500 Words a Week - Stress Test Yourself
You’re stuck behind a car at traffic lights. The lights go green, the car takes a little longer than you expect to begin to move. You beep for them to hurry up. You swear to yourself in the car. The car has moved on, but you’re still annoyed. This frustrated mood begins to grow, you remember something else from your past that bothered you. In turn making you feel more frustrated. You’re experiencing the world with anger-tinted glasses, every little thing you notice frustrates and annoys you.
When commuting, 9 times out of 10 somebody is going to do something that frustrates you. Something that causes you to react. If we know at some point this is going to happen at during our commute. Even if we are walking, someone will cut in front of us. The test is then when this happens, when somebody does something that frustrates us, how quickly can we let it go and move on with our journey. How quickly can we return to our pre-annoying incident mindset.
I gauge how quickly I can return to the pre-mindset as an indication of am I experiencing much stress. With the rationale of, if we haven’t much causing us stress, we shouldn’t overly react, and we will be able to return to our pre-mindset quickly. When we are stressed, every little thing manages to get on our nerves. In turn, it takes us awhile to return to our pre-mindset as we replay the situation over and over and allow our annoyance to grow and fester.
Not only is it a test, but it’s also a challenge too. Something to keep us conscious of how often we can remain calm and look past events that have happened. Sure, someone cut in front of us, sure we can have our little beep of annoyance, then we can either move on or continue to stew in that annoyance. Stewing in the annoyance is only affecting us and making our day worse.
We often receive advice around being more present. This is something that I feel is hard to truly define, I think it covers many aspects of how we go about day-day life. The above to me has an aspect of being present in it, in terms of avoiding mulling over things that have happened in the past. Things we have no control over, no ability to change or influence.
As we begin to shorten the time down it takes for us to return to our pre-annoyance mindset, the trick then becomes can we stop ourselves reacting altogether. The beep of annoyance we are all too comfortable pressing, the swearing to ourselves in the car, can we prevent this.
