Why You Should Always Answer Your Text Messages
You may save someone a lot of stress…
I used to be notorious for not answering text messages because I used to get so many of them, or it used to be a way for me to control my communication with a person, or it used to be a way to show someone how I felt.
But I’ve come to learn, now being on the other side of not receiving a response to a text message that it actually really affects the person sending it. And your not answering can actually affect their well-being to an extent that, if left unchecked, can lead to the creation of wild explanations or a growing lack of self-confidence.
Over the past few years, I’ve dealt with several people who are just generally bad at answering texts. I thought it wouldn’t affect me as much as it has, but for some weird lingering reason, it seems to nag and gnaw at me a little in the back of my mind and little questions like:
Did I do something wrong?
Am I the one who caused this?
Do they hate me?
Is he/she angry at me?
What did I do?
They all seemed to crop up and start to eat away at my psyche and made me more self-conscience.
It’s even worst when a friend stops texting you for no reason why and you don’t know if it was something that you said or did or if you offended them, or if they arbitrarily decided to stop talking with you.
But basically, I’ve concluded that I never ever want to cause this kind of pain again on another human being. The kind of pain that causes someone so much stress and anxiety that they lose all perspective on normal reality and start to obsess over the myriad, almost unimaginable plethora, or possibilities that could be the result of them not texting back.
You may never find the reason they didn’t text you back. For anyone who’s ever been in a relationship, each person has a different idea of texting etiquette. Each person was raised in a completely different culture and has a completely different family history. They may have a weird relationship with technology and sometimes have to cut it out of their lives or go on radio silent in order to disconnect. They may only want to talk to certain people at the moment because they were metaphorically attacked in someway. They may do it out of a defense mechanism to hid from the world. Or they may be a big fat jerk, or just found out they have cancer. You just don’t know.
I hope we live in a future one day where this kind of problem doesn’t exist.
However, if this happens to you, don’t worry! Here are some ways to overcome that anxiety, (besides trying to push it out of your mind which sometimes makes it worst):
1. Reframe
Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
You just have NO idea what they’re going through. Oftentimes, we think of ourselves too much and that’s actually why we get hurt, it’s because we think it’s our fault, or we are the sole cause of it. But we give ourselves too much credit and who knows what that person may be going through. Statistics say that it most probably has nothing to do with YOU.
BE THE BOARD
In their book, The Art of Possibility by Rosamund & Benjamin Zander, one of their rules is called, “Be The Board”
This rule essentially means that we shouldn’t say things like “Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda” which we say far too often, and often lead to many negative outcomes and arguments. We shouldn’t say things like, “It’s all my fault…” but rather, we do have the choice to “take full responsibility” for how we arrived in that situation and possibly how we can get out of it.
We all have the chance to take 100% of the responsibility, not blaming ourselves per se, but being part of and acknowledging that you can have responsibility in how the situation happened, either by staying passive, or throwing the blame on someone else, or knowing a way to help fix the situation.
So you can reframe instead of seeing life happening to you, you can design the stage itself on which your life plays out.
2. State -> Story -> Strategy
One of the best frameworks and mindsets comes from Tony Robbin’s Unleash the Power Within workshops.
He basically says that our state of mind causes the way we tell the story of our day and the situation we’re in, which then leads to the strategy with which we approach the problem. So when we’re in a “lowered emotional state” we actually are so in our heads that we only see problems and not solutions.
We suffer a lot because we focus too much on ourselves.
Tony sometimes phrases this as, “The quality of your life is the quality of your questions.” Questions determine your focus. Most people — and I’m certainly guilty of this at times — spend their lives focusing on negativity (e.g. “How could he say that to me?!” or “How could this happen to me?”) and therefore the wrong priorities!
“Where attention goes, energy flows, and results show.”
~T. Harv Eker
So we have to be careful to not let our minds wander too far. In fact, they say if you think about something for more than 60 seconds, that thought will then start to affect your entire mood and thus your entire body and day.
3. Remember, Rule #6
If you ever get a chance to read The Art of Possibility, Ben tells this great story of Rule #6 which essentially means,
“Don’t take yourself so goddamn seriously.”
And basically, there are no other rules, only this one. But it’s a nice way to remember during the day if you kindly remind yourself to remember Rule #6 when situations get out of control because at that point, you can step back, laugh a little, and remember that we’re all in this thing called life together and we’re all works in progress trying to figure things out.
Calls (no pun intended) to Action
- The next time someone texts you, be sure to text them back within the next couple days (at the very least!) because you might just be causing them stress! They’re waiting for an answer :)
- And if you’re waiting to hear back from someone who just refuses to text you back, then remember that they probably have more stuff in their life then you may understand, (or care to understand), they may just simply be a jerk, or have different etiquette than you, and were raised differently from you. You don’t need their negativity in your life anyway. So just think of the future bigger picture and let it pass.
