16 - Frustration
How can you overcome frustration?
Everyone experiences one kind of frustration or another every day. Frustration should stimulate us, help us solve a problem, not yield to it. When we are crushed under it, it becomes a chronic type of negative feeling.
We become creative artists when we let our servomechanism create ideas and solve problems. But too many of us jam our creative mechanism with worry, anxiety, and fear, trying to force a solution with the forebrain, the seat of our thinking but not the seat of doing. This jamming of the creative servomechanism doesn't serve us at all. It inhibits us from our goals, putting a roadblock of negation in front of us, creating frustration.
There are five roadblocks of frustration:
1. We worry not only before making a decision but after.
We carry this extra fifty pounds of worry on our minds all day.
The cure? Express anxiety before we make a decision — not after. There are, let us say, five solutions to a problem. Anxiety is creative while we choose which road to take. Once we choose, however, we must stop worrying and call upon the confidence of past successes to guide us in the present. If we call upon the failures of the past to guide us in the present, we create immediate frustration.
2. We not only worry and fret about today, we worry about yesterday and tomorrow.
This sets up a pattern of instant frustration because we call upon past failures and future apprehensions to guide us in the present. We can't think positively with negative feelings.
The cure? Think only of today. Every day is a complete lifetime. Forget yesterday; lose it in the vacuum of time. Tomorrow doesn't exist; when it comes it is another day. Let your servomechanism do what it can do well: respond to the present. Try, try, try — now, now, now!!!
3. We try to do too many things at one time.
This creates tension instead of tone, spasm instead of comfort. When we try to do too many things at one time, we try to do the impossible.
The cure? Don't fight relaxation. Join it. Learn to do one thing at a time. This brings relaxation. This frees you from the burden of hurry and failure.
4. We wrestle with our problems twenty-four hours a day Without letup.
We carry our problems from the job, to the home, to our bed. This creates tension that produces frustration.
The cure? Sleep on your problem if you are unable to solve it. Sleep on it, not with it. Let your success mechanism work for you when you hit the pillow as you recall past successes.
5. We refuse to relax.
We don't know what it is. We just know the word, that's all. The spasm of repeated worry produces the spasm of frustration. You can't have someone relax for you. You've got to do it on your own.
The cure? You sit in a room of your mind and you relax there to cut the electric circuit of distress.
Relaxation overcomes frustration. Don't think it. Work for it. Do it — now! Remember these words of Plato,
"Nothing in the affairs of men is worth worrying about".
By Maxwell Haltz, M.D., F.I.C.S.