The little things can drive you crazy!
Here is how to manage them effectively.
Below is a partial list of the reality of constant “little irritants”. Recognize any of them?
1. People criticizing and then telling you a better way to do
your jobs, manage your home, or raise your children
2. Ants in the kitchen
3. Traffic
4. Rude people
5. Dropping something that spills or breaks
6. Someone who pretends to listen
7. Being put on hold and then being disconnected
8. Parents screaming four letter words at their children
9. The neighbor’s dog barking all day long.
10. All the cats on the street turning your front porch plants into urinals.
11. The sound of the ba-boom coming from speakers in a car three blocks away.
12. Being told the cost of living hasn’t gone up so there will be no increase for senior citizens.
13. Looking in your rear view mirror only to find someone riding you so closely if you just took your foot off the gas pedal they would be sitting in your front seat
14. Sick people coughing and sneezing while they are a work
15. Not being able to get the lid off of a container or jar
16. The puppy shredding paper all over the house
17. Kids yelling
18. When your entire day changes because of little sequences of life you didn’t expect
19. When you are in a hurry and everything and everybody seems to move in slow motion
20 Constipation (really)
21. You get to the meeting fifteen minutes early only to discover that it started fifteen minutes earlier than your arrival
…..and the list goes on and on and on – day after day after day!
You probably can add fifty things to the list that haven’t been mentioned. So WHY do these things irritate you? After all, they aren’t life threatening; they are just bothersome.
The incident isn’t the biggest problem, but just the trigger for an overload of stress and a possible explosion of emotion! The idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back” is an old Arab proverb. It refers to a camel loaded beyond it’s capacity; hence, the broken back. This is a reference to any process by which cataclysmic failure is achieved by a seemingly inconsequential additional event. This also gives rise to “the last straw” often used when something is deemed to be the last in a line of unacceptable occurrences. Everyone suffers from this at one time or another in his or her life.
You know now that these events are simply triggers and a release that may be less troublesome to resolve – a bit of yelling or snappy answer and it’s over. What you haven’t attended to is the underlying cause that will cause these events to trigger your emotions over and over again.
One or all of these methods can help you to manage these events calmly.
1. Laughter. Usually there is something that can tickle your silly bone if you search for it. Even if it’s ironic humor, laughter will lighten the situation and trigger a more positive response.
2. Use your oxygen immediately to manage your stress. Breathing slowly and deeply will get oxygen to your brain and muscles and ligaments. You will respond more intelligently and your shoulders will relax. This is a method that is ALWAYS
AVAILABLE and its FREE. Empower yourself, if you do nothing else in the management arena, learn to use this secret weapon. It works mentally and physically – that’s the way human kind is built!
3. Keep in mind, we are all human and “stuff” happens to the best of us. This is just a fact of life. This trigger incident will be over quickly if you let it.
4. Divert your attention to something that is really higher on the priority list. You may have to clean up a mess or handle the scenario, but make it quick and positive. You have more important stresses to attend to than the occurrence of these little irritants.
5. To begin to really attend to the “big stresses” – you have many options: stress reduction exercises, meditation, on line websites, personal training. Don’t give up. Take a breath and learn how to help yourself!
“Things do not change: we change.”
Henry David Thoreau
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And more stressful and irritating than your day changing because of those little sequences of life is having your husband then say “so what’s the big deal?”!!!