{"id":773,"date":"2017-09-26T19:20:23","date_gmt":"2017-09-26T19:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/?p=773"},"modified":"2017-09-26T21:21:06","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T21:21:06","slug":"equifax-brain-freeze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/2017\/09\/26\/equifax-brain-freeze\/","title":{"rendered":"How Equifax froze my brain – and what I did about it"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Image<\/a>\u00a0\u00a9 2012 Shelly \u0295\u2022\u1d25\u2022\u0294 . Licensed under\u00a0CC-BY<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Here’s a story about how my brain got stuck, and how I eventually managed to unstick it.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I belatedly got around to putting a credit freeze<\/a> on my credit reports in response to the Equifax data breach (you should too if you haven’t already). It was certainly a pain, made the more so by the knowledge that I was doing this work, and paying fees, because of a broader system dysfunction that I’m not responsible for. So I was in a bad mood to begin with (grr).<\/p>\n

I ran into my brain freeze moment when trying to address my TransUnion report:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. For whatever reason, the online verification process wasn’t good enough.\u00a0They needed me to scan and upload my picture ID and a utility bill (grrr).<\/li>\n
  2. OK, I can handle this, I thought. I did the scans and tried to upload the files. Nope – I got an error message saying the files needed to be in TIFF format (TIFF format?)\u00a0(grrrrr).<\/li>\n
  3. Mastering my frustration (or so I thought), I opened Photoshop to do the TIFF conversion, actually kind of proud of myself for staying relatively calm. Nope – another error message saying the TIFF had to be black-and-white (grrrrrr).<\/li>\n
  4. At this point my brain felt something like the picture above. I was stuck in problem-solving mode, consumed by the quest to break through the logjam of obstacles and stupidity and of course my own frustration. My brain was working, but I was rapidly losing my ability to do anything but press forward on the path I’d started. It didn’t occur to me, “hmm, I wonder if there’s another approach I could take?'” I was lost in thought–and so I lost my awareness.<\/li>\n
  5. So here’s what the problem-solving part of myself did: I found a way to convert a TIFF to grayscale, wondering if that would meet the black-and-white requirement. Nope – this time the error message said, “you have exceeded the number of attempts. Please start again.”<\/li>\n
  6. I was numb. I logged in again, looked around for a method to create true B&W (note the illogic of my fevered brain: I hadn’t tested the grayscale yet)…and found myself going down a Photoshop rathole. At least for me, that is not a nice place to be.<\/li>\n
  7. And at this point I woke up. It probably helped that I would be teaching a mindfulness class in a couple of days. (Fear of hypocrisy is a powerful motivator!) Maybe I saw one of the many mindfulness books scattered around my office. Anyway, I finally…just…stopped. I let go of the problem-solving mindstream. I looked at the messed-up, pixilated image of the Seattle City Light bill I had been working on in Photoshop.in Photoshop. And suddenly realized: I can mail in copies of the documents.<\/li>\n
  8. In 5 minutes I was done. For the price of a postage stamp my problem was solved.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Of course there are plenty of situations where the only recourse is to press ahead with mental effort. But what was instructive to me about this situation was that my problem-solving mind prevented me from seeing alternatives. The useful thing about mindful awareness is that it, almost by definition, sees everything. In a mindful state you can observe your mind; you can observe how your emotions (grrr) are coming into play; you can remember *why* you’re trying to solve the problem in the first place. And all those things give you many more tools for figuring out the best way to proceed.<\/p>\n

    You aren’t stuck with just your frozen brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Image\u00a0\u00a9 2012 Shelly \u0295\u2022\u1d25\u2022\u0294 . Licensed under\u00a0CC-BY Here’s a story about how my brain got stuck, and how I eventually managed to unstick it. Yesterday I belatedly got around to putting a credit freeze on my credit reports in response to the Equifax data breach (you should too if you haven’t already). It was certainly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stable-attention"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":785,"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773\/revisions\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jhanderson.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}