We started talking in the last post about choosing your emotions instead of just reacting subconsciously to a situation. The classic example is someone cutting us off in the traffic or pushing in front of us in a queue. The most common reaction, and one which society would have us believe is our God-given right, is anger. Horns start tooting, hand gestures are thrown about, and language is expelled from the lungs along with spit from the foaming mouth. In the moments afterwards that anger presents itself in the body as hormones rushing about to prepare the body for the ‘fight or flight’ response.
Our body senses danger from our reaction and slows blood supply to the digestive organs and increases blood flow to the heart and muscles instead, as well as a myriad other changes in the body to prepare us to fight this danger or flee from it. (The reaction to stress is also the same reaction whether it comes from work or relationship issues.) Some react to these changes through getting violent or aggressive but if we do not run from ‘this danger’ or ‘fight it’ and ‘use up’ all these bodily stress reactions then we are left sitting in a traffic jam or standing in a queue with our body primed for action. The hormones racing through our system and diverted blood supply leave us literally pumped with nowhere to go. It then takes us some time to calm down and we find ourselves sitting there repeatedly going over the moment, reliving it inch by inch and woe and behold any child or person who tries to interrupt these thoughts because they then become the victim of our body’s preparation for an encounter.
So why do we do this to ourselves? Why would anyone, knowing this is going to happen allow it to transpire? The answer is simple and the alternative is freedom to choose our own responses to a situation and not have our moods (or our body) controlled by the actions of another.
We grow up seeing how other people react in a given situation. We subconsciously ‘learn’ from watching others how to do certain things. It’s how we first learnt to walk, talk and drive a car. Now we don’t have to try or even think about these things when we are doing them, our body has built nerve pathways based on actions and reactions that we have and those pathways have been used so many times that the connections between the nerves (known as the synapses) actually fuse together to make a permanent and speedy route.
Nobody likes feeling angry or frustrated, just as much as we don’t like being pushed in front of in a queue. So why do we think it’s our God-given right to feel angry or frustrated when someone does something we have no control over? Why do we choose this response? It has become a habit. We are habitually reacting; we learnt something a long time ago and habitually react the same way each time.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”. Is getting angry going to stop people from pushing in front of us? Is it going to teach them a lesson? If they are truly selfish people then no amount of you getting stressed, angry or aggressive is going to teach them anything. There is also the possibility that somewhere in their journey they learnt that to get anywhere or have their needs met they had to push in and this has now become a ‘habitual action’ for them. Consider also that if you were out and received a call to say that your child was sick or had suddenly been called into work, or any other scenario that meant you had to hurry, and you stumbled upon a traffic jam, or a queue at the chemist or whatever, would you not consider your needs and decide they warranted pushing up closer to the front?
My point is we can’t always assume that someone is being mean or selfish when they push in front of us in any situation. They could have a valid reason for doing something that if they had a chance to explain to us, we would happily let them go first; or it could be simply that they have learnt somewhere along the way that this is what they have to do to ‘survive’.
By becoming more aware of our reactions, we can question ourselves and ask: is this reaction going to serve a good purpose for me? Is getting angry in this situation going to bring about a change that will make my life better and help meet my physical and emotional needs; or am I getting angry at a situation I have no control over and the only difference my reaction is going to make to the world is a negative effect on MY own emotions and body.
In the next few days I encourage you to be very aware of your reactions in different situations and ask yourself the above questions; because, in the same way we built nerve pathways to ensure a habitual anger response, we can build new pathways that ensure we question the results first and then choose a more appropriate (and peaceful) response to a situation.
Many people believe that we can’t choose our feelings. I agree that feelings are neither right nor wrong. We can never say to someone “you shouldn’t feel that way”, because the fact is that they do. We can however, change our perception of a situation and our thoughts about it and this awareness, of a habitual reaction versus a conscious response, changes how we feel in a given situation. It is through this practice of watching our reactions and altering our response that we can find a way to inner peace in moments that could have otherwise been filled with negative emotions.
Yours in finding Peace, Love and Happiness
Meg
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