I have insane admiration for and quite a serious amount of jealousy of people who are able to sail through life with with every setback sailing right past them, leaving no trace or mark.
I've noticed it more in people who had a comfortable upringing and no money worries. Oh dear, dinner is burnt? No worries just order takeout! Lost your passport a few days before a holiday - no sweat, just pay the fast track processing fee. Car broken down? Just jump in a taxi. Coffee ruined your top? Just buy another one. Etc. Money often means far fewer worries in life, and kids must definitely notice and feel that.
As you can probably guess, I grew up relatively poor. Every day/week something would be causing my parents stress, often related to money. No amount of grounding themselves or belly breathing would have alleviated the stress.
I know the article is about smaller things, many of which of money can't fix, but I do wonder if growing up in a low-stress environment (largely because of no money issues) instills something that enables you to not sweat the minor things in life
I don’t think those people you’re thinking about sail through life and never get bothered by anything at all. You probably only see them deal with things that are below their level of worry or frustration. They’re not going to be unbothered by the death of a loved one or major financial catastrophe.
However people who have good emotional control can appear to be emotionally invincible relative to people who are turn every minor annoyance into a catastrophe and are completely devastated by anything with minor significance.
> I've noticed it more in people who had a comfortable upringing and no money worries. Oh dear, dinner is burnt? No worries just order takeout! Lost your passport a few days before a holiday - no sweat, just pay the fast track processing fee. Car broken down? Just jump in a taxi. Coffee ruined your top? Just buy another one.
You’re only seeing one very narrow version of problems in their life that are easily solved by money.
I grew up around some kids who were very wealthy. Some had net worths in excess of $10 million in their 20s because their parents were tax optimizing their inheritance over decades.
While they were unbothered by simple things that could be solved with a credit card (burnt dinner, spilled coffee) they were, in general, much less prepared to handle the stresses of life than their peers. In fact, I can think of many examples where they fell apart and some who spiraled immediately into drug addiction the first time they encountered life problems that weren’t easily solved by money: Being broken up with by a love interest, denied promotions because they weren’t performing as well as their peers, doing poorly at their expensive colleges.
So I wouldn’t agree at all that wealthy people are inherently more resilient to stress. You’re only looking at a narrow set of financial problems which are already solved for them. Having those problems solved for them can actually lead to lower levels of stress resilience when the real problems come along.
Your points and examples are valid. However, when you say:
> I wouldn’t agree at all that wealthy people are inherently more resilient to stress
I beg to differ.
I think the OP is talking about growing up in poverty. Repeated stress with no relief, which is the condition of poor people in society, has been shown to affect their resilience. (Sorry, I don't have references handy, but these should be easy to find).
I think you might want to examine your assumption that there are people who "sail through life." It may seem that way from the outside, and you may even observe people handling everyday stressors well. But I promise you, everyone is struggling. Everyone suffers. (btw, that's actually the first Noble Truth of Buddhism).
But you can learn ways to separate the stress you can't control from the stress you can control (your reaction/behavior), which is the foundation of CBT & ACT (and is the third Noble Truth).
I personally don't think upbringing has a big impact on our natural ability to do this; I think it's mostly genetic. But it doesn't really matter.
The good news is, the brain is plastic, and you absolutely can change your mind and behaviors pretty radically over time. This is the science behind psychological flexibility / ACT—and yes, it does replicate.
When I find myself thinking "some people just have it easier," I try to ask myself "is that a workable worldview? If I follow that train of thought, is that moving me in the right direction? Or is it causing me to give up or give in to resentment and frustration? Could I just let it pass?" You don't have to argue with the thought; you can just notice it and let it float on by.
Years ago I heard someone, possibly on NPR's Fresh Air, talking about how thoughts were a lot like food: just as we can make decisions about what we eat - "no, I am not going to eat that (now|today|ever)" - we can also learn to identify thoughts that have negative effects on us and when they happen we can choose not to think them.
At the time, this sounded a bit fanciful and just a bit ridiculous to me. Over the decades since, it has come to be one of my foundational philosophies. Obviously, I am unable to stick to it all the time, just as I sometimes eat food that I know is going to make me feel bad. But it's there as a guiding principle, all the time.
Yup, I've realized similar. "You are what you eat" and also "You are what you think". But like you said, it's not about scrutinizing every single thing you think/eat but more about recognizing patterns and seeing if those patterns are aligned with your own values.
No amount of poverty or wealth will reduce your road rage. How you react to people not following the rules of the road as you expect them is on you.
If a toddler spills juice on your dress on your wedding day, rich or poor you're just going to have a stained dress and whether you scream or laugh about it really doesn't have anything to do with money.
Money is an adaptation but certainly not the only one to unexpected difficulty. It is easy to fantasize that everything would be better just if you had x, but that's a scapegoat that lets you be the way that you are because you're powerless to do something about it... it's wrong. How you react to the world is in your power and it's free. And very often it's exactly the reverse, poverty isn't giving you a bad attitude, having a bad attitude is making and keeping you poor.
> No amount of poverty or wealth will reduce your road rage. How you react to people not following the rules of the road as you expect them is on you.
Yes, but being raised in poverty can be inherently traumatic, and adverse childhood experiences (like those frequently experienced during poverty) can reduce a person's capacity for dealing with stressors. You might benefit from reading the latest research on trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and CPTSD.
This is a very important point that many people are unaware of unless they have experienced it. Poverty leaves a ton of invisible scars that a simple change in bank balance or net worth cannot erase. These scars compound over generations, and explain a lot of things about modern society that people unaware of the effects of poverty attribute to "moral failings" of individuals.
I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with money, or even the stress of the environment inherently, I think it's all about how people choose to deal with their problems.
You could be raised in a poor home and grow up to a work in a "high stress" environment with ease because at some point you chose not to be too bothered by it.
Probably it's learned behavior from the parents. When your parents had good intentions but really panicked or scolded you like the world was going to end when you did something wrong... that can have a subconscious impact in your life that every wrong move and every thing that happened could be a matter of survival.
I think the artcle might be missing one core premise of ACT - that it is not meant to help you to deal with negative emotions it the moment all that much.
The book on ACT I'm reading (happiness trap - from the founder of the technique) goes to great length to say that trying to "deal with negative emotions" (anxiety, sadness, etc) using affirmations, rationalization, etc is a dead end - it's not helping in the long run most of the time and is actively distracting and takes a lot of effort that could be put elsewhere.
The suggested path (that i am finding somewhat helpful) is to learn to act in accordance with your values regardless of how you feel and the story you tell in your head. It will still suck balls day to day, but on top of that, in the long run, you will feel more at peace and in control and respect yourself for following your chosen path.
The core realization is that while it may seem like your feelings (anxiety) and the story that plays in your head* is what makes up YOU, you may treat these as biological and early developmental "warnings" that your brain has learned to warn you of danger, and you most likely will feel this way for the rest of your life and won't have control over that, but you are actually FREE to choose how to act in response to these situations.
It may seem like these feelings and thoughts are making you act in a certain way, but they are not!
In your example, the feeling of financial anxiety could be accompanied by a thought like - "shit, how am i going to pay for that, why does it always happen to me, how do i fix it, why do i have to ruin it for myself and people i care about by being so sloppy, why does the universe makes it so hard for me and so much easier for others.." - and there's nothing you can do to change that feeling or that thought pattern in your head.
But what you can do is to use one of the techniques to (very temporarily) tune out of this thought train, check in with your values (eg taking care of loved ones), and choose a course of action that fits these as much as possible given the circumstances (eg find a way to spend quality time with them on a tighther budget) and DESPITE all that noise in your head.
A large chunk of the book is focused on consciously discovering your core values.
Is it easier to act with integrity (eg not snap at loved ones) moment to moment if you are not under financial stress or if that stress was not a part of your upbringing? Sure as hell! And given these unfair and idiotic and unnecessary circumstances that caused your internal machinery to work the way it does right now (stay alert at all times), it is your decision to commit to a further course of action - either numb your pain short-term (by ruminating, or alcohol, etc) or act in accordance with your values. Your (highly uncooperative ancient meat lizard) brain will still pull you towards a short term fix - because it is its primitive reward-seeking job, and you will inevitably loose control and let it win sometimes (esp under stress), but there is a part of you that can choose to patiently course correct your behavior towards your higher level values every time that happens. Or maybe you know that at this very moment you do not have resources to course correct much - and that's okay, as long as you are being honest with yourself and act accordingly (eg "i need to find a way to take better care of myself atm - to free up resources to take better care of others, it would be against my values to overwork myself to the bone and be so exhausted that i struggle to catch myself when I'm being mean to them").
One additional realization that i found helpful is that, in the face of such challenges, your brain is quite good at making you think that it knows how everything works - so you feel more in control, and so that the path of least resistance (doing nothing or numb your pain now) seems like the most rational one that agrees with your values. An antidote to that I found helpful is to remind yourself that you know very little about who you are (beyond the silly story playing in your head on repeat), and how you will react to things, and who other people are, and what's going on for them. So you can choose to plan your behavior to align with your values under the assumption that you know infinitely little about both yourself and others.
tldr is that pain is inevitable, but you may reduce (but not eliminate) suffering if you learn to act with integrity in the face of it
I am deaf but not completely deaf. Some sounds I can hear and a lot of the sounds that are loud enough to come to my attention are annoying. Often not the same sounds that annoy other people, too.
I'm reminded of a conversation with my friend who is fully Deaf from birth and a signer. Hearing people are a foreign culture for him. It's tricky to navigate the hearing world sometimes, when you don't know what what noises things make and how they are perceived. (Stacking metal or ceramic dishes is an almost silent experience for me, for example.)
He noted that the sounds hearing people complain about seem related to control. Thunder? Not a problem. Natural and nothing you can do about it. The beep of a truck backing up? That's due to a person. It could be controlled. Rain? Not a problem. Sprinkler system? That's ultimately due to a person. It could be controlled. Microwave beep? Could have been controlled; you're supposed to hit the stop button at 0:01. Dog barking? Annoying because again, supposed to be controlled. Wild birds cawing at the crack of dawn? Filtered out and ignored. (Mostly, some people do complain about those.)
Realizing you don't actually have control and that the other person might not actually have control is surprisingly relaxing, I've found. I suppose that's closely related to the "radical acceptance" of the article.
Your friend is remarkably prescient. I [1] can mostly "tune out and ignore" those "irritating" sounds that so many others complain, gripe, and stress about, and I have noticed the identical aspect your friend noticed, although I don't think I considered it a "control" aspect until now. Those that are "bothered" by some sound they ought to ignore always seem bothered by sounds where they believe they should have some ability to "control" their world (even, if, they really don't have any control over the truck in the alley beeping because it is reversing out). I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked by someone I'm with "aren't you bothered by ???" to which my answer almost always is some form of: "I hear it, but I don't let it bother me." Which almost always evokes an amazing surprise on the part of the individual who asked the question, often with a response along the lines of "I don't understand how you can do that."
[1] for the record, not deaf, so I cannot fully relate to nor understand your world.
But that's what religion is, wisdom and nonsense mixed together by people who didn't yet have the benefit of the great filter to separate the wisdom from the nonsense: science.
This article is about ACT which borrows these techniques from the ancient stoics, but there is a lot of similarities between stoicism and buddhism, zen especially.
From the article: Micro-stressors such as running late [...] represent the unavoidable pain that comes with being human.
Is running late really unavoidable? I think there are proven strategies to avoid it. (My wife and one of my sons on the other hand would agree that it is in fact unavoidable)
Not the best example they could have used because the root cause is ambiguous.
I try to be prepared and on-time, but being late some times is unavoidable if there’s a car accident on the freeway that leaves me locked in a traffic, I get a flat tire, my flight is delayed, or any number of other unpredictable things outside of my control happen. I think that’s what the article is trying to talk about.
Given the full breadth of "unavoidable", yes. As there can always be something completely out of your control that will make you late, despite your best efforts to be prepared.
But, for the majority of the habitually late, it is merely a direct result of their own actions, and so is indeed "avoidable" from that extent.
In practice? Yes it’s unavoidable. Unless you build in enough buffer to account for _every_ possible scenario out of your control, the probability of running late is non-zero.
In the long run, it is unavoidable. No matter how prepared you are, there will be something that will cause you to run late. It's just a matter of how frequently this happens.
I’ve gotten a lot out of the writings of Albert Ellis whose work in the 50s and 60s became cognitive behavioral therapy. He would have said that it is irrational to demand that everyday inconveniences not exist, and by changing your thinking to accept and expect that unavoidable inconveniences happen, you will be less likely to allow these things to cause emotional distress.
He credits the ancient stoics and other philosophers for influencing his methods.
I don’t think anyone should tolerate what they find annoying, life is too short. If something or someone wants to keep you around, they should be less annoying to you.
Sometimes, it’s your own mind too. I have at times, pretty bad OCD in the form of terrible intrusive thoughts. They can trigger such distress in me that I’ve lost years of my life to them. Learning to tolerate them is essentially the first step to reducing their frequency in the conscious mind. That and meds but if I could just stop thinking some things, trust me, I would.
I think you’re missing some of the point. What will you do when you find yourself stuck in traffic or in an airport security line that takes an hour to advance? Substitute some annoying situation that is beyond your control. If you react by upsetting yourself, then the advice is for you; otherwise, I don’t think you need it.
I have seen some people turn themselves around with ACT-style therapy like this article introduces. Some can build up response patterns that turn minor daily annoyances into bigger problems that disrupt their mood for hours or even the rest of the day.
These behaviors of blowing things out of proportion or letting them get under your skin can be both learned and unlearned, in addition to developing organically. Therapy techniques like this are an intentional way to practice unlearning bad habits and replacing with undeniably better habits that you want to practice.
Raising and teaching young children is a learning experience for how some of these habits can develop and how to teach better responses to life's frustrations. Kids can get frustrated easily and their emotions run strong. Learning how to teach kids to control their emotions and respond appropriately to life is one of the core parenting challenges. I feel like I learned a lot about myself in the process of trying to figure out how to teach it to my kids and set a good example for them.
On this topic, I've also observed a few cases in teens and adults who seemingly learn bad habits about becoming overly annoyed by small things, primarily from social media influencers. There is an entire universe of social media influencers dedicated to grievance-based entertainment, where they produce content about things that make you angry or feel like the victim. I think it's supposed to be cathartic or helpful, but in the process of producing content they reach further and further for topics to turn into grievances.
The early trend of "emotional labor" being an invisible burden was the first time I saw this. The social media influencer version of emotional labor actually diverged from the literature definition and became an umbrella term meaning that your emotions were unpaid labor. If anyone did something that made you feel those emotions or you had to deal with someone else's emotions, you were supposed to feel burdened and victimized. There have been other trends like "mental load" that are variations of this idea that you have been made into the victim via other people or the world triggering your own emotional responses, which may have become exaggerated via these social influencers constantly bringing them front and center.
I have insane admiration for and quite a serious amount of jealousy of people who are able to sail through life with with every setback sailing right past them, leaving no trace or mark.
I've noticed it more in people who had a comfortable upringing and no money worries. Oh dear, dinner is burnt? No worries just order takeout! Lost your passport a few days before a holiday - no sweat, just pay the fast track processing fee. Car broken down? Just jump in a taxi. Coffee ruined your top? Just buy another one. Etc. Money often means far fewer worries in life, and kids must definitely notice and feel that.
As you can probably guess, I grew up relatively poor. Every day/week something would be causing my parents stress, often related to money. No amount of grounding themselves or belly breathing would have alleviated the stress.
I know the article is about smaller things, many of which of money can't fix, but I do wonder if growing up in a low-stress environment (largely because of no money issues) instills something that enables you to not sweat the minor things in life
I don’t think those people you’re thinking about sail through life and never get bothered by anything at all. You probably only see them deal with things that are below their level of worry or frustration. They’re not going to be unbothered by the death of a loved one or major financial catastrophe.
However people who have good emotional control can appear to be emotionally invincible relative to people who are turn every minor annoyance into a catastrophe and are completely devastated by anything with minor significance.
> I've noticed it more in people who had a comfortable upringing and no money worries. Oh dear, dinner is burnt? No worries just order takeout! Lost your passport a few days before a holiday - no sweat, just pay the fast track processing fee. Car broken down? Just jump in a taxi. Coffee ruined your top? Just buy another one.
You’re only seeing one very narrow version of problems in their life that are easily solved by money.
I grew up around some kids who were very wealthy. Some had net worths in excess of $10 million in their 20s because their parents were tax optimizing their inheritance over decades.
While they were unbothered by simple things that could be solved with a credit card (burnt dinner, spilled coffee) they were, in general, much less prepared to handle the stresses of life than their peers. In fact, I can think of many examples where they fell apart and some who spiraled immediately into drug addiction the first time they encountered life problems that weren’t easily solved by money: Being broken up with by a love interest, denied promotions because they weren’t performing as well as their peers, doing poorly at their expensive colleges.
So I wouldn’t agree at all that wealthy people are inherently more resilient to stress. You’re only looking at a narrow set of financial problems which are already solved for them. Having those problems solved for them can actually lead to lower levels of stress resilience when the real problems come along.
Your points and examples are valid. However, when you say:
> I wouldn’t agree at all that wealthy people are inherently more resilient to stress
I beg to differ.
I think the OP is talking about growing up in poverty. Repeated stress with no relief, which is the condition of poor people in society, has been shown to affect their resilience. (Sorry, I don't have references handy, but these should be easy to find).
[dead]
I think the opposite is true, too.
With some friends we make a couple of "stressful" escapades every year and since I started doing it I feel that most things don't worry.
Nothing I do regularly in my daily life equals being lost in the mountains not being sure if we are gonna make it. It gives you some perspective.
I think you might want to examine your assumption that there are people who "sail through life." It may seem that way from the outside, and you may even observe people handling everyday stressors well. But I promise you, everyone is struggling. Everyone suffers. (btw, that's actually the first Noble Truth of Buddhism).
But you can learn ways to separate the stress you can't control from the stress you can control (your reaction/behavior), which is the foundation of CBT & ACT (and is the third Noble Truth).
I personally don't think upbringing has a big impact on our natural ability to do this; I think it's mostly genetic. But it doesn't really matter.
The good news is, the brain is plastic, and you absolutely can change your mind and behaviors pretty radically over time. This is the science behind psychological flexibility / ACT—and yes, it does replicate.
When I find myself thinking "some people just have it easier," I try to ask myself "is that a workable worldview? If I follow that train of thought, is that moving me in the right direction? Or is it causing me to give up or give in to resentment and frustration? Could I just let it pass?" You don't have to argue with the thought; you can just notice it and let it float on by.
Years ago I heard someone, possibly on NPR's Fresh Air, talking about how thoughts were a lot like food: just as we can make decisions about what we eat - "no, I am not going to eat that (now|today|ever)" - we can also learn to identify thoughts that have negative effects on us and when they happen we can choose not to think them.
At the time, this sounded a bit fanciful and just a bit ridiculous to me. Over the decades since, it has come to be one of my foundational philosophies. Obviously, I am unable to stick to it all the time, just as I sometimes eat food that I know is going to make me feel bad. But it's there as a guiding principle, all the time.
Yup, I've realized similar. "You are what you eat" and also "You are what you think". But like you said, it's not about scrutinizing every single thing you think/eat but more about recognizing patterns and seeing if those patterns are aligned with your own values.
It's not money. It's attachment to expectations.
No amount of poverty or wealth will reduce your road rage. How you react to people not following the rules of the road as you expect them is on you.
If a toddler spills juice on your dress on your wedding day, rich or poor you're just going to have a stained dress and whether you scream or laugh about it really doesn't have anything to do with money.
Money is an adaptation but certainly not the only one to unexpected difficulty. It is easy to fantasize that everything would be better just if you had x, but that's a scapegoat that lets you be the way that you are because you're powerless to do something about it... it's wrong. How you react to the world is in your power and it's free. And very often it's exactly the reverse, poverty isn't giving you a bad attitude, having a bad attitude is making and keeping you poor.
> No amount of poverty or wealth will reduce your road rage. How you react to people not following the rules of the road as you expect them is on you.
Yes, but being raised in poverty can be inherently traumatic, and adverse childhood experiences (like those frequently experienced during poverty) can reduce a person's capacity for dealing with stressors. You might benefit from reading the latest research on trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and CPTSD.
This is a very important point that many people are unaware of unless they have experienced it. Poverty leaves a ton of invisible scars that a simple change in bank balance or net worth cannot erase. These scars compound over generations, and explain a lot of things about modern society that people unaware of the effects of poverty attribute to "moral failings" of individuals.
Exactly!! And this isn't just theoretical. There is a ton of hard scientific evidence showing that this is the case.
I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with money, or even the stress of the environment inherently, I think it's all about how people choose to deal with their problems.
You could be raised in a poor home and grow up to a work in a "high stress" environment with ease because at some point you chose not to be too bothered by it.
Probably it's learned behavior from the parents. When your parents had good intentions but really panicked or scolded you like the world was going to end when you did something wrong... that can have a subconscious impact in your life that every wrong move and every thing that happened could be a matter of survival.
I think the artcle might be missing one core premise of ACT - that it is not meant to help you to deal with negative emotions it the moment all that much.
The book on ACT I'm reading (happiness trap - from the founder of the technique) goes to great length to say that trying to "deal with negative emotions" (anxiety, sadness, etc) using affirmations, rationalization, etc is a dead end - it's not helping in the long run most of the time and is actively distracting and takes a lot of effort that could be put elsewhere.
The suggested path (that i am finding somewhat helpful) is to learn to act in accordance with your values regardless of how you feel and the story you tell in your head. It will still suck balls day to day, but on top of that, in the long run, you will feel more at peace and in control and respect yourself for following your chosen path.
The core realization is that while it may seem like your feelings (anxiety) and the story that plays in your head* is what makes up YOU, you may treat these as biological and early developmental "warnings" that your brain has learned to warn you of danger, and you most likely will feel this way for the rest of your life and won't have control over that, but you are actually FREE to choose how to act in response to these situations.
It may seem like these feelings and thoughts are making you act in a certain way, but they are not!
In your example, the feeling of financial anxiety could be accompanied by a thought like - "shit, how am i going to pay for that, why does it always happen to me, how do i fix it, why do i have to ruin it for myself and people i care about by being so sloppy, why does the universe makes it so hard for me and so much easier for others.." - and there's nothing you can do to change that feeling or that thought pattern in your head.
But what you can do is to use one of the techniques to (very temporarily) tune out of this thought train, check in with your values (eg taking care of loved ones), and choose a course of action that fits these as much as possible given the circumstances (eg find a way to spend quality time with them on a tighther budget) and DESPITE all that noise in your head.
A large chunk of the book is focused on consciously discovering your core values.
Is it easier to act with integrity (eg not snap at loved ones) moment to moment if you are not under financial stress or if that stress was not a part of your upbringing? Sure as hell! And given these unfair and idiotic and unnecessary circumstances that caused your internal machinery to work the way it does right now (stay alert at all times), it is your decision to commit to a further course of action - either numb your pain short-term (by ruminating, or alcohol, etc) or act in accordance with your values. Your (highly uncooperative ancient meat lizard) brain will still pull you towards a short term fix - because it is its primitive reward-seeking job, and you will inevitably loose control and let it win sometimes (esp under stress), but there is a part of you that can choose to patiently course correct your behavior towards your higher level values every time that happens. Or maybe you know that at this very moment you do not have resources to course correct much - and that's okay, as long as you are being honest with yourself and act accordingly (eg "i need to find a way to take better care of myself atm - to free up resources to take better care of others, it would be against my values to overwork myself to the bone and be so exhausted that i struggle to catch myself when I'm being mean to them").
One additional realization that i found helpful is that, in the face of such challenges, your brain is quite good at making you think that it knows how everything works - so you feel more in control, and so that the path of least resistance (doing nothing or numb your pain now) seems like the most rational one that agrees with your values. An antidote to that I found helpful is to remind yourself that you know very little about who you are (beyond the silly story playing in your head on repeat), and how you will react to things, and who other people are, and what's going on for them. So you can choose to plan your behavior to align with your values under the assumption that you know infinitely little about both yourself and others.
tldr is that pain is inevitable, but you may reduce (but not eliminate) suffering if you learn to act with integrity in the face of it
I am deaf but not completely deaf. Some sounds I can hear and a lot of the sounds that are loud enough to come to my attention are annoying. Often not the same sounds that annoy other people, too.
I'm reminded of a conversation with my friend who is fully Deaf from birth and a signer. Hearing people are a foreign culture for him. It's tricky to navigate the hearing world sometimes, when you don't know what what noises things make and how they are perceived. (Stacking metal or ceramic dishes is an almost silent experience for me, for example.)
He noted that the sounds hearing people complain about seem related to control. Thunder? Not a problem. Natural and nothing you can do about it. The beep of a truck backing up? That's due to a person. It could be controlled. Rain? Not a problem. Sprinkler system? That's ultimately due to a person. It could be controlled. Microwave beep? Could have been controlled; you're supposed to hit the stop button at 0:01. Dog barking? Annoying because again, supposed to be controlled. Wild birds cawing at the crack of dawn? Filtered out and ignored. (Mostly, some people do complain about those.)
Realizing you don't actually have control and that the other person might not actually have control is surprisingly relaxing, I've found. I suppose that's closely related to the "radical acceptance" of the article.
Your friend is remarkably prescient. I [1] can mostly "tune out and ignore" those "irritating" sounds that so many others complain, gripe, and stress about, and I have noticed the identical aspect your friend noticed, although I don't think I considered it a "control" aspect until now. Those that are "bothered" by some sound they ought to ignore always seem bothered by sounds where they believe they should have some ability to "control" their world (even, if, they really don't have any control over the truck in the alley beeping because it is reversing out). I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked by someone I'm with "aren't you bothered by ???" to which my answer almost always is some form of: "I hear it, but I don't let it bother me." Which almost always evokes an amazing surprise on the part of the individual who asked the question, often with a response along the lines of "I don't understand how you can do that."
[1] for the record, not deaf, so I cannot fully relate to nor understand your world.
The creator/founder of ACT struggled with tinnitus—you might be interested to read his account. [0]
[0]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/get-out-of-your-mind...
I've been reading No Mud, No Lotus recently (https://www.parallax.org/product/no-mud-no-lotus/) by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and this is very much the same advice.
This book has brought me immense joy, I'd recommend it to anyone.
It's fascinating how much Buddhism has gotten "right".
I certainly agree with your take on Buddhism, but I often find that sage advice is buried amongst spiritual waffle in Buddhist books.
But that's what religion is, wisdom and nonsense mixed together by people who didn't yet have the benefit of the great filter to separate the wisdom from the nonsense: science.
This article is about ACT which borrows these techniques from the ancient stoics, but there is a lot of similarities between stoicism and buddhism, zen especially.
From the article: Micro-stressors such as running late [...] represent the unavoidable pain that comes with being human.
Is running late really unavoidable? I think there are proven strategies to avoid it. (My wife and one of my sons on the other hand would agree that it is in fact unavoidable)
Edit: added missing word
Not the best example they could have used because the root cause is ambiguous.
I try to be prepared and on-time, but being late some times is unavoidable if there’s a car accident on the freeway that leaves me locked in a traffic, I get a flat tire, my flight is delayed, or any number of other unpredictable things outside of my control happen. I think that’s what the article is trying to talk about.
> Is running late really unavoidable?
Given the full breadth of "unavoidable", yes. As there can always be something completely out of your control that will make you late, despite your best efforts to be prepared.
But, for the majority of the habitually late, it is merely a direct result of their own actions, and so is indeed "avoidable" from that extent.
In practice? Yes it’s unavoidable. Unless you build in enough buffer to account for _every_ possible scenario out of your control, the probability of running late is non-zero.
In your case it may help to read it as: Micro-stressors such as others running late [...] represent the unavoidable pain that comes with being human.
In the long run, it is unavoidable. No matter how prepared you are, there will be something that will cause you to run late. It's just a matter of how frequently this happens.
I think 15% of people have a true mental block on timing
I’ve gotten a lot out of the writings of Albert Ellis whose work in the 50s and 60s became cognitive behavioral therapy. He would have said that it is irrational to demand that everyday inconveniences not exist, and by changing your thinking to accept and expect that unavoidable inconveniences happen, you will be less likely to allow these things to cause emotional distress.
He credits the ancient stoics and other philosophers for influencing his methods.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/rational-em... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5836900/
I don’t think anyone should tolerate what they find annoying, life is too short. If something or someone wants to keep you around, they should be less annoying to you.
Sometimes, it’s your own mind too. I have at times, pretty bad OCD in the form of terrible intrusive thoughts. They can trigger such distress in me that I’ve lost years of my life to them. Learning to tolerate them is essentially the first step to reducing their frequency in the conscious mind. That and meds but if I could just stop thinking some things, trust me, I would.
I think you’re missing some of the point. What will you do when you find yourself stuck in traffic or in an airport security line that takes an hour to advance? Substitute some annoying situation that is beyond your control. If you react by upsetting yourself, then the advice is for you; otherwise, I don’t think you need it.
I have seen some people turn themselves around with ACT-style therapy like this article introduces. Some can build up response patterns that turn minor daily annoyances into bigger problems that disrupt their mood for hours or even the rest of the day.
These behaviors of blowing things out of proportion or letting them get under your skin can be both learned and unlearned, in addition to developing organically. Therapy techniques like this are an intentional way to practice unlearning bad habits and replacing with undeniably better habits that you want to practice.
Raising and teaching young children is a learning experience for how some of these habits can develop and how to teach better responses to life's frustrations. Kids can get frustrated easily and their emotions run strong. Learning how to teach kids to control their emotions and respond appropriately to life is one of the core parenting challenges. I feel like I learned a lot about myself in the process of trying to figure out how to teach it to my kids and set a good example for them.
On this topic, I've also observed a few cases in teens and adults who seemingly learn bad habits about becoming overly annoyed by small things, primarily from social media influencers. There is an entire universe of social media influencers dedicated to grievance-based entertainment, where they produce content about things that make you angry or feel like the victim. I think it's supposed to be cathartic or helpful, but in the process of producing content they reach further and further for topics to turn into grievances.
The early trend of "emotional labor" being an invisible burden was the first time I saw this. The social media influencer version of emotional labor actually diverged from the literature definition and became an umbrella term meaning that your emotions were unpaid labor. If anyone did something that made you feel those emotions or you had to deal with someone else's emotions, you were supposed to feel burdened and victimized. There have been other trends like "mental load" that are variations of this idea that you have been made into the victim via other people or the world triggering your own emotional responses, which may have become exaggerated via these social influencers constantly bringing them front and center.
The triviality of this articles coping mechanisms annoyed me.
I’m increasingly finding things easier to deal with by categorising them into: things I can control; things that are beyond my control.
I find most people can't accurately sort the two though. They perceive what others do as within their control and it drives them mad
Getting locked up in jail will do wonders to cure people of this and many other things.
However, the side effects are very severe.
This article seems fine, but I would say that physical acts are really the core go-to for this. Things like running a marathon or Zen meditation.
There's nothing that helps you endure smaller unpleasant things more directly than just a regular practice of enduring them.
Can't read the article from phone.
That must be annoying
For what it’s worth, site works without problems on iPhone.
That's how they test your patience.
DAMNIT!!!!!