Photo by Dingzeyu Li on Unsplash
What Do Reactions Look Like?
- You’re in a fight with someone you care about. You’re angry. You feel justified in your anger because he/she is not listening to you. You feel unheard and invalidated. Before you know it, insults and other hurtful things gush out of your mouth, and you instantly regret saying anything at all. The other person leaves, and you’re stuck in shame with thoughts like, “I’m such a loser. I’ll never get it right. I’m always doing this. Why would anyone ever love me?”
- You’ve told your kid to pick up her toys more than once, and she still hasn’t done it. It’s past her bedtime which means you’re going to bed later than planned, and you have to get up early in the morning. You’re tired and out of patience. Frustrated and at the end of your rope, you yell and criticize her, and yank the toys out of her room. She goes to bed with tears rolling down her cheeks. You say you don’t care, but you end up feeling terrible when your head hits the pillow.
- Your best friend met someone special 2 months ago, and she’s already talking about moving in with this person and maybe even getting married. Your heart sinks because she stopped hanging out with you as much, and you’re not in a romantic relationship and haven’t been for some time. You start ignoring her phone calls and texts. When you do finally talk to her, you tell her she’s crazy to rush things and she’s making a huge mistake. Your friend is hurt, and now you two aren’t talking at all.
Reactions are anything you do or say before you press the pause button. Overreacting happens when your thoughts and emotions spiral out of control and make things worse than they really are. Pausing to reflect on things more deeply is the key to stop (over)reacting and start responding.
5 Steps to Stop Overreacting
- Stop saying “I’m right” and start asking “What’s my goal?” When you’re upset, your goal is to feel better. Does being right ever produce more peace and less negativity? Do you feel better when you’re right? No client I have worked with has ever said “I feel so much better when I know I’m right.” The opposite is true because the more you hold onto being right, the less open you are to anything else. Saying “But I’m right!” all the time reveals a very rigid way of thinking. Whenever you hold onto rigid thoughts and beliefs, you don’t realize there are other possibilities, different ways of doing things. If your goal is to increase your ability to do something other than what you normally do, to stop reacting and start responding, then let go of “but I’m right!”
- Talk about yourself, not the other person. When you criticize someone else, you’re being defensive and taking the focus off yourself. Unless it’s positive and encouraging, talking about the other person when your emotions are flaring up is not a good idea. Defensiveness via criticism, getting loud, or giving the cold shoulder to someone is all about trying to control your own fear and anxiety. When you take a more open stance and tell the other person more about how you’re feeling, it creates a safer space. Defenses get lowered as control gives way to connection.
- Pay attention to your emotions. This is what we talked about in the last blog Identifying Emotions 101. When you can identify what you’re feeling and say it out loud “I feel angry…I feel frustrated…” you’re automatically slowing everything down instead of stepping on the gas. And you’re letting air out of the pressurized, ballooning emotion inside you. Paying attention means noticing everything you can about that feeling without judging it – you’re just stating facts about the feeling. For example: “I feel angry. I feel hot in my neck and face. I feel tension in my muscles. I feel my heart beating fast and hard. I am thinking that I want to yell and scream but I really want to just talk” etc. The more time you spend paying attention to where and how your feelings show up in your body and your mind (thoughts), the quicker those waves of emotion will dissipate into calmer waters.
- Practice deep breaths. It’s a cliché, right? You read blogs, you’ve gone to therapy, or you went to yoga once or twice, and everywhere you look someone is telling you to take a deep breath. Why does everyone seem to be worried about the way you breathe? Well, because deep breathing calms you down. You are equipped with your own alarm system that gets triggered whenever you sense danger of any kind – physical, emotional, or social. We call this alarm system the sympathetic nervous system. You’re also equipped with your own relaxation system that gets triggered when the danger passes or different parts of your body sense that you’re okay and there is no danger. We call this relaxation system the parasympathetic nervous system. In short, the two are equally important but opposed to each other. The Autonomic Nervous System is the scientific name for both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and autonomic simply means involuntary or unconscious. This means you’re often triggered into reactions you can’t control. Deep breathing is one of the easiest ways to manage your involuntary stress reactions (Fight-Flight-Freeze) because it puts the parasympathetic side back in the driver’s seat using the vagus nerve as a key to start the engine on your relaxation system. (I will explain more about this in the next blog posts in this series Can I Control My Anxiety and Why Anger Matters.) The more deep breathing you practice when you’re not triggered, the more likely you are to do it when you are triggered.
- Develop your empathy muscles. Empathy is about putting yourself in another’s shoes and understanding why they might do the things they do. When you’re feeling misunderstood, invalidated, like you can’t catch a break, you tend to overreact and do things you wish you hadn’t. Could that be true of other people, too? Of course! Understanding that other people feel exactly like you feel can help you stop overreacting and start responding with more kindness. A good way to develop empathy is through people-watching. Go to a bookstore café, or a coffee shop, or a park. Notice the people around you, and then notice your first thoughts about them. Did you smile at someone and they didn’t smile back, maybe they just looked away and ignored you? What’s your first thought? Is it negative about that person? Okay, so notice that, and then be curious and wonder about more. Maybe that person isn’t rude and instead they’re just insecure. Maybe that person just lost their job. Maybe that person had a fight with their significant other, and you happen to look like him/her, so it’s painful to see your smile. You develop more empathy when your thoughts turn from judgment to understanding.
In the next blog posts coming up in this series, we’ll talk more about managing anxiety and anger – 2 of the biggest contributors to unhappiness in relationships.
Recent Comments