Saturday, December 29, 2012

How To Alleviate Your Frustration Without Taking It Out On Others

By Marisol Guy


It is not uncommon to experience frustration. This is an emotion that tends to arise unbidden when people are challenged by their circumstances, an activity or an environment. Overreacting to this emotion, however, can have very detrimental effects on a person, his or her lifestyle and reputation. Following are a few helpful strategies for alleviating frustration without blowing your top.

Identify the true source of this emotion and avoid projecting. More often than not, people are at issue with themselves when they act out negatively or in anger towards others. Take some time to consider where your anger is actually arising from and then deal with this, rather than responding negatively to others who share your environment.

Give yourself a few minutes to get yourself under control, whether through deep breathing or getting outside for a bit. It can be helpful to have a change of environment when you are trying to collect yourself. If you have become agitated while performing a certain activity, take a break. You can return in a much more effective state after you have taken some time to refresh your mind and your mood.

Learn whether you are expecting too much from yourself. Sometimes people have very high expectations of themselves and they leave absolutely no room for personal error. If you expect yourself to be perfect, you are probably applying those same high standards to everyone else around you. You must be fair to both yourself and those who share your life. Humans make mistakes and they are never perfect. Understanding this will help you to avoid a lot of unnecessary agitation.

Try to determine whether there is an aspect about yourself that you are attempting to cover up. Sometimes people take actions or have life habits that they do not know how to control and which they do not enjoy. These things might be secreted away, however, they have an unfortunate way of boiling up to the surface.

One example of this is people who are very neat and obsess over the smallest messes as the resulting feelings of stress and anger are not actually related to the physical environment. These individuals are usually trying to create a physical space that is dramatically different from their inner shame and turmoil. When you try to make peace with yourself and your perceived faults, you will not need to always be in control of your external environment.

Sometimes, however, people need to institute positive change in order to avoid blowing up over small things. People are sometime prone to becoming frustrated with smaller things that they know they can control, while they internalize issues that are too large or overwhelming to deal with. Rather than growing angry over small issues, however, it is better to find feasible and proactive ways to start tackling the real source of the anger.

Everyone will experience frustration at some point in time. If you are starting to feel this emotion too frequently or you are not comfortable with how it makes you respond, you must start working to address the problems that are the source of this unpleasant feeling. Your efforts will help your professional and social lives and will make you a far more likable person overall.




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