Calm down now, Don't get excited | Eastern North Carolina Now

   My son said that saying use to make him so mad he could scream.

    Whenever we were working on something in the shop or playing baseball in the yard and his youthful exuberance would overtake his common sense, I would always say. "Calm down now, don't get excited".

    I never knew how much it irritated him for me to say that. As a matter of fact, I was not even aware that I said it. It had become such a natural thing to me that it ranked right up there with "Good Morning" or "Have a good day". Recently we were talking and he told me how much that phrase pissed him off. He told me I would say it even when he was not overly excited or worked up. He is 34 years old now and it kind of shocked me to hear that.

    Well, it woke me up to some of the things that you begin to take for granted in life. Like the overused phrase, "How's it going"? Or "Take it easy". They become so second nature that you do not even realize you are saying them and you say them without meaning or really intending to get an answer.

    I made a mental note not to say "CDN>DGE" to my son again. Several days later, I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, with that saying rolling through my mind and it finally occurred to me why it rolled so easily off my tongue.

    During my infantry training in the Army, the phrase was drilled into us like the cadence of a march. It was the Army's version of Pavlov's dog training. When things got exciting or highly stressful the Drill Sargent would say" Calm down now, don't get excited". It was a verbal queue to relax and do your job. I never realized how deeply embedded that phrase was in my physic.

    A couple of others come to mind as I think about it. One was a technique learned after I returned from Vietnam and attended a Veterans seminar. They are forms of self-suggestions to bring about a calming response. I wear a rubber band around my wrist and whenever I feel an anxiety attack beginning, I will pull and snap the rubber band against my wrist and silently repeat the word "Cancel, Cancel". It will usually relax me

    One of the infantry grunt's often-repeated phrases in the field was used when things got so bad you did not think you could take another straw on your back. We would just say "It don't mean nothin". It allowed you to put almost anything out of your mind and move on with the job. Little did I know that all it did was postpone the time until it did mean something.

    I am sure there are other phrases or techniques that I am not aware of. When I explained to my son where the phrase "CDN>DGE" came from and that it was more a queue to myself instead of him, he just gave me a hug and said "Calm down now, Don't get excited"