In 1944, the commander-in-chief of the British 3rd Air Force Battalion, Baldwin, issued an order requesting detailed investigation and statistics of all fighters participating in air operations, especially some of the crashed fighters. A week later, Baldwin received the report and found a shocking result: the main cause of the crash was neither the enemy’s violent artillery fire nor the severe weather in nature, but the pilot’s misoperation; the accident occurred. The most frequent period is neither in the fierce firefight nor in the emergency retreat, but in the few minutes after completing the mission and returning to land.
After analysis, Baldwin found that the original pilot was highly concentrated on the battlefield, but it was not easy to make mistakes. But on the triumphant return journey, their spirits became more and more relaxed, and their emotions became more and more slack. When they finally saw the familiar base and the runway that were getting closer, they suddenly felt a sense of security without any guard. However, it was precisely this moment of relaxation and slack that caused catastrophe. Baldwin concluded by saying: “Our failures are often not at the most difficult times, but at the most relaxed times. The closer we are to success, the more we must be vigilant.”
Baldwin is right. The final slack is often fatal slack, and this slack is often produced naturally and unknowingly. When a person or a group is engaged in stressful and dangerous work and performing urgent, difficult, dangerous and heavy tasks, they will generally mobilize the strength of the whole body to the greatest extent, concentrate on doing things well or even to the extreme. This is due to the subjective will to avoid various risks. It is also due to the objective environment of high mental tension and no opportunity to slack off. However, after overcoming dangers and completing tasks to relax the mind, slack often follows, and the dangers caused by slack will come quietly. Therefore, disasters often stem from the “last slack.”
From the perspective of a person’s physical state, mental stress is not all bad. Medical psychology believes that people’s mental stress can generally be divided into three states: weak, moderate and strong. When a person maintains a tense rhythm of work and life, the heart will expel more blood through strengthened contraction, so that the vasomotor function of blood vessels will be improved, thereby reducing the probability of cardiovascular disease. An expert has done a special study and found that people who are moderately nervous and busy usually live about 29% longer than people who are often in a state of mental relaxation. This leads to a conclusion: if people can properly handle the stress in work and life, not only will not harm their health, but can promote health.
? From people’s life experience, moderate mental stress is conducive to cultivating brain excitatory factors and improving the brain’s activity in dealing with the objective environment, so that people’s thinking is quick, responsive, energetic and even stronger. Facing the vicious and vicious tiger on Jingyanggang, Wu Song tried his best to avoid the tiger’s pounce, leap, and tail, then use his best to interrupt the whistle in his hand, and then take advantage of the momentum. Riding on the tiger and slamming with a fist, the tiger was finally beaten to death. But after he killed the tiger, he didn’t even have the strength to move the tiger. This also justifies a saying: drizzle and wet clothes. Why does the drizzle wet clothes? It was because of contempt and slackness, always thinking that the drizzle was irrelevant, and letting it go, the result was that the clothes were wetted unknowingly. When the pouring rain comes, people will take all kinds of evasion and cover measures to keep themselves safe.
In modern society, people’s life is getting faster and faster, and “mental stress” seems to be the personal feeling of most people. In order to realize the yearning for a better life, we do not have to aim at too high career goals and living standards, and put ourselves in a state of tension all day in pursuing a high-achieving career and a high-quality life; but we must also not be joking and doing nothing all day. Let relaxation and slack destroy the glorious achievements and good life that should have been possessed; not to mention the momentary success and satisfaction and let the “last slack” ruin the glory and beauty that have been achieved. .
