A Glass of Water

Occasionally I may post tutorials. This is the first one, and it is more an observation than a tutorial. I find that when I want to read people for signs of stress the best way to do this is by placing a glass of water in front of them. Water is the best for this because everyone likes water, but not so much that they're just going to guzzle the whole thing down right away. Make sure you don't hand them the water, just place it in front of them.

Okay once you've got the water in place then start up your conversation or whatever it is your doing, like a poker game. What I notice is that when people start getting nervous or feeling a bit uncomfortable they will always go for the water. Of course they may just go for the water because they are thirsty and want a drink, but there always seems to be a difference in the way a person grabs the drink naturally and when they grab it as a perceived comfort or safety blanket. Always watch when they grab the drink. If they make a point to look at it, they are nervous or stressed. If they don't look at it they are fine and dandy. I don't know why this is, but that's the way these things work.

Sometimes the person may not go for the drink, but instead will start looking at it, or playing with it. A person who is happy and fine will do the same, but only incidentally. The nervous person will be looking at the glass as they play with it. A happy person just taps naturally without ever looking at the tapping. But a nervous person tends to focus their eyes on the tapping.

Here's some examples. I was at dinner with my family a few years back, and we were picking on each other as we do. But at one point Dad got a bit uncomfortable with our teasing of him, and I saw him look at his beverage and then saw his arm make a slight twitching movement towards it before he pulled it back. I screamed at him "We got you!!" And he just laughed knowing I saw that twitch and look. See he knew by grabbing that beverage he was going only be making a nervous action, and was trying to stop himself. But that's the beauty of this, wanting to grab that glass for whatever the reason is instinctual. You have to force to stop yourself, and unfortunately Dad was just a bit too slow and I caught him. But even if he hadn't made that twitch, the brief look he gave the glass was enough. The look was basically his way of trying to escape the scene. He couldn't walk away so instead he tried to focus on anything else rather than the people in front of him, and in this case it was his beverage. If he had focused on anything else, it might have been more difficult to tell but beverages and basically anything else that one can pick up and fiddle with, like a straw or napkin are clear signs.

The next example is my own to illustrate just how instinctual it is to go for the beverage. About a year ago I was at a restaurant with one of my dear friends who I hadn't seen in about a year. Typically the conversation in such situations would come easily because you can just catch up on the past year's activities. But we had done that the day before when we conincidentally ran into each other. So for me I had nothing much to talk about because we already were caught up and it wasn't like we had been all that involved recently which makes having actual discussions much more difficult. The problem with all of this was that there was a huge white elephant in the room which I didn't want to talk about. But because I'm an aspie (see Contacts and Crushes), not talking about something like a white elephant is about impossible for me. Seriously, it's like something I have to do, similar to how I have to breathe. All my efforts were being put to not talk about that one thing, but since I was so focused on not talking about it I couldn't focus on coming up with anyother topic to talk about. And at one point we had come to one of those natural sliences (which I'm not good with either) and I panicked because I knew I was completely out of ideas, and I went for the drink. I knew as soon as I picked it up what I had done, and I think my friend noticed too (as though I wasn't giving off enough vibes as it was), but fortunately my friend is the extremely social type and was able to come up with a new topic to talk about. I think we focused on how good the food was. But there you go. Even though I knew what picking up that drink meant I was telling about my emotions I couldn't stop myself from doing it. It's instinctual.

So there you have it. If you ever need a simple way to read a person just place a glass of water in front of them and watch.