nothing for the entire day, I’d wager that most of us would get bored living that lifestyle 7 days a week. We’d still feel the need to get up and do something.

Therefore, life cannot be too laminar for some of us.

On the flip side, we don’t want too much turbulence. When the pressures start to mount, such as when we’re busting a gut for a promotion, raising children, paying off the mortgage, experiencing frayed relationships, mourning the deaths of loved ones (and many more other factors indeed), we’d find our lives getting unnecessarily complicated by the turbulence involved.

And those are just “first world problems”. We who live in countries where we are sheltered from daily conflict are very protected, and I myself am thankful for it.

People living in war-torn and conflict-ridden areas have it worse. The daily stress to survive - in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for instance, with all the damage inflicted and weapons involved, innocent civilians are extremely fearful for their lives. It’s an uphill battle each day just to survive.

I don’t condone the violence that either side has implemented, because what we’re seeing is the death of many innocent civilians who may not even have wanted to be involved in the conflict.

These times are extremely turbulent for all of them and my prayers go out to them.

An overly turbulent mind is not what we want for ourselves either.

In turbulent flows, what we can see is the formation of eddy currents, which affect the flow pattern of the fluid.

In our minds, when things are turbulent, overthinking can worsen the situation by mixing up and conflating different situations. Arguments with significant others have always shown it to be true in my case.

What we do need is a clear mind, and that’s why we can also see successful professional sports coaches such as Phil Jackson being described as a “Zen master”.

Keeping the mind clear under turbulence is the only way to work out proper solutions to rectify multiple different problems bombarding our brains.

Otherwise, we can very easily fall victim to stress-related aging:

Which gets even more exacerbated if our sleep is affected:

But given the busyness of life, it’s not that easy to pause and clear our minds as and when we like, no? Yet we have to keep on trying!

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