Do you ever feel as if things in your life are swinging wildly back and forth from one extreme to another, and your emotions are roller-coaster-ing along with them? I’m sure this is a common occurrence among humans, and it’s understandable that you might react strongly to things going on around you, whether they are great or terrible.

I often hear my humans either celebrating because something awesome has happened, or cursing the world because something annoying has happened, and I wonder if they acknowledge how they’re letting external circumstances affect their emotional state.

Case in point! My primary human, Annie, was delighted yesterday when she got news that she’d passed a course she’d been taking. It was the culmination of over a year of effort on her part and she felt both tremendous relief and great joy at successfully completing the task.

The following day, however, external circumstances conspired to make the next steps of the process she was undergoing (in relation to her continuing professional development) both onerous and frustrating. And, understandably, she got angry about it. But this diminished the feelings of accomplishment and pleasure she’d been experiencing only the day before – about the same thing!

I’m sure Annie blamed the external circumstances for making her feel bad and ruining her previous joy. But it was her internal reaction to the situation that was doing that, not the situation itself.

You can’t always control the events of your life, and it’s inevitable that the pendulum of your experience will sometimes swing one way and sometimes the other. What I can suggest is that you always take a moment to review your situation, no matter what’s happening around you, and do what you can to decide how you want to react to it.

Annie subsequently expended some time and effort to rectify the situation and make progress towards her goal, but that was delayed and made into a more negative experience by her feelings of anger and frustration. And the only person impacted by that was her. If she’d taken some time to reflect, she might have been able to remind herself of her accomplishment of the day before and use that to mitigate her more negative feelings on the day after.

So, next time you’re gearing up to react negatively to events outside your control, take a breath and see if there’s a way you can change your reaction to make your feelings about the situation better.

Don’t forget to let me know how you get on – or if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in an upcoming blog post!

 

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