How to Calm Your Brain During Conflict [Infographic]

Conflict can cause negative emotions to surface such as anger and frustration. These negative emotions can lead to physical effects such as loss of energy, feeling sick, and can keep you from seeing the problem clearly.

By controlling how you react to conflict it can help you to solve problems quickly and effectively – and without ruining your entire day.

I recently had an insurance problem where the computer apparently forgot to send my insurance policy to the insurance company.  A family member needed hospital treatment and the hospital told me that I had no insurance. “What? Of course I do. Let me go figure this out.”  That started a three month process of calling the insurance company and going back and forth. If I did not figure this out it would have left me with a 31,000 hospital bill.

So yeah. I was stressed out. The first two weeks I freaked out and was frustrated with everyone I talked to.  However, I made a terrible mistake. I chose to talk about my problem with friends and family. What this did was cause me to prolong my frustration and only revved me up even more. Three days after this happened I actually became nauseous and sick for an entire day.  After two weeks I laughed at myself because I realized that I was just making the situation worse.

In the book  “Don’t Bite the Hook: Finding Freedom from Anger, Resentment, and Other Destructive Emotions” the author describes a split second where you can feel the emotion of frustration and you can either ignore it or bite it. Once you bite it, though, that’s it. The frustration will open up like a flood gate. I had realized that I was scared and did not know if this problem was going to work out so I sought comfort from friends and family. By doing this I bit the hook in a big way and the frustration took away my time, energy, and focus.

Although I had to continue to follow up and there were still situations that arose that knocked on the door of my frustration, I chose not to talk about it with friends and family and did not dwell on it for very long. I was then able to look at what was happening and deal with my problem without it running my life and taking up all of my time and energy.

Here is an infographic that explains how conflict affects you physically and some simple steps to handling situations calmly and efficiently.