I'm so irritated. How can I stop being so irritable? Well, let's get into that today.
The very most important place to start with this is perspective. Big surprise,
right? Perspective is everything and it's all that we have. How to stop being
irritable when we feel irritable? Where is our focus? Think about that for a
moment. When I'm feeling irritable, my focus is on something or someone outside
of me, it's like.. So as long as we're identifying the problem to be over there,
outside of ourselves, that's the problem. That perspective will change everything.
There's an acronym that I can use to help capture what we can do about this
irritability so it starts with F. F stands for frustration. When we feel
frustration, it's the first indicator feeling that we're going to need if we
want to get on top of this irritability. The next one A. A stands for anger.
Frustration, anger, R. R stands for resentment. Frustration, anger and
resentment our indicator feelings. Now you can see it spells the word far in
fact, back in graduate school, we talked about the far out model which means that
you're out of control, right? Frustration, anger and resentment are all really
valuable indicator feelings but they're misleading because when we feel any of
these three, our natural conclusion might be that someone or something else needs
to change, something outside of me causing me to feel all of these things
so the timeout that we can take, let's put a T in here for timeout.. My wife
tells me I need a different acronym but I think it's working because what if
you're just an irritable fart? Well let's use that to our advantage. When you feel
frustration, anger and resentment, that is an indicator that you need a timeout
which is going to help you reframe your perspective so I call this the fart
factor. Maybe we should put up a parental advisory right here, right, oh, how
shocking but it'll help you to remember it, frustration, anger and resentment are
going to lead you to take a little timeout, get refocused right here because
that's where your power and control will be as long as you're waiting for someone
or something else to change this for you, that could be a long wait and it's
actually part of the victim mentality. I know I've shared with you in other
videos that I used to do child custody evaluations for the court. Yuck work,
right? And I had bitter angry divorcing people coming into my office, fighting
over their children and it's my job to step in and see if I can help them to
sort that out to make some recommendations to the court. Well as
these guys are bitterly angrily fighting with each other,
guess who they're blaming for all of their frustration anger and resentment?
You're right, each other. Let me ask you a question about that, how soon? Is the ex
going to make everything okay? Do you see the trap? That victim mindset has this
getting stuck in a place that we don't even want to be and
we're waiting for someone else to change that for us, to make it all okay. If you
can see it in the custody example that I just shared with you, let's take that
same principle and apply it to whatever it is that is triggering your
irritability and and without getting too distracted that it's about someone or
something else. We'll go to the fart factor where frustration, anger and
resentment lead us right into that timeout, pause and I would recommend at
this point that you do a little breathing, okay.
Just the slow intentional focused breathing. Why? So that we can get your
brain chemistry reversed so that we can get your brain working for you instead
of against you. We get out of that fight-or-flight response which allows
our thinker, the cognitive part of our brain to kick in and start doing some
problem-solving and to see our own part of it because that's where we have some
kind of control. Can we get past this irritability that we're feeling? Yeah and
the first step is that perspective, we've got to get out of blaming someone or
something else for how we feel. Follow the fart factor, take the time out,
breathe, get yourself calm down and then let's do some really good thinking about
this. Okay, so let's quit farting around. The fart factor will help us to stop
being so irritable. Hope you enjoyed this one.