I

am a careful, careful eater: I have never forgotten the “golden rule” I learned in childhood — never talk while you eat.

My 11th grade biology teacher explained what would happen if you did: It would cause the sphincter separating your respiratory and digestive tracts somewhere down your throat to open up, causing your food to obstruct your breathing tract. Translation: Eating while talking will cause you to choke on your food.

Just recently, I forgot the golden rule. I was too excited about a particular subject and, competing for my co-worker’s divided attention, I hastily told her something while chewing on my food. Cough, cough. Probably a tiny piece of rice got caught in the intersection between my respiratory and digestive tracts, causing me to cough loudly; my eyes started to water. I drank a glass of water, getting rid of the rice that had temporarily choked me.

A tiny incident it was. Being the paranoid person that I am, however, I began to recount stories of how people choked on much larger pieces of food and somehow had to be treated in an emergency room. Then I said to myself, privately: “Thank God, I am no longer a jerk.” If I was a jerk who people hated, who would help me if I were to choke on a large piece of food (which God forbid would ever happen to any of us)?

I was once a jerk. I worked as a teaching assistant during my college years. Insecurity and inflated pride, apparently, made a toxic mix. I was highly impatient and harshly critical of students I supervised.

Until I got my fair share of being treated harshly upon entering the workforce for the first time, I had not known just how badly it could make you feel. I have no idea whether the students I helped supervise took my harsh behavior personally during my college years but in retrospect, having been treated harshly myself, if I could turn back time (which none of us can do), I would not have been so harsh toward people.

Acting like a jerk does more than hurt other people, it hurts yourself as well. Indulging in bad temper while venting negative emotions on other people is like smoking a cigarette and as comedian-cum-neuroscience writer Ruby Wax once said: “Pleasurable for a moment but causing irreversible damage to your health.”

Probably, the Health Ministry should put up posters in public spaces stating, “Having short tempers could cause cancer, heart attacks, impotency as well as pregnancy and embryonic problems [not to mention stroke, probably],” the way it slaps warning labels on cigarette packs.

Why so? Although a predisposition to bad moods and short tempers also has to do with one’s biological and psychological circumstances, like in my case, living in big cities like Jakarta test one’s patience on a daily basis.

Imagine yourself in the Jakarta traffic for a minute, where around 17.4 million motorists are on the roads every day causing air, visual and noise pollution, or being cramped shoulder-to-shoulder with a swarm of strangers while commuting by train or bus: enough to drive you nuts already.

Sociologists coined it the urban overload theory, describing how a barrage of stimuli drives our brain nuts. Neurologists have shown that our brain has limited capacity to take in information; it lacks the bandwidth to cope with the flood of information caused by the industrial revolutions of the 21st century, as Wax said.

Perhaps our toxic urban environment can help explain a phenomenon described by American management scientist Christine Porath as a “rise of incivility in the workplace”. When the overload of information brought by the metropolitan cities is coupled with business competition, our chances of acting like a jerk increase innumerably.

How to cool our brains down amid such a cacophonous setting? Wax’s 2016 book A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled and Porath’s 2016 book Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace give you simple, easy-to-follow steps on how to treat yourself and others kindly while coping with your day-to-day situations.

Be kind to yourself and your fellow urbanites because Jakarta sometimes leaves us all in crappy situations, although the city can also be mysteriously delightful in its own ways. The bonus would be if you choke or faint one day, or get into any sorts of trouble in public (God forbid), you will have people who will help you, because you have been kind to them.