When you’re feeling stressed, it’s easy to slide into a mode of simply reacting to everything. Someone pushes your buttons and you snap. You go to instant anger and irritation, and also it’s easy to jump to conclusions about their intentions and motivation. You figure they are purposefully bugging you and trying to make your life harder.

Each time you catch yourself in a GRRRR mode, take a deeeeep breath… slowly let it out… deliberately relax your shoulders… clench your hands together and unclench — do that a few times to get your body to calm down.  Now work on your mind.

If you already blew up at someone, apologize for over-reacting.

From now on, each time your buttons are pushed, mentally create a short-circuit instead of REACTING.

The key steps needed to handle your hot buttons are:

• disable the wiring
• learn to pause to give yourself time to absorb what happened or what was just said
• think about how it relates to you
• respond

The process of disabling or disconnecting the wiring might take a while, but it is well worth the persistence. Keep it up and one of these days soon when someone pushes your hot buttons, you’ll find that you automatically go into the healthier mode of pause – think – respond.

your happiness guru,

Evelyn