Use These Mental Tricks to Prepare for Unpleasant People
The mindfulness craze has already reaped a myriad of benefits – improved sleep, increased productivity, avoided mindless snacks, and more.And now we can add another good thing to this list: researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of California at Davis found that mindfulness practice can be used to enhance compassion, which in turn can help all of us deal with the annoying (or downright) difficult people we face on a day-to-day basis.
In a new study published online last month in the journal Mindfulness, researchers analyzed the day-to-day trajectories of 51 adult participants in Stanford’s 9-week Kindness Cultivation Training (STT). An educational program designed by a group of clinical psychologists and contemplative scientists, including the Dalai Lama’s chief translator of English, Tupten Jinpa, CCT teaches people how to choose more compassionate thoughts and actions and develop relationship skills.
During the course, participants used the app to record twice daily assessments of four emotional states – anxiety, calmness, fatigue, and alertness – along with their ability and desire to control their feelings. They also talked weekly about their strategies, including methods such as changing their reaction to a situation to simply accepting the situation.
Results? Researchers have found that actively practicing compassion – the ability to recognize someone else’s suffering and be motivated to relieve that suffering – not only reduces anxiety, but also increases overall calmness.
And more importantly, they found that you can actually teach people to be more compassionate.
Looking to train your brain at home with multiple CCT concepts? Try these tips from the Wall Street Journal :
- Pay attention and notice: Pay attention to how you feel in the situation and how your body reacts to it. Find out what you need. You may just need a few deep breaths to calm your mind and those sweaty hands.
- Put yourself in the other person’s shoes: take the time to look at life from her perspective. Recognize that, like you, she has family and friends, goals and dreams … and baggage.
- Let it go: Recognize that you are worried about the person or situation, and allow that thought to move on to allow the part of your brain that is trying to run or fight to relax and not get stuck in a loop. (In particular, daily meditation can help train your brain to let go.)
- Practice leads to excellence: start where is easier. Practice compassion for yourself and your loved one. Then relax into a more complicated relationship.
And if you want to go further, Stanford’s CCT program, now in its eighth year, is open to everyone, and you don’t need to be in California to attend classes. More than 100 certified teachers teach classes year-round in the United States and 10 other countries. Through meditation and mindfulness practice, lectures and interactive communication exercises (and homework), participants learn to develop resilience, strength, and courage in the face of suffering, both others and their own.