When something confronting or difficult happens, we might react with anger, upset, fear or despondency. Our reactions can seem so automatic that we fail to recognise that moment – perhaps a split second – between what happened and our response. It’s during that moment that our response is determined.
Living a more satisfying and self-determined life means learning to manage our responses to life’s problems effectively. Not letting that split second pass unnoticed, but using it to muster our resources, inviting our wisdom and reason to join with our emotions before we react.
We can practise extending that moment between stimulus and reaction, from a split second to a few minutes or even days. This gives us time to explore what’s going on. The hard part is that it means sitting with uncomfortable feelings like stress, loneliness, anger or uncertainty and recognising them for what they are.
Reacting without acknowledging those feelings is like trying to fix a problem before you know what the problem is. Your instant solution might include lashing out, avoiding, starting a fight, or turning to addictive behaviour – things that only make things worse and can lead to regret, shame or embarrassment. When the way you behaved is not in line with how you like to see yourself, you experience what’s called cognitive dissonance. It’s an extremely uncomfortable feeling, which most likely leads to further reactive solutions, like doubling down and trying to justify how you behaved in the first place.
So many problems can be avoided if we take that moment to check in with ourselves before we react. Not only can we survive uncomfortable feelings, but we can use them to gain useful information. From there we can consider our response, guided by wisdom and a clearer view.
Stephanie Hills ©