What To Do When Feeling Frustrated?
Daniel Tiger sings, “When you’re feeling frustrated… Take a step back! And ask for help.” I have a few more thoughts on this though. Take a look.
Definition: feeling or expressing distress and annoyance, especially because of inability to change or achieve something.
Meaning: Feeling frustrated typically means there is a blocked goal. Continued and increasing levels of frustration can lead to the secondary emotions of anger and bitterness.
What to do (general): Take a deep breath. Say out loud, “This too shall pass.” Observe the feeling. Breathe again. If you haven’t read the general primer to the emotional intelligence blog, it will help with the basics and provide a foundation for managing any emotion. For me, the most important thing has been not judging my feelings. Emotions are neither good nor bad, positive nor negative, healthy nor unhealthy. They are neutral. They are trying to tell you something. They just are.
What to do (specific): Frustration is trying to tell me that there is a goal - some thing or outcome I want - and that goal is being blocked. Whether in a journal, e-mail, or with a friend, I identify the goal and identify the goal, then identify the block. Feeling frustrated is very helpful when the result is trying even harder to achieve your goal. Once I overcome the block and my goal is met, the frustration dissipates most of the time. Increasing levels of frustration may motivate me toward greater effort or different methods for achieving my goal. If my “heavy lifting” changes my circumstances, the result might be feeling proud. And if the circumstances change on their own and I get what I want, frustration may also resolve. My feeling frustrated can sometimes appear to go away if I no longer think I want my goal, but that really just pushes the feeling away. I get disconnected from frustration because I’ve reached my limit. I would disconnect from my emotions so I know longer feel frustrated. If you are in touch with your frustration, you are at least one step ahead of me. I have a history of disassociating from my feelings so that I’m not aware of them. It takes tremendous emotional intelligence to recognize I am feeling something, and then put a name to it. Frustration. If I don’t want to feel frustrated anymore, there are several things I can do.
Abandon the goal - when my goal is something that depends on other people or circumstances outside of my control, the goal is setting me up to experience negative emotions. The first step is to relinquish the goal. A common illustration is the monkey trap. In India, to catch monkeys, they place a banana inside a cage with bars. The bars are spaced far enough apart that a monkey’s hand and arm can fit through but close enough that the monkey’s closed fist gets trapped. The monkey comes, reaches her arm in to grab the banana, and gets stuck. Grasping the banana causes her to make a fist, and her larger fist plus banana cannot escape the cage. The monkey will attempt in frustration to extricate herself, but will fail until she gets captured because she is unwilling to let go of her goal.
Change the goal - next, redirect your energy and choose a goal that does not rely on other people or circumstances. Choose a goal that depends solely on your own time, energy, resources, and motivation to achieve. Make it small and discrete. Let’s look an example: addictive behavior. “Hold on,” you might be thinking. This seems like exactly the type of goal that does not depend on other people or circumstances. Not engaging in addictive behavior ______________ is something that a person with the resources and motivation should be able to accomplish, right? Not necessarily. Trying to stop an addiction in this way is referred to as “white knuckling” named after what happens when you clench your fists. The goal of trying to stop an addictive behavior heavily relies on circumstances outside of my control. My brain chemistry for one. If I admit my history and upbringing, I realize that years of flooding my brain with dopamine has increased my need way above reasonable levels. I will have withdrawal symptoms that make me miserable if I try to just stop my addiction cold turkey. So, I change my goal. Instead of saying, “no, no, no, no” to my target behavior, I focus on taking a deep breath when I feel tempted and triggered. I abandon the goal of trying not do addictive behavior ___________. I change my goal to ASKING FOR HELP when I am I want to engage. My goal is to make a phone call to my sponsor. My goal is text friends and ask them to pray for me.
To expand this step and make it applicable to any situation requires work. When I have identified the goal I wish to lay down because of its endless frustration, I can productively identify a new goal - one that does not rely on other people or circumstances. The types of goals will be personal goals for character growth. It will be goals around perspective, thought patterns, and above all - attitudes. I heard a sermon once where the speaker recounted a story where he was counseling a teenager who felt completely controlled by her parents. “I feel like a slave. I feel like they are tying me up.” The speaker had compassion and validation for the young girl. After giving her time to express her feelings, he wanted to empower her to say that there was “no rope tying up her attitude.” I don’t know how I would feel if I heard those words in that moment myself. But as a listener to this story, it felt freeing. Even in the worst circumstances, I had power over my own attitude.Create meaning - I started out this section deciding between find meaning and discover meaning. I settled on create meaning to emphasize my active role in this step, but there’s a caveat. It’s that I create meaning alongside my Creator. My higher power, Source, the universe, or Holy Spirit. This step is a process. I try to find meaning, but in the end meaning finds me. When I was a teenager, I was an officer of my church youth group. We did not have a youth pastor for a long time, and it felt like I was doing everything by myself. I hated it. But it felt like a calling of mine.
I read this story once where God asked a man to push a giant boulder up a hill. It was an immovable boulder, and no matter how much he pushed it would not move. But day after day, the man pushed with his full strength using his arms, legs, chest, and shoulders on this rock. After years of this task, the boulder was basically in the same place. Finally, the man lost it and cried out to God about this impossible task. The man was bitter at God and called him an evil task master! God responded to him, “Look at your body.” From pushing on the rock, his entire body was chiseled. His arms and calves were well-defined. He had grown in strength both physically and mentally. It was then that God rolled the boulder up the hill Himself.
After I read the story, I created the meaning. I saw that in my loneliness, that I had developed leadership skills that I would have never known. I grew in my perseverance and in my compassion for other communities that were flocks without a shepherd. I looked at my own spiritual body. It was chiseled from head to foot. I remember that I grew up during that time. I also know that when the time was right, God brought that great youth pastor to our church and was a faithful servant to the group and significant mentor to me.
I came across an article written in the Huffington Post by Heather Kopp, “Why Christians Make Miserable Addicts” I then found the book she wrote, Sober Mercies. So many nuggets of wisdom in there. One that I’ll share is that in her pursuit for sobriety, Heather writes that she didn’t get sober right away, but she learned how to ask for help, “which was perhaps the greater miracle.”
