Questallia

Anger is a natural human emotion, thus a normal reaction of a person to external stimulus. Yet, if not well managed, anger can cause a lot of troubles such as conflicts at workplace, fights in the family, rejection of others, loneliness. Anger damages personal relationships. You may say that in this case, it is desirable to get rid of this emotion for good. Well, things are not quite like this. Think of progress: why do revolutions occur? Because of people getting angry with the current system, wanting to make it better of to change it. Why are there so many discoveries and inventions? Because of some people getting angry with items around them not fulfilling their needs entirely. Aristotle had some great words about anger:

Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.

Briefly, that is anger management. How to do it, that is another story and it needs a lot of practice. Next time you come into a situation that makes you angry, try to follow the next steps:

• Notice the internal changes in your body immediately after being exposed to the anger stimulus. You will probably feel your blood flow intensifying, a raise of your pulse, an intensification of your heartbeats. This step should last for less than a second.
• Don’t react yet, let your brain become fully conscious of the changes within you, take deep breaths and don’t think of anything else than the anger flow within your veins. This step can last a few seconds.
• If you managed to follow the first two steps, you are already less exposed to an anger burst, only due to the simple fact that you became aware of the process of getting angry. And you delayed your reaction with only a few seconds, not more. Now you can think: evaluate the damage. Then think of what more damage your anger burst may bring in additionally. Keep in mind that whatever is upsetting you so badly, it was already done, and that life has no undo command, so you would never ever be able to re-establish the initial state of things.

Now, if you still feel like going furious, do it, but notice the changes in your body. Do you feel the heart pumping a huge flow of blood towards your head? Do you feel your neck veins swallowing while blood crosses them? Do you feel like your eyeballs don’t have enough room in their orbits and tend to come out? And your voice! Pay attention to your voice when shouting: isn’t it funny how it gets higher and higher until a final point where it almost disappears? Hear your words: can you spot anything constructive in your angry speech? I very much doubt that.

The anger moment has gone. Isn’t it true that you are still under its effects? Notice how much time your body needs to relax and to gain back its initial state. I bet you still feel some reactions even 10-15 minutes after the explosion. This means nothing but useless ware for your organs, a burden for your heart and veins, an additional job for your brain. Besides, this does not solve anything, you still have to evaluate the situation and take some adult decisions.

It will probably take you a while until you manage to go through all 5 steps. But if you succeed, it will be a very rewarding experience, trust me. After practicing this enough to become a habit, you can step further and try to eliminate step 4 from the process. What will happen: you’ll get directly to the constructive and positive way of thinking, your feedback will improve and the others will like you more and they will recognize you as a leader, able to show them the way right out of trouble. And your internal organs would be willing to come out to give you a hug! You will save your heart from beating like crazy, your head from preparing to blow up and you’ll protect your vocal cords. Remember that life is nothing more than a chain of experiments: you don’t have to do this for the rest of your life. You set a time for experiment, you do it and evaluate the results. If you are happy, go on. If you are miserable, stop it and try something else. We change with every moment. We re-write our definition with any new idea, with any new experiment, with any new friends or other connections we make. This is being alive in my vision and I challenge you to give it a thought. If you can’t do this, you can always try the alternative offered by the best yoga certification program. Yoga teaches you how to relax and it is highly beneficial for your mind and body.

I started smoking in my early 20s. Since getting this new habit I smoked over 15 years, an average of 20 cigarettes per day, in total, more than 100,000 cigarettes. As I was in good health, I never felt any consequences of this slow poisoning. I liked to smoke mostly when I was working and when I was chatting with friends. It gave me self-confidence; it made me more creative, more optimistic, a better presence for the others. Besides, all my friends were already smoking, and I just wanted to be recognized as one of them, I did not want to have anything peculiar or different, I wanted to go with the flow.

It is one year now since I quit smoking and I don’t think I’ll ever smoke again. My life improved a lot, in new ways I never thought of in connection with quitting smoking. For instance, my life in hotel rooms got better. Before, I used to ask for a smoking room whenever I checked in a hotel. Smoking rooms have a bad smell, regardless the hotel category or cleanliness. Maybe they don’t smell if the hotel is new but this I cannot tell. Many times I had to endure that bad odor, being ashamed to go and ask for another room at the reception. I noticed that improvement from the first time I checked in a hotel as non-smoker and I was impressed of the nice flowery scent of the room. That was a hotel I used to stay in many times before, so I could immediately tell the difference of this new sensation.

I bet you are now asking why I stopped and how I did it. I can’t tell you why, but I can tell you how. One day I got out of cigarettes and I was not in the mood to go out to buy some, as I was working on something new and I did not want to interrupt my ideas. So I postponed smoking for a while, to get ready with my new project. This is the keyword here: postponed. I never quit smoking, I just postponed it. When I finished what I was doing, it was already evening, I was hungry, so I ate something, then I got this idea: what if I don’t go to buy any cigarettes today? Will I feel better tomorrow? And I started this experiment of seeing if not smoking for a few days can lead to some improvements, such as climbing 6 floors and the stairs and not getting tired at all, or running for one hour and not getting out of breath.

Do you see my point? I never quit smoking. I only postponed it for the sake of my experiment. I must tell you that I never believed all those who were claiming that smoking hurts the body, damages the organs or whatever other stuff like this. How could I ever believe such stories when I was the living proof that they were wrong: I was there, with 15 years of smoking behind me and feeling great, in a wonderful shape, taking relatively long and difficult mountain hikes. So I decided to try to see if there is any evidence of truth in that. With my mind set to the new experiment, it was rather easy not to smoke, but I got some cigarettes in the house, to have them just in case of emergency, as my friends who unsuccessfully tried to quit several times said that the worst of all was the thought that they were out of cigarettes.

After two weeks of experiment, I decided to stop it. I did not notice any improvement of my health or of my sport abilities. I still got tired at the 4^th floor when climbing the stairs, I still could not run one hour at once, I felt exactly as I used to feel before. So I took one cigarette and lit it. Then something unbelievable happened: the first smoke was really bad, awful, and stinky. I almost chocked. After I tried the second one, a thought just crossed my mind: how could I ever be able to smoke? It was so bad that I did not feel any urge to finish the cigarette. Later on, I tried again and I had the same bad taste so I went for postponing again the smoking. It’s one year now already and I’m still postponing my next cigarette. I don’t notice a health improvement yet, but I don’t notice a desire to smoke either. Besides, it seems that you are what you think of you. I used to think at myself as being a smoker. In time, I started to reconsider this by thinking of myself as non-smoker, and so I became today.

And I discovered that I did not lose any friend because of my new attitude, I did not lose my natural humor and optimism and I did not become more stupid. I did not get fatter, either.

Meanwhile, thinking of this, of how many people try hardly to quit without success, and of myself achieving this without even wanting to, I realized why I did start to smoke it the very beginning: I never knew what to do with my hands. Smoking gave my hands an occupation, it made me look like doing something, even when I was doing nothing, when I was just day dreaming. Now I know that my hands don’t need such an occupation, they don’t need acting at all. I know that hands follow the brain, not the other way around.

And I can wear smaller purses, as I don’t need to carry with me so many items anymore.

I read a lot about people who suffer severe health injury caused by smoking and who are not able to quit for good. For them, I have this piece of advice: try this new experiment of postponing smoking, not for two weeks, but for twenty years, why not? Develop an internal dialogue with yourself on the topic of who you are and what defines you. Define yourself, not for a lifetime, but for a day time. Today I am a non-smoker. Today I’m acting as an optimist. Today I’m a dreamer. I can choose in the morning what I want to be and how I want to be acting and behaving for the rest of the day and stick to that, since it is only for one day. And if I choose the same thing for 365 mornings in a row, then at the end of the line, I’ve been a non-smoker or an optimist for a whole year.