Spike your blood pressure from zero to sixty, in three seconds

During a recent family holiday dinner, our poodle shaggy plume of a tail knocked my drink onto the hardwood floor.

Splattered everywhere, including onto my shoes.

My mother about had a heart attack, while a few other relatives gasped audibly.

But for some reason, it didn’t bother me. Not even in the slightest. There was no pet scolding, hand wringing, pulse racing or expletive screaming. While continuing my conversation with my cousin, I grabbed some napkins, wiped up the floor, shook the soda off my leg, wadded up the paper into a ball, and calm returned.

The dog didn’t even thank me, but hey, nobody’s perfect.

Anyway, reflecting on this small moment made me realize something.

Everyone differs in their tolerance for frustration. Part of it comes down to nature, but for the most part, it’s nurture. This a skill we can learn.

Becerra and his team of psychologists created something called the emotional reactivity scale. Scientists did research to measure the typical ease of activation, intensity, and duration of people’s emotional responses. It’s a fascinating read.

Particularly the last category of duration, which measures how long people feel the way they feel. Here are several of the questions from the scale, starting with positive emotions. Think about how you might answer them.

*When you’re happy, does the feeling stay with you for quite a while?

*When you’re feeling positive, can you stay like that for good part of the day?

*When you receive pleasant news, do you stay enthusiastic for a while?

*If someone pays you a compliment, does it improve your mood for a long time?

Hopefully the answer to most of those questions is yes. Because the longer of a half life can we can generate around those positive feelings, the calmer our overall experience of life will be.

Next, let’s see questions for the negative emotions.

*When you’re upset, does it take you quite a while to snap out of it?

*When you have an angry episode, does it take you longer than other people to get over an episode?

*Once you’re in a negative mood, is it hard for you to snap out of it?

*When annoyed about something, does it ruin your entire day?

redu

This scale isn’t perfect, but it’s a useful window into our own habits around emotional regulation.

Ultimately, the goal is not to be consistently or insufferably positive; nor is it to avoid acknowledging and siting with our negative feelings. Both are important.

The key is not living in the extremes. Elevating our overall wellbeing by maximizing our emotional upside and reducing its downside.

How low is your frustration tolerance? Does something like a spilled drink at dinner spike your blood pressure from zero to sixty in three seconds?

If so, you’re not alone. But just know that you are likely to experience higher levels of emotional disturbance, which leads to greater mental distress. It’s not a smart long term strategy.

Ellis writes about this in several of his books about rational emotive therapy. The secret, he says, is deciding and working to become a much less disturbable individual. Making yourself into the kind of person who doesn’t make themselves severely anxious, depressed or enraged at the drop of a hat.

Or in my case, a soda.

It takes a lot of practice to become less disturbable. And ironically enough, the process itself is quite frustrating. Becoming a less emotionally reactive person can feel like an exercise in futility.

But spending your whole life choosing to enrage yourself about ordinary human misery is way worse. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How have you become a much less disturbable individual?