We’re going to be discussing how to deal with annoying people. I am going to make a recommendation to you that you start to just slightly change your focus now. What can happen when we’re dealing with an annoying person is that we tend to focus an awful lot on the ‘what it is about them that’s so freaking annoying’, like the actual things, that they do and we get down into the sort of nitty-gritty detail about the specific ways in which they do it.
The reticular activating system – this is something in your brain and it works like a radar so that whatever you’re thinking about and focusing on it draws more of that into your consciousness. If you are constantly talking to yourself about the annoying person and checking if they’re doing the same thing again that annoys you, you are going to get very tuned into it.
One of the things that you can do is focus on something else and really tune into it. It doesn’t have to be something about that person, that annoying person, but it could be so that it starts to divert your focus away from the annoying aspects and onto something else. You get that reticular activating system working in a way that gets you to tune into the more helpful stuff instead.
The next thing we are going to stop focusing on the why!
Why do they do it?
Why do they do this annoying thing?
Why would they choose to do that?
Here’s the thing when we think about anything in the format of a ‘why’ it doesn’t help us to come up with helpful answers. Let me give you an example when we ask the question why do they do that freaking annoying thing or anything else that starts with a why! When we ask a ‘why’ question it gets us looking to the past and often negatively so if you ask yourself why they have to chew so loudly or something like that what that’s going to force your brain to do is to look back into the past to your memories, experiences and interactions with that person when they were doing that annoying thing and if anything if you’re going to come up with answers to that question like the answers typically speaking probably won’t be all that favourable to them, they’re not going to be all that positive.
What these two actions are going to cause you to do; it’s two good reasons to go into a negative emotional state of annoyance all over again one because you started reflecting back on times in the past where they’ve been doing that annoying thing and then you’ve gone and got yourself like when we recall stuff when we recall certain memories they will trigger us back into the emotional state that we were feeling back at that time.
If you think back to a time in the past when someone annoyed you; you can expect that your body is going to get a little tensed up or that your breathing is going to go a little bit squiffy or that you just start noticing negative emotions that you did not want to have so asked ‘why’ is bad for that reason.
The other thing as I say is not just that it causes you to sort of reflect but it causes us to come up with answers to that why question which are most likely to be negative so unless you’re really checking yourself like unless you’re being really conscious of the responses to that question if you just kind of like flippantly like go ‘oh I don’t have to be so annoying then’ your brain has a tendency to go ‘well because they’ve never been taught good manners and to chew their food with their mouth shut because they like sitting close to you and seeing the look on your face when they make those chomping noises and it will come up like your own mind will come up with a list of really unhelpful reasons to answer that why question so that’s why you shouldn’t ask why either of yourself or with anybody else.
By Gemma Bailey
