Sometimes it’s just as simple as changing your perspective a little.
My uncle has pretty bad anger issues. Almost every workday he’d have to drive downtown, usually when the traffic was the worst (and he hated downtown driving to begin with), and he’d get super stressed and rage about it. He’d try to make it so he didn’t have to go downtown, but almost without fail something would come up and he’d be stuck doing it.
He told me he realized it wasn’t healthy, so he tried fixing it by changing it from thinking of it as ‘goddamnit I have to drive downtown again after I tried so hard not to!’ to ‘oh well, have to do my daily downtown trip’. And then when he occasionally didn’t have to go downtown, it became sort of an extra bonus treat.
He was amazed at how much anger he lost, just with a small change in thinking.
Sometimes it’s just as simple as changing your perspective a little.
My uncle has pretty bad anger issues. Almost every workday he’d have to drive downtown, usually when the traffic was the worst (and he hated downtown driving to begin with), and he’d get super stressed and rage about it. He’d try to make it so he didn’t have to go downtown, but almost without fail something would come up and he’d be stuck doing it.
He told me he realized it wasn’t healthy, so he tried fixing it by changing it from thinking of it as ‘goddamnit I have to drive downtown again after I tried so hard not to!’ to ‘oh well, have to do my daily downtown trip’. And then when he occasionally didn’t have to go downtown, it became sort of an extra bonus treat.
He was amazed at how much anger he lost, just with a small change in thinking.