He was a small but very intelligent and articulate young man. I had seen him before, but it had been quite a while. He came to me complaining (as did his family) that he was having some trouble controlling his anger, dealing with quarrelsome students at school, and not always getting his assignments inside or outside of school completed in a timely manner.

We discussed the usual ways to approach this, I asked him about his goals that he wanted to work on with his counselor, and we established that he was not in need of any medication from me.

When I asked for triggers for his troublesome times, like the times that his assignments went missing in action, he told me that he had the most trouble right after someone made him angry or slighted him in some way.

“I call those times my glitches,” he stated matter-of-factly.

Glitches.

We all have them, don’t we? I know I do.

When I have been up for too many nights until too late, have been working too hard, or have neglected to exercise or eat right, I am prone to be glitchy.

How do my glitches show up?

I am (more) forgetful. I might forget a name, which doesn’t mean much for me since I did not inherit the gene that allowed my father to remember someone’s name, the number of children they had and what all their shoe sizes were, twenty years after he first met them. I might let an important piece of an assignment slide, then remember it the next day. I might think about something I need to do, but then forget to put it on mu master to do list.

I get fearful. I worry about things that I have no control over, that might not even concern me, or that I have no business fretting over in the first place. If my guard is down, and my worrying is up, look out glitches!

When I am overwhelmed emotionally, look for a glitch or two to be in the mix. I wrote previously about a week when “I had all the feels.” That kind of week, with its stresses good and bad, its changes big and small, and its uncertainly about the future, is a glitch magnet.

If I have too many tasks on my plate, too many projects to finish easily, or too many interactions that will be stressful for me, I tend to not pay close enough attention to the things that are important.

If I say yes too often, even knowing that I have no more time or energy to possibly do what I just told Mr. Jones I would be happy to do, glitches are coming.

Yes, my friends, sometimes I am just too big for my glitches.

How about you? Are there times that you forget, don’t complete something or that you are not thorough enough?

Greg Smith is a psychiatrist who blogs at gregsmithmd.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com