From the author: Involuntary, i.e. actions uncontrolled by consciousness cease to be performed freely and naturally when, in a situation of stress, a person tries to take them under conscious control with a strong-willed effort. There is a well-known metaphor about a centipede, which once wondered in what order it needed to move its legs, and immediately became confused, losing the ability to move. Igor Yurov, psychotherapist HOW TO RECOGNIZE A SIGNAL OF STRESS? or WHAT IS AN EMERGENCY RESPONSE / “ALARM-REACTION” / “CONFUSION IN THE HEAD or WHY STRESS LEADS TO ERRORS IN WORK” Question: “I work as a manager in a campaign where I have to do a lot of work related to preparing documents in a short time, communication with clients. The load is significant, but I can handle it. What’s worse is that sometimes our boss is “raging”, and whoever fell under the hot hand is to blame. In such an environment, fatigue and apathy set in at the end of the day. Recently I began to notice that during these periods I confuse the letters in words. You have to “turn on” special controls so that an error does not slip through in a letter to an important client. Tell me, what can such a castling of letters in words mean?” I.Yu.’s answer: “A raging boss” and “the inclusion of special control” explain everything very well. Imagine a child in front of a formidable teacher looming over him or in front of a parent throwing thunder and lightning. He begins to get lost, stumble, make ridiculous mistakes, slips, blots, corrections that he would never have made in a calm situation. If the tension of the situation continues to grow, then completing the task will become impossible at all - the hand will tremble, the pencil will break, the pen will stop writing, and the head will stop thinking. Everyone knows that the student will not complete the task, at least not do it efficiently and creatively, until the teacher or parent calms down, says an approving word, and the whole situation is defused. The athlete will not perform the exercises beautifully until the coach stops yelling, the nurse will begin to confuse the instruments if the surgeon gets nervous. No matter how grown-up and mature we are, according to the rules of subordination, our immediate superiors are our educators, teachers, parents (and even higher-ranking managers are generally “gods”). This is how their psyche more or less consciously perceives them, because we all come from childhood. Your “castling” of letters is a minimal failure in the regulation of behavior in a situation of stress. Stress (or rather distress) is remarkable because the psyche, and the entire body, cannot function without failures. Overload will definitely make itself felt, for some with a headache, for others with a panic attack, for others with insomnia at the end of the working day, for others, like you, “just” rearranging the letters in words. In an alarming situation, something necessarily gets out of control, thereby, in fact, signaling stress. The founder of the doctrine of stress, Hans Selye, called this phenomenon an “alarm reaction,” i.e. "alarm response" or "alarm alarm". Pain during physical trauma is an expedient acquired signal about damage, about the need to resist or dodge the traumatic agent. The Alarm reaction is the same useful adaptive signal, but with the threat of psycho-emotional trauma, warning that the level of anxiety is growing, and if the situation or attitude towards it does not change, then symptoms of neurosis or autonomic dysfunction may further manifest themselves. Involuntary, those. actions uncontrolled by consciousness cease to be performed freely and naturally when, in a situation of stress, a person tries to take them under conscious control with a strong-willed effort. So, for example, the completely natural process of falling asleep becomes impossible precisely when a person “forces himself” to fall asleep in fear of another insomnia. Well, you “turn on special control”, fearing to make a mistake, and, of course, the letters immediately begin to “castle”