We should all learn how to protect ourselves from the chaos surrounding us. Especially during these difficult times when chaos is all around us from protests to the epidemic that’s completely still unknown to us and a cause of stress for many.
Before we continue, it’s important to remember that there is good and bad chaos. We all know how to recognize bad chaos. The good chaos that we all need is more creativity, more freedom, spontaneity, and imagination, while bad chaos is closely related to bad stress.
How to protect yourself from chaos?
Yes, you are in charge and you can protect yourself from chaos. How? Here we list some ideas and like anything in life, this requires practice and repetition. To change any type of behavior you need practice so you don’t get discouraged.
We don’t have control of our environment and other people’s behavior but we have (or should have) control over our thoughts and emotions. Here is what we can do differently.
Know Yourself
Know what pushes your buttons. Don’t be afraid to step outside yourself without losing yourself. Understand the situation you are in from an outsider’s perspective. Understand that self-doubt is your ally. Do you know when you need help? When you need help, are you afraid to go outside and get the help you need? Knowing yourself is the first step of any change. How would you change if you don’t know what needs to be changed?
Put Self-Knowledge into Practice
One thing is to know yourself but it’s a completely different thing to operate if you don’t know yourself. Understand your feelings, slow down, and react when you are ready to react not when you are overwhelmed with feelings.
It’s not easy to put the knowledge you know about yourself in practice but trying will help.
How to Protect Yourself from Chaos? Slow Down!
Slow Down
To avoid reacting right away, you need to know how to slow down. When you operate based on learned behaviors, you need time to unlearn those behaviors and adapt the ones more suitable to your own well-being.
Before reacting and regretting the reaction, get yourself out of the situation, or don’t react at all. Slow down, gather your thoughts, and then react.
Understand the Context
Misunderstandings happen. If you think what you believe is true then you are wrong more often than you think. Maybe you have an interpretation of what someone said and what it means without realizing that it’s not correct. Ask before you come to a conclusion. Understand before you react. Spend more time understanding than reacting.
Fight Your Inner Gaslighter
We are all prone to some degree to fool ourselves by self-deception or judgmental thinking. If we are avoiding admitting the truth to ourselves it will be difficult if not almost impossible to change our behaviors. We need to learn the difference between intuition and misleading ourselves into believing what serves us at the moment. Also, we need to learn the difference between harsh or sometimes even inappropriate impulses and healthy spontaneity.
Learn How to Deal with Your Emotions
This is the crucial part. Becoming a master of your emotions is key to becoming a wiser version of yourself. It’s not about being a robot and having your emotions always under control but about understanding and being in charge of bad emotions. It’s a skill that requires practice. Again, it’s not about suppressing your emotions and ignoring them but embracing them and learning how to observe your emotions.
Learning how to have a grasp on your emotions is important when we are younger. You learn everything easier when you are a child, the same goes for emotions but it’s never too late.
