People experience frustration in a number of different ways and areas in life. Your day may start with frustration when you’re running late and need to get your child ready for school. You may feel frustrated at work if deadlines are missed and the work piles up on your desk. Or, you may feel frustrated when your partner doesn’t seem interested in spending time with you anymore like he used to.
Regardless of why you are frustrated, there are steps you can take that will help you cope with these emotions and resume your sense of balance in life. Everyone faces obstacles. Some obstacles are more challenging to overcome than others. But with the right coping strategies, you can do it.
Here are 7 ways to help you:
- Take a break. Pause for a few minutes and ask yourself: “Why am I so frustrated?”. Find out what is bothering you and then decide whether it is worth pursuing, if you can shift some aspect of the frustration or if it’s best left alone. Once you have made this decision, move on with your life, and don’t let this frustration overwhelm you again later.
- Get some exercise or take a walk around the block when you’re feeling overloaded. Exercise releases endorphins, which makes you feel better and much less frustrated about what’s going on in your life. High performers regularly exercise first thing in the morning to get the “happy hormone” flowing before tackling any of their daily tasks.
- Declutter your mind by focusing on positive things. This can be difficult when you feel frustrated, because you want to do something to help yourself feel better. However, if you shift your perspective to focus on the things that you are grateful for or notice what is going right about a situation, you will be able to broaden your outlook and begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
- Focus on solving the problem or situation that’s giving you frustration rather than getting caught up in it. Instead of getting frustrated with how much is piled up on your virtual or actual desk, take a moment to make a list of urgent and important tasks versus non urgent and non-important task and start fresh in the morning with a clean slate.
- Spend some time alone to reflect on what you’re feeling. But don’t just sit in the house and reflect. Go to the gym, or go outside and enjoy nature while you reflect on your situations. You will find that the fresh air and body movement helps relieve your frustrations instantly because they allow you to mindfully refocus your thoughts and feelings in a positive way.
- Talk it out with someone in your support circle. Tell someone you trust about your frustrations and be willing to receive constructive feedback about your potential blind spots. They will probably be appreciative of your candor and may even want to help solve the problem that’s bothering you.
- Keep a gratitude journal. Think about all of the things and people that you are grateful for in your life. This will help take your mind off of things that are making you frustrated and remind you of everything good in life. I heard a top business mogul say before that he wouldn’t get out of bed each morning until he mentally reviewed everything he was grateful for to the point that it brought tears to his eyes.
Finding ways to return to a state of harmony when we are frustrated is important for a number of reasons, including how stress affects your health. If you let your frustrations get the best of you, they are likely to consume your mind, send you in a negative tailspin and make you irritable.
This will interfere with how you interact with others. It can lead to conflicts and arguments in your relationships with family, friends, or a partner, which can put stress on other areas of your life as well. It’s important to recognize when you’re feeling frustrated and take steps to mindfully deal with those emotions rather than bottling them up inside, where they may eventually explode if not dealt with in a productive manner.
Jerica Glasper is an Optimal Performance Strategist and Certified Mindset Coach at www.OptimalMindShifts.com.
She works with organizations and professionals to provide emotional intelligence training, entrepreneurial mindset development, energy and stress management.
She guides CEOs, managers, teams and entrepreneurs to understand the driving forces that motivate them to think, believe and behave the way that they do.
Through science-backed tools and techniques, her clients are able to apply the power of emotional intelligence to improve how they communicate with themselves, each other and customers, which enables higher levels of empathy, teamwork, productivity, career enjoyment, and customer satisfaction, so that companies can optimize business outcomes.
