Dealing with ?.
How to better tolerate life
How to deal with bull, crap, bunk, drivel, gibberish, guff, hogwash, nonsense, rubbish, baloney, bosh, bunkum, flim-flam, hokum, hooey, malarkey, moonshine, phooey, and poppycock.
In our lives, we must tolerate and accept a certain amount of crap. We have to listen to the automated voice inform us that our call is important and that they are experiencing higher-than-usual call volume. We have to punch in our account number twice and then give it to the agent after we get off hold. It’s life. There is crap to put up with.
I have some thoughts that can help us
- understand our annoyance
- have a better sense of humor
- be less annoyed
The first thing to consider is who doing the crap. We are better able to tolerate crap in direct proportion to the amount of perceived good we are receiving. If we perceive the provider as good, we will tolerate more of their associated crap. A quote (often attributed to Oscar Wilde) makes great sense of this: “If you dislike someone, the way that they hold their spoon will offend you, but if you like them, they could drop a plate of food in your lap and you wouldn’t care.” Even before I dial the number to reach my cable company, they have annoyed me. I just don’t like them. The first step in dealing with crap is to notice who is doing it so we can know if we are just prone to being annoyed.
The second step is to change your usual thought pattern when you experience crap. Next time you hear, “We are experiencing a higher-than-usual call volume,” make a smiley face on a piece of paper. And any other time in the day you run into some societal crap, add another smiley. This is just a little cognitive trick to send your brain on a neural pathway other than the one you usually follow. (This works. Really. Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on this. I’ve done this. Try it. You’ll be amazed.)
Third, I want you to change your language. I want you to replace the times that you say, “have to” with “get to.” Instead of (or immediately after) thinking, “I have to put up with this crap,” think, “I get to put up with this crap.” Instead of saying, “I have to call the cable company because they overcharged me,” say, “I get to call the cable company because they overcharged me.” Instead of relating a story about how you had to put up with seven minutes of hold-music, tell them that you got to put up with seven minutes of hold-music. (Like putting a ? on paper, this trick also is surprisingly powerful.)
To be a well-balanced person in this (insane) society in which we live, we must continually up our tolerance and how much we can accept.
#wisdom_biscuit: the power to be less annoyed is within you.
