Breaking the Cycle of Frustration
Learning to avoid anger and embrace change
The other night I was dicing celery for dinner. I had the stalks all cleaned and laid out on the cutting board, I’d sliced them neatly length-wise, and I was on the final stretch, cutting them into tiny pieces. I was being careful. The cutting board was narrow and I could see — all too easily — the likelihood of some of the celery falling off the board and onto the floor.
And yet, despite my caution, despite my attempts to prevent it, I watched powerlessly as a lone piece of celery leapt from my blade, hurdled the edge of the cutting board, and plummeted to the floor.
My blood boiled. I ground my teeth in frustration, anger bubbling over. How dare that celery defy me! How dare it contradict my carefully laid plans! What was it thinking, leaping away from my knife so impudently?
News flash: celery has no brain. It cannot think, or make plans, or act independently. It fell to the ground as a simple consequence of physical forces acting on it. In hindsight, it makes as much sense for me to be angry with the celery, as it does for me to blame it on some random guy in Fargo.
And yet, my anger was directed entirely at the celery. That stupid thing, I said to myself. That stupid, worthless piece of garbage.
I’m sure I wasn’t hurting the celery at all with that tirade.
Anger in frustration has been a character flaw of mine for a long time. I don’t like that I do this — that I react mindlessly with rage when something inanimate blocks my plans.
My wife is my role model here — she’s amazing. If she stubs her toe, she gasps, hops around for a few moments, squeezes her eyes shut, maybe whimpers a little, but she never once blames the chair leg that she tripped on. If she drops something and it breaks, or if she drops a bit of food on the floor while preparing a meal, she just sighs and does what has to be done to clean it up. She never gets angry at these things. They are just things that happen. She gets over it, and moves on.
As I’ve considered the differences between my responses and her responses, I’ve decided that there is a cycle to frustration, and where I get stuck in an infinite loop, she’s figured out how to escape early.
The cycle goes something like this:
- I have a vision of what I want to do, or how things should happen. I will chop the celery, and it will stay on the cutting board.
- Something unexpected happens, disrupting that vision. A bit of celery falls from the cutting board, and onto the floor.
- I refuse to let go of that original vision so easily, even when it conflicts with what actually happens. The resulting dissonance manifests as frustration. The celery was supposed to stay on the cutting board! But now it’s on the floor! This wasn’t supposed to happen!
- I act out of anger as I try to deal with the change, fruitlessly assigning blame. Stupid celery! How dare it fall off the cutting board!
- Grudgingly, I form a new vision, one that tries to reconcile the original plan with reality. In the back of my mind, the original plan is some sacred ideal now, and any new plan must still come as close to it as possible. Okay, fine, some celery fell, but NO MORE WILL BE TOLERATED.
- Repeat from step 2.
Step one is inevitable. Nothing wrong there. You kind of need a goal in mind when you start, some idea of how you want things to turn out.
Step two? Also inevitable. None of us are prescient, or omnipotent, right? (Right?) We’re going to be making plans with incomplete information, and executing on those plans with imperfect ability. There are bound to be gaps in our plans and our abilities, through which unanticipated events can fall.
Step three, now. I refuse to let go of that vision, and that’s one part of the problem. Whereas my wife can shrug her shoulders, say “I didn’t see that coming,” and move on, I tend to cling tenaciously to what should have been. How pointless is that?
Step four? Also problematic. Wasted energy, too. While I’m over here blaming celery for being overly acrobatic, my wife is already bending down to pick up the adventurous tidbit. While I’m going red in the face, trying to force reality to bend to my will, she’s accepted that the plan has changed and is already moving on, already forgetting that the celery fell at all.
And step five — all it needs is for the grudging aspect to be left out, and a willingness to acknowledge that the original plan may have been flawed. Yes, plans change. Let’s embrace that! And while we’re at it, let’s also acknowledge that these new plans are probably going to need adapting and fine tuning, too.
In the end, it’s all still a cycle, but I want to turn it from a cycle of anger and frustration into a cycle of growth and iteration. Learn! Change! Grow!
Ultimately, this is all very easy to talk about. Changing a lifetime of behavior, though — that’s hard. But I’ve gotten to the point where, after erupting in anger over some perceived betrayal, I’m able to recognize what happened, and think about it in terms of the cycle. That’s progress, right?
Eventually, someday, maybe I’ll be able to recognize what’s about to happen, and adjust my response. Maybe someday I’ll be able to respond like my wife does, calmly and quietly.
That sounds so nice. I can’t wait!
If you liked this article, let me know by clicking the little heart below! I’ve been writing a lot lately about self improvement, based on personal experience and observation. If you liked this one, you might also like Disrupting Your Comfort Zone, or Grumble Less.
