I’ve tried the serenity prayer without god and I’m reading the subtle art of not giving a f*ck, but it’s not enough. The book is good though.
There are still moments when people really piss me off and while I’d like that not to affect me, my first instinct is still to feel anger and to hate the jackass making my life or work difficult. Sometimes I’d like to punch him in the face.
It could be the plumber who doesn’t come on the agreed day, the technician who ‘repaired’ a tv set, only to have the same issue the next day, a coworker who keeps yelling when I’m trying to work and even after asking him not to be loud, blatantly ignores me or coworkers who importunate me with stupid questions about my weekend.
A strategy I’m going to use now at the workplace is to ignore every non related job question from these people and only answer when they ask something job related. As for the plumber, the hate usually subsides after 2 days, but I’d like to be more resilient, not to jump to anger and hate so easily.
It’s like I’m emotionally very easy to trigger.
I don’t know if you agree with this sentence: A person who yells does it because he doesn’t have power to modify a situation to his advantage, because he is powerless.
This is how I feel sometimes.
This might sound odd, but start listening to metal music.
A lot of the lyrics in these songs are aggressive and downright violent (especially if you start listening to death metal and black metal), and for me, it helps to release my emotion.
For example, many people think “I want to punch that person right in their dumb face”. Listening to a song that talks about doing it, and mentally visualizing it, is very cathartic. I don’t really know how to explain it, but just letting go to the music and having it take all your rage and frustration helped me a lot going through similar situations.