Category Archives: Dealing with annoyances

Only have positive self-talk

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The quality of your self-talk has a strong impact on your state of mind. Quite simply, when you have positive self-talk it improves your state of mind, when you have negative self-talk it worsens your state of mind.

Purify your mind so that all your self-talk is positive.

Negative self-talk does not benefit you in any way and do not bring you any closer to achieving your long term goals. It should be eliminated and replaced with positive self-talk which empowers you.

Negative self-talk can be defined as chatter that makes you feel bad rather than feel good. This can take a variety of forms directed at yourself or at external things and other people. This includes putting yourself down, worrying about the future, being generally negative towards everything. Includes being negative towards other people, even thinking you’re superior to them which feels good short-term, but ultimately poisons you.

Have you ever been trapped in a conversation with someone who’s compulsively negative about everything? It feels horrible and you typically want to tape their mouth shut or just escape. Yet when our own self-talk is negative we do the exact same thing inside our heads despite it making us feel just as bad. Why do we do this to ourselves when it’s within our power to transform it to something better?

Now think being in conversation with someone your genuinely like and how much good that feels. It’s fun and positive and you want it to go on for hours more. This is the quality of self-talk we want going on inside our heads all the time.

Become more consciously aware of the quality of self-talk you’re having. Monitor the quality of your self-talk at different times and in reaction to different events, labelling it as either positive or negative.

When you notice yourself having positive self-talk, think to yourself “This is good I want to have more of this”. When you catch yourself having negative self-talk, you want to eliminate it and replace it with something more positive.

A good way to break negative self-talk patterns is to do something physically different. If you are sitting down at the time, then simply standing up and walking around will usually break you out of the negative self-talk pattern and then it’s easy to focus your mind on something positive.

Choosing how to react

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When something bad happens, you don’t actually have to get upset.

You have the power to choose how you react.

We respond to most things in predictable ways. Ice-cream makes us happy, being stuck in traffic makes us frustrated.

Take the scenario where you’re waiting to meet a friend but they’re 20 minutes late. You’ll probably to get angry and start thinking of subtle ways to communicate your frustration to them so they feel guilty, all the while giving the outward appearance of being cool with them being late.

By thinking like this won’t make you happy. Why should you take actions which don’t make you happy? No one’s forcing you to. There’s no need to get upset over something so trivial. Them being 20 minutes late will not affect your ability to hunt and gather food. (From a supermarket, LOL).

Instead, choose to enjoy the situation. Look on the bright side man. Have fun people watching, stretch out your hamstrings, plot how you’re going to take over the world, have a power nap, think of the weird expression you’ll get from your friend after you give them a massive hug.

Most of your reactions aren’t ones you consciously choose to have. Most of the time you have the “default” reaction and don’t realise that you’re free to react however you choose. Your default reaction is only one of many different options available to you.

The next time something happens which you don’t like, ask yourself “How do I want to react to this?”. A few possible answers: “I want to enjoy this situation”, “I wanna be cool like the Fonz” or “What would a circus clown do?”.

Controlling primal reactions to negative stimuli

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I was on a bus yesterday and there was this guy at the back who had a really nasty cough that wouldn’t go away. He was coughing the entire journey, fun times. In a previous article I shared a way that you can deal annoying people by using a change in perspective, here I’ll show a different method which operates at a more primal level.

I tend to nap while I’m on the bus, and since I already had my eyes shut I decided that I’d deal with the coughing guy with a sort of meditation. When you’re sitting by yourself on a bus for 30 minutes it gives you a lot of freedom to be introspective.

Whenever this guy coughed, my natural, automatic reaction was one of annoyance and anger. It just bubbled up from a place within me that I have no conscious control over. Because my eyes were shut, I had far greater sensory awareness of how this was effecting me physically. I could feel my chest and shoulders tightening ever so slightly, I could feel my blood pressure rise. Mentally I had a bunch of negative thoughts which tied in with the physical reaction such as “why did he have to get on my bus”, “does he have no respect for other people”, etc. These thoughts tended to hang around for a while and repeat themselves.

This introspective awareness had mentally shifted me to become a third party observer. I could clearly see that whenever this guy coughed, my body and my mind had the exact same negative reaction to it. It was as if we were both in a lab taking part in an an experiment which kept getting repeated.

Due to my inability to stop the stimulus e.g. tape this guys mouth shut, my only choice was to control my primal reaction to it. I used a similar technique to what I use when I meditate. That technique involves me observing my automatic thoughts, but not following them. I let them drift right past me as if there were in a parade that I was watching from the sideline.

I would see myself my negative reaction bubble up, but I would not follow it any further. It would flash before me but then it would go as fast as it came. I could feel myself relaxing almost instantly after each time the guy coughed. It was still slightly annoying, but the level of annoyance was greatly reduced. My initial reaction was a lot lower and the negative thoughts which hung around afterwards were significantly less, to the point of not really being there. Here’s a really basic diagram showing my reactions before and after applying the technique.

Before:
AAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…………..

After:
AAaa……………………………………

A = Initial reaction
a = Negative thoughts
. = Relaxed

Detaching yourself from your primal reactions and observing means you’re not identifying with them. Instead of feeling like you’re angry, you see yourself having an angry reaction. The reaction is something that is seperate from you, like a box you can pick up and touch.

If you open the box you’ll find a monkey :-)

Re-framing negative reactions

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Part of becoming more conscious is being more aware of things around you and what goes on inside your mind. You become aware of the reactive thought patterns you have and the effect they have on your mental state.

When you see something you don’t like it’s normal to react negatively to it. While this is normal, it’s also problematic. The problem is that most of your negative reactions serve no real purpose, they change nothing in the physical world. The only effect they have is to sink your mood to a lower place, often dragging down the moods of those around you.

Let’s say you’re sitting on a bus and there’s some teenagers being loud and annoying. You get angry and start fantasing about about all the bad and nasty thing you could do to them and how justified you would be in doing so. So you sit there and stew in your anger until you get off the bus.

What has your anger achieved in this example? Has anything productive come from it? You have achieved nothing. All that’s happened is you gave your power away to some teenagers, essentially becoming a mental slave to the way they behaved. The teenagers owned you!

At first glance it may seem as if the teenagers are the problem, but that not the full picture. They are the stimulus, but you’re the one having the reaction. Your mind is half the equation.

Your mind is half the problem.

Fortunately, you posses the ability to control your reaction to the stimulous so that it’s less damaging. You have the power to refram your negative reaction so that it’s a positive reaction instead. This means you’re the one who’s in now control of your mental state.

How would this be achieved in this example? Instead of focusing on how rude and annoying these teenagers are, instead you focus on how much fun it would be to be in their shoes, blissfully unaware of everything else, just having fun with your friends. Or, if you’re slightly mean you could focus on the fact that everyone else on the bus is probably cringing and getting uncomfortable, yet it’s not your fault and you can just sit there and enjoy the fact no one can blame you for all of this.

The stimulus has not changed, yet your reaction to it has shifted from one that makes you angry to one that you find fun.

This isn’t to say that negative reactions don’t have their place. There are plenty of situations where it is correct to have a negative reaction, such as when somebody is behaving in a way which is destructive and you posses enough influence to change this. However, most negative reactions are simply mindless, pointless outbursts that are completely useless. Think about the behaviour of someone who’se a serial complainer. They bitch and moan about everything and give off this horrible negative vibe. Yet this sort of negative, mindless behaviour often goes unchecked within your own mind for hours at a time.

Right before I started writing this article I caught myself having a reaction over something incredibly trivial. I was having a coffee and flicking through an old community newspaper. I saw an ad for a local politician who I’d never seen before. My immediate reaction inside my head was along the lines of “shameless self-promotion, how are some people are dumb enough to fall for this idiot”. I then closed the paper and realised that I was the idiot for having such a mindless reaction to someone who I had absolutely no knowledge of.

I pondered for a minute wondering what would a better reaction for me to have would be. What about this ad for a person can I now choose to appreciate instead? I can appreciate the design of the ad, the colours used, the gracefulness of the fonts used. I can appreciate the desgin of the suit the guy is wearing. I can imagine what it’s like to be the guy in the ad. How cool would it be to have the confidence to put yourself in the public arena like that. How great would it be to thick-skinned like he must be, immune to all the negative feedback he’d get on a daily basis. How would it feel to be passionate enough to jetison your day job and commit yourself to something so out there?

I looked at the ad again and now my reaction was positive because I was looking at attributes which I could appreciate. The stimulus was exactly the same but my reaction was completely different. The problem had vanished! Clearly, the problem was only ever in my mind.

Reframe your reaction, your interpretation of your sensory input. Change your perspective of things so that you see it from point of view that makes you happy rather than upset.

When you start doing this, you’ll notice that you’re in a much nicer headspace than usual. Those small negative reactions really snowball. If you spend half of your waking hours being grumpy and focusing on negative things, you’re going to be miserable half of your life!

Dealing with annoying people at work who won’t shut up

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Most work places have at least one person who’s really annoying and just won’t shut up. Sometimes just hearing their voice halfway across the office triggers angry feelings inside you that lead to fantasies about committing acts of violence against them.

Unfortunately, you can’t actually kill them and you’re forced to put up with their stupid face and the stupid words that flow out of their stupid mouth. Your brain hates them :-(

How do you make better?

The following are bad ways to deal with this person and will only make the problem worse:

  • Sitting in a circle with your co-workers and talking about everything you hate about the person
  • Trying to ignore them as you sit at your desk getting more and more pissed off until you finally need to take lunch 30 minutes early because you need to get out of the office
  • Hoping the person gets fired for being useless and annoying
  • Sending emails from an anonymous account saying nasty things
  • Offering someone $15 to kick them in the head
  • Writing a business proposal which demonstrates how making the person redundant will equate to an increase in profit over 5 years of approximately $600,000.

Now I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be euthanized. They should. However, this isn’t going to happen so you need a better way to deal with this for your own emotional well-being. Right now the angry reactions that you thoughtlessly have are hurting yourself.

Contrast this with someone at the office who you think is awesome and you love seeing them. You just click with them and a 5 minute chat can easily become the highlight of your work day. Your brain likes them :-)

Your new goal is to react differently to the annoying person. You will change your current angry reaction in to a happy reaction like the one you get from the person you like.

The following methods can help you:

  • Prevent hearing their voice. Listening to music through headphones while at your desk can be work. Ways you can make it even better is using headphones that block a lot of external sound such as in-ear buds, big headphones that cover your ears like ear-muffs and noise-reducing headphones.
  • Laugh at them. Chances are their personality is quite silly and resembles a cartoon character more than a real person. Sometimes stupid people can be an endless source of amusement.
  • Start talking to them. When you do this your brain will automatically shift them toward the “friend” category and you’ll begin to chill-out around them.
  • Develop a sense of humility for them by silently wishing them luck and even pray for them if you’re that way inclined. If you do this right you’ll notice that your emotional state is *very* different from the one you normally associate with this person.