by Mark Schiffman, M.S.
I had a meeting this past week in what seemed to be a galaxy far, far away. I was looking forward to the meeting itself, but not to the hour and forty-five minute train ride it would take to get there. Since the meeting was in the middle of the day, in combination with travel time, it would take up a huge chunk of the primetime of my day. After enduring the trek, I checked my e-mail after I got off the train, to discover that the person whom I was supposed to meet with had an emergency, and would need to reschedule.
As I felt anger and frustration building up, I took a deep breath and tried to slow down my thoughts to see if I can challenge them:
Irrational Self: “I am angry at the person whom I was supposed to meet because he shouldn’t have cancelled the meeting.”
Rational Self: “What do you mean he shouldn’t have cancelled the meeting? He had no right to? Are you placing an irrational demand on him?”
Irrational Self: “I guess so. But what if he has a really bad excuse?”
Rational Self: “He said he had an emergency. Can you not take that at face value? And let’s say it was for a really bad reason, how will it help you to get yourself angry?”
Irrational Self: “I guess it won’t. The truth is, the more I think about it, being angry right now would be completely useless. How would anger help? Even if it was justified in this case, which it probably isn’t, I would never confront the person who cancelled the meeting, so what function would anger serve?”
Rational Self: “Very rational thought! I would imagine that holding onto the irrational beliefs fueling our anger at this point would just serve the function of ruining the rest of our day. Do you think we can just accept the fact that inconveniences like this happen and regardless of who is at fault, the only ones that would really suffer from this anger is us?”
Irrational Self: “I think we can try that.”
While the internal dialogue is slightly modified from its original version, the main idea is the same. I often find it helpful to challenge the functionality of beliefs leading to anger. While there are times that anger does serve an adaptive function, it is important to evaluate, how much is it really helping me attain my goals and how much is it hurting? In this case it wouldn’t have helped me at all, and it would have just made me ruminate and complain for the rest of the day. Why would I want to do that? To paraphrase the Hulk, I don’t like me when I’m angry.
As I boarded the train for the hour and forty-five minute return trip, instead of getting angry, I chuckled, and thought, “at least I can get a blog post out of the experience.”
