When you feel a negative feeling (annoyance, jealousy, anger, draining of energy, nervousness), find its root cause. Have a conversation (or a journal entry) where you do this. Some things that are helpful:
- replay the incident.
- to what extent were your feelings and actions influenced by your situation (ex. you’re angry at people in general today because your bike got stolen today, even though that had nothing to do with the people)?
- (fundamental attribution error) imagine how the other person’s situation might have influenced their actions.
- watch the incident from a neutral, third party point of view. What would they say the problem is? Who is acting reasonably?
- what biases did you carry to the interaction?
- what would the best outcome be? Do not use words such as “deserve.”
- what can you do to prevent the feeling? Is there something you can prime yourself with?
- be brutally honest with your feelings. Let the System 1 part of you rage it out, be misogynistic, racist, a jerk, etc. You’ll analyze and correct them later, but you can’t correct them if you aren’t honest with yourself about them.
Trigger is anytime you feel like you’re spinning wheels, any feeling of annoyance, any negative feeling, especially if it’s general annoyance, annoyance you can’t pin to a specific reason that you’d feel justified about explaining to someone.