How do you react when your flight gets canceled, a friend doesn’t show up, or your dinner burns to a crisp? What if you spill coffee on your white shirt before a business meeting? Or you are robbed of your passport, money, and cell phone in a foreign country?
Many of us would become anxious or angry, which certainly does not improve the situation.
We need to be flexible. Being flexible means remaining cool headed, which allows us to problem-solve and to think of alternative actions when facing an unforeseen event. Being ready to adapt to changed circumstances invites creativity and resourcefulness.
Flexibility of attitude and action will give you the confidence to confront any situation. The simple act of remaining calm opens the possibility of maintaining a sense of humor and adventure, which increase your chances of having a positive outcome or at least an interesting experience.
For example, imagine the advantage of going to your business meeting with comfortable ease and a witty remark despite the stained shirt vs. being uncomfortably embarrassed. Or imagine the story you could tell when you are one of the few tourists who gets to experience a police station in Morocco vs. feeling panicked and overwhelmed.
Our memories of difficult situations and experiences make the best stories. If you keep calm and aware enough to observe the details and emotions while engaging the characters involved in the mishap it will make your experience that much more rewarding.
Bad situations may require that you modify your expectations. In a worst-case scenario that lacks any humor or an otherwise silver lining, being flexible means letting go and trying to gain patience, wisdom and humility, and to face the misfortune with a sense of grace.
Staying calm is key to making wise decisions and essential to maintaining healthy relationships. Yet there are times when it’s impossible to stay calm. A teenager has lied to you, your spouse insults you, a co-worker yells at you. Anger or shock can trigger your fight or flight response, which activates powerful stress hormones.
Those hormones trigger many physiological, biochemical, and psychological changes. They increase alertness, and generate fear, aggressiveness, and anger. Such biologically-driven changes may be helpful when you are physically threatened. Yet they can be harmful to your relationships and social and work-related interactions. When too much of the primary stress hormone cortisol is rushing through your body, you are much more likely to say or do something that you will later regret. Delay your response – time for a pause
You need to find a way to delay responding until your stress level has subsided to normal levels.
Exercise: The quickest way to decrease the levels of cortisol and related stress chemicals in your body is to do five minutes of strenuous exercise allowing you to sweat lightly. For instance, you can go for a run or do push-ups, sit-ups or jumping jacks.
Meditation: Another way to forestall harmful reactivity in emotionally-heated situations is to meditate for at least fifteen to twenty minutes. Focus on breathing deeply while relaxing and letting go of any thoughts or emotions that pass through your mind.
Distraction: At a minimum, pursue other activities and wait until you feel calm before dealing with a particularly heated emotional situation.
Once calm, you will be able to ask questions and find out the how and why of the situation. You want to avoid simply jumping to conclusions and striking out against the people involved. Impulsiveness
A pause is also a powerful defense against making impulsive decisions. The desires for pleasure, food, sex, and approval from others have their bases in biology and can thus easily become excessive. Uncontrolled pleasure-seeking and impulsive decision-making can end up being more harmful than beneficial.
Thus, pausing before taking action is a key in preventing bad impulsive decision-making. Here are some examples of impulses that may be wise to forestall:
• Eating too much: You’ve just eaten a big plate of delicious pasta and you want to have seconds although you know you shouldn’t.
• Drinking too much: You crave that third or forth glass of wine regardless of the consequences.
• Buying too much: You want to buy an expensive jacket although you can’t afford it and you don’t need it.
• Pleasing others too much: You feel pressured into saying “yes” to a request to volunteer, although you are already over-burdened with other obligations.
• Wasting too much time: You feel like going on social media rather than doing something productive or spending time with family or friends.
• Slipping into inappropriate relationships: You can’t resist responding to a married person’s inappropriately-flirtatious text with a suggestive text of your own.
By simply delaying taking action or making a decision, the impulse to act immediately tends to diminish. Forestalling taking action is easier than resisting an impulse, because you’re not saying “no” to yourself or to others. You are simply saying, “I’m going to wait for five minutes/15 minutes/a day before making the decision.” With a little time and distance, other priorities and desires will tend to decrease your overwhelming urge to act impulsively.
Impulsive behavior becomes stronger when a person is bored. So taking the time to engage in another activity and gain distance from the temptation will also help the impulse fade away.
Prepare yourself
If you know what kind of situations present temptation or tend to make you angry, try to imagine the situation likely to occur and imagine how you are going to respond.
Example: If my teenager does something terrible, I will say, “Let’s talk tonight/tomorrow.” Then I will go for a run. I may try to get the situation in perspective by talking to a friend. I will put myself in his/her shoes and imagine how I can be most effective in a conversation. I will have a calm tone of voice and allow him or her to explain before interrupting or making any assumptions.
Example: If there is a buffet tonight, I will pace myself during the meal, and take a fifteen-minute break before deciding if and how much seconds I’ll have.
Feeling anger and acting out anger are two very different things. When you feel anger it is usually a signal that some harm is being perpetrated against you or others. However, when you let anger take over, it is no longer an effective way to deal with the harm being done. In rare highly-dangerous situations, expressing rage can be an effective means of scaring a person or an animal away. Yet even when it is effective, you want to be able to consciously choose when and how to express anger.
When anger takes control
The problem with letting your anger take control, rather than viewing it as a signal, is that anger destroys the ability to think rationally, to get along with others, and to find solutions. A single moment of inappropriately expressed anger can destroy an evening, a relationship, or your job. You can undermine a lot of effort and history when you let it drive your actions.
If you’re bound up with dissatisfaction, frustration, or desire for revenge, acting out your anger will not help. It can lead to distraction, accidents, and destruction. It can lead to outbursts, hostility and regret. It can also lead to the loss of reputation, the ability to have positive relationships, and the ability to help others and to participate in the community. Alternatively, anger turned inward can lead to depression.
Cultivate patience
The best way to learn to deal with angry people and your own anger is to cultivate patience. To communicate effectively with another person, you need to wait until neither of you is consumed by anger. Take time to find out why someone else is behaving poorly or treating you unfairly. Take time to understand what underlying values you seek to re-establish in your life and your relationship. Only then can you figure out the most effective way of dealing with a bad situation.
Anger can be overwhelming. So it requires a lot of effort to develop self-restraint and composure. When someone is angry with you, it is important to respond with compassion or at least neutrality, rather than piling your own irrational behavior onto theirs. Patience does not mean accommodation. It means taking the time to understand the situation and the people involved before taking appropriate action from a place of inner strength and calm.
Ask questions and listen until the angry person calms down. If you can’t take being around someone who’s angry, tell the other person you need some time to calm down and think about the situation. Then go for a walk, breathe deeply, and take the time you need until you can gain a wider perspective about the situation.
Cultivate patience with yourself as well as others. The result will be a feeling of equanimity and core strength, which allow for the most effective problem solving and the least pain in your life and in your relationships.
Talking about your ex in a disparaging way is tedious and draining to others and reflects poorly on you as a person. Nobody will be impressed that your last boyfriend or ex-wife sent abusive emails or stalked you. They will merely wonder whether you are a victim or a bad judge of character.
If asked about your past relationships, rather than starting on a diatribe of complaints, you could simply say, “We went our separate ways,” or “We grew apart.”
Grow up, don’t put down
Better yet, find a way to view your difficult relationships of the past with perspective and find a silver lining. After all, you were together for a reason and probably got something out of the relationship.
It is often through the very gridlock and troubles in a relationship that we learn who we are and what our boundaries are.
We all live and learn from experience, especially from painful episodes that cause us to grow.
There may be times when you do want to talk about a painful relationship with a close friend in order to gain insight about yourself or the relationship or to share what you have learned. Yet self-reflective conversations are very different from complaining about and belittling others. Remember to stick to the former, where your intent is to understand, grow, gain peace, and become more whole.
by Dr. Alison Poulsen Twitter: @alisonpoulsen https://www.facebook.com/dralisonpoulsen
Rudeness tends to gradually get worse if you simply let it slide, causing relationships to deteriorate. But resentment and over-reaction make things worse as well. So how should you respond to rudeness?
When someone is rude to you, whether it is your partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, child, or acquaintance, it’s best not to do respond to the person’s demand. First, let them know that you don’t appreciate his or her rude attitude. The trick is not becoming hostile yourself.
A simple “excuse me?” with a questioning tone of voice often will be enough for them to apologize or rephrase with a more neutral tone of voice.
Sometimes you may have to actually say, “That tone of voice really doesn’t work for me,” or “please don’t yell at me,” or “I don’t appreciate being yelled at,” or “it’s not helpful to sound angry.” Again, the key is to remain calm, and in some circumstances, you may even be able to retain a sense of humor, which is often the most effective way to get things on the right track.
If we let rudeness slide, our relationships will deteriorate over time, allowing disrespect and contempt to take over. It’s very important, however, not to put the other person on the defensive. Thus, stay calm, maintain your dignity, and retain a sense of humor if appropriate.
