Waiting room. (Photo credit: stevelyon)
I was sitting in a waiting room earlier, waiting to talk to one of the receptionists and drop off a form. There weren’t many people there, there was nice lighting and a kind of relaxed, progressive vibe – basically no reason at all that I should have been uncomfortable. Yet I found myself more stressed out than usual, as I almost always do when I’m sitting in a waiting room.
Something occurred to me which I thought people may be interested in. Noticing that as soon as I had walked in and identified it as a ‘waiting room’, I became immediately more stressed out than I was before. Almost as though I had switched into ‘waiting room mode’. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ll bet a lot of people experience a similar sort of thing.
When are you usually in waiting rooms? Job interviews, government departments, dentist/doctors appointments, hospitals, airports, court summonses, situations where you don’t actually work at a place but are waiting to enter it etc. There isn’t anything inherently stressful about waiting in a room for something to happen. However for myself at least, I seem to associate waiting rooms with a stressed out, nervous state. Another possible hypothesis: a person comes to identify themselves as someone who gets stressed out in waiting rooms through observation, then continues to act in accordance with this belief about themselves in similar situations.
If this is the case, I wonder if it is possible for one to disassociate waiting rooms with stress. Of course this in itself probably isn’t something worth spending a lot of time on, but perhaps if there are any psychologists reading this they can run with the idea. I’ll bet the same principles can be applied to public speaking, sales situations, dates etc.
