Patrik Edblad's Blog, page 6

3 Surprisingly Helpful Techniques to Deal with Difficult People

1. Expect Their Presence

If someone treats you poorly, it’s not their behavior that bothers you.

It’s your expectations about their behavior that does.

Imagine, for instance, that your boss gives you a snarky comment.

If you feel agitated, it’s not because of how your boss treated you.

It’s because you didn’t expect your boss to treat you that way.

But if you think about it, that expectation is unrealistic.

The world is full of annoying bosses and other difficult people.

You can’t escape them, so expect them to cross your path occasionally.

That way, they won’t startle you as much, and you’ll be better able to deal with them.

2. See Their Pain

Every person you come across struggles with pain and suffering.

Just like you, everyone you meet deals with daily stressors, difficult emotions, and devastating experiences.

Life is hard, and none of us will escape the tragedies of illness, loss, and death.

Keep that in mind when you engage with family, friends, colleagues, and strangers.

Remind yourself of our shared human condition and that you don’t know what the other person is going through.

Try your best to be kind, gentle, and compassionate.

That way, you’ll elevate your relationships and deepen your appreciation for others.

3. Forgive Their Mistakes

If someone mistreats you, it’s because they don’t know any better.

And since that’s the case, there’s no good reason to get agitated.

You can think of it this way: When someone mistreats you, they do it either unintentionally or intentionally.

If it’s unintentional, it doesn’t make sense to waste energy on their negligence.

And if it’s intentional, they have a character flaw, which is not your job to fix.

You can’t control how other people behave.

All you can control is how you respond to their behavior.

So, practice forgiving people for their negligence and flaws.

The faster you can let go of what they did, the quicker you can move on.

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3 Effective Ways to Relieve Stress and Anxiety

1. Adjust Your Breath

When you’re under stress, your breaths spontaneously become fast, short, and shallow.

That breathing pattern strains your body and creates a downward spiral of more and more stress.

So, it’s good practice to adjust your breath whenever you feel stressed.

All you have to do is follow the three simple rules of optimal breathing:

Breathe through your nose.Breathe into your belly.Exhale longer than you inhale.

By deliberately breathing slowly, deeply, and rhythmically, you’ll signal your nervous system to calm down.

And that, in turn, will spark physiological processes to put your body and mind at ease.

2. Practice Cognitive Defusion

If you’re having stressful thoughts, that’s not a problem.

It only becomes a problem if you “fuse” with the thoughts and can’t separate yourself from them.

Imagine, for instance, that you’re preparing a presentation for work, and your inner voice says, “Gah, I can’t do this! I suck at presenting!”

If you’re fused with that thought, you’ll accept it as an objective truth, which allows it to wreak havoc in your mind.

But thoughts aren’t objective truths — they’re subjective interpretations.

And you can remind yourself of that by practicing cognitive defusion.

Notice your thoughts, step away from them, and treat them as clouds floating through the sky of your mind.

That way, negative thoughts won’t stir as many negative feelings.

3. Accept What Is

Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Imagine, for instance, that you’ve injured your leg.

The pain you experience comes from the damaged tissue.

Any suffering you experience comes from your resistance to the pain.

“I hate this pain! Why won’t it go away? I wish it would just stop!”

Thoughts like these can add a tremendous amount of suffering to your pain.

So, try to accept what is instead of resisting it.

Witness and allow the painful feelings in your body and anxious thoughts in your mind.

Let go of your resistance and let your current situation be exactly the way it is.

It won’t eliminate the pain but it will drastically reduce your suffering.

And that will make your situation much easier to deal with.

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3 Powerful Techniques to Cultivate a Peaceful Mind

1. Ignore the Uncontrollable

If you focus too much on things you can’t control, you’ll feel helpless, anxious, and stressed.

So, get into the habit of separating what is outside and inside of your control, and then act accordingly:

If it’s outside control — let it go. Tell yourself, “I don’t care,” until you’ve developed a healthy indifference to the situation.If it’s inside your control — take action! Spend the time, energy, and focus necessary to create the change you want.

Strive to focus as much as you can on what’s within your control and as little as possible on what’s not.

It will make you much more effective, calm, and happy.

2. Choose Helpful Interpretations

If you feel annoyed about something, it’s not the thing itself that disturbs you.

It’s your perception of the thing that makes you feel annoyed.

To use psychology speak, it’s not “stimulus → response,” but “stimulus → perception → response.”

This is a powerful insight because it means you can control your state of mind.

You have the option, at any moment, to dispute unhelpful interpretations and replace them with more helpful ones.

So, whenever you find a negative feeling stirring in your mind, try to find a more beneficial way to frame the situation.

If you can change your perception, your emotional response will follow.

3. Love Your Fate

Don’t wish for things to happen the way you want them to.

Instead, wish for them to happen exactly the way they do.

This attitude is called “amor fati” and means “love of fate.”

To love fate is to perceive everything that happens, including the bad, as necessary parts of life.

This isn’t easy, of course, but it’s very powerful.

Because if you can adopt this attitude, you won’t have to worry about difficulties randomly showing up.

You’ll assume that whatever challenges are ahead have been waiting for you all along.

And instead of hoping they won’t come, you can anticipate them and use them to get stronger.

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3 Simple Strategies That Can Make You Mentally Stronger

1. Use Negative Visualization

This is a mental technique in which you deliberately envision the worst possible outcomes in your life.

When you wake up, remind yourself that this might be your last day alive.When you leave your home, imagine what it would be like to lose it.When you see a friend, remind yourself that this might be the last time.

Obviously, you don’t want to ruminate endlessly on things like this.

But a few seconds of negative visualization sprinkled throughout your days can be immensely beneficial.

It will give you a much deeper appreciation for the blessings in your life.

And it will make you much better prepared for when disaster strikes.

2. Practice Voluntary Hardship

This is a practice where you deliberately put yourself in uncomfortable situations.

The practice can take any shape you want, but here are some ideas you can use as inspiration:

Underdress for cold weather.Turn off the air conditioning in your car.Take cold showers.Do intermittent fasting.Drink water only.Sleep without a pillow.Do high-intensity exercise.

By occasionally putting yourself through voluntary hardship, you’ll improve your resilience, confidence, and courage.

And that will make you much better equipped for whatever involuntary hardships come your way.

3. Live With Little

You’ve probably heard stories about successful people wearing the same outfit every day.

They can easily afford to buy more clothes or even hire a stylist to do it for them.

Still, they choose to wear the same stuff day in and day out because it reduces the complexity in their lives.

It saves them valuable mental energy that they can use for other tasks.

And you can accomplish the same thing by practicing simplicity.

Try getting rid of unnecessary stuff and see how it affects your state of mind.

You’ll probably find that fewer possessions means more mental space.

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3 Powerful Ways to Eliminate Your Bad Habits

1. Remove the Triggers

We tend to assume that our personality drives our behavior.

But in many cases, our environment drives our behavior even more1.

So, whenever you want to break a bad habit, removing its triggers from your surroundings is a good practice.

Here are some examples:

If you stay up too late at night, remove the TV from your bedroom.If you spend too much time on your phone, turn off your notifications.If you procrastinate at work, use software to block distracting websites.

The fewer unhelpful triggers you have in your environment, the less willpower you’ll need to resist them.

2. Replace the Behavior

It’s much easier to replace a bad habit than it is to break it2.

Imagine, for instance, that you want to stop using your phone in bed.

Your current habit loop might look like this:

Cue: Get into bed → Routine: Use your phone → Reward: A sense of calm

If you stop using your phone, you won’t get a sense of calm either.

And that makes it very hard to stay away from your phone each night.

So, you might instead want to try a slightly modified habit loop:

Cue: Get into bed → Routine: Read a book → Reward: A sense of calm

If you can find a new routine that provides the same reward as the old one, it can stick surprisingly fast.

3. Create a Commitment Contract

A commitment contract is a binding agreement between your present self and future self.

The contract should include three parts:

Your goal — The change you commit to making by when.Something at stake — Like your hard-earned money.A referee — Someone who will hold you accountable.

You can make a physical contract of your own or use an online service to create a digital one3.

Just make sure that your goal is clearly defined, that losing what you put at stake would sting, and that your referee is strict but fair.

The more thoughtful you are with the details, the more likely you’ll be to honor the agreement.

FootnotesLewin’s EquationTiny Habits by B.J. FoggStickK and Beeminder are great alternatives.

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3 Proven Ways to Make Your Good Habits Appealing

1. Use Temptation Bundling

Whenever you want to make a habit more appealing, you can use this formula:

I will only (tempting behavior) while I (desired behavior).

Here are some examples:

I will only listen to my favorite podcast while I work out.I will only drink my favorite coffee while I work on my report.I will only watch my favorite show while I fold the laundry.

By combining things you want to do with things you should do, you get to enjoy both immediate rewards and long-term benefits1.

So, whenever a tempting behavior seems compatible with a desired one, consider bundling them together.

2. Celebrate Your Wins

According to behavior expert BJ Fogg, emotions create habits.

If you want a behavior to become habitual, your brain must associate it with feeling good.

And you can accomplish that by using Fogg’s “celebration” technique2.

There are many ways to celebrate, but you might for instance:

Do a fist pump.Tell yourself, “That’s like me!”Put on a big smile.

It might sound silly, but it can work remarkably well.

If you find a way to celebrate that makes you feel good, and do it every time you’ve completed a behavior, it will become habitual much faster.

So, always celebrate your wins—no matter how small they seem.

3. Track Your Progress

One of the easiest and most effective ways to change your behavior is to measure it.

Research shows that merely asking people to track what they do immediately and significantly improves their performance in that area.

For instance, studies show that people who use pedometers will increase their physical activity by 27% and walk at least one extra mile per day on average3.

What gets measured tends to improve.

So, it’s good practice to track your progress whenever you want to create a new habit.

Just make sure that the measure you choose truly creates the behavior you want.

FootnotesHolding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym: An Evaluation of Temptation BundlingRewire Your BrainPedometers Help People Count Steps to Get Healthy

 

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3 Powerful Strategies to Make Your Good Habits Stick

1. Plant Habit Seeds

You can’t rely on motivation when you create a new habit.

It won’t work because motivation is unpredictable and constantly fluctuating.

So, instead of trying to “get motivated,” make your habit really small.

This approach works exceptionally well.

It’s no coincidence that the most influential habit books are named Mini Habits, Tiny Habits, and Atomic Habits.

By starting with a tiny seed of a habit, you bypass the need for motivation.

You can do it every day whether you feel like it or not.

And that allows you to be consistent enough that your habit can take root and grow naturally over time1.

2. Use Commitment Devices

A commitment device is a way of proactively locking yourself to a particular course of action2.

It’s something you put in place now, so you will act the way you want to later.

Here are some examples:

Cutting up your credit cards to avoid mindless spending.Getting a long-term gym membership to work out regularly.Putting your alarm clock across the room to get up on time.Buying unhealthy snacks in small packages to avoid binging.Installing a website blocker to avoid procrastinating at work.

An appropriate commitment device can change your behavior instantly.

So, whenever you want to solidify a habit, think about how you can lock yourself into doing it.

3. Utilize Social Contagion

Attitudes, behaviors, and emotions spread spontaneously through social circles.

This process is called social contagion3, and it has significant implications for our lives.

For instance, fascinating research shows that:

If you share rooms with a student who has good grades, your GPA will likely increase too4.If your colleagues are often late for work, you’ll also be more inclined to come in late5.If you have a friend who becomes obese, your risk of becoming obese increases6.

It may not seem like it, but the people around you affect you in a big way.

So, deliberately surround yourself with positive influences.

With time, their good habits will become your good habits.

FootnotesTiny Habits by B.J. FoggThe Stomach-Surgery ConundrumSocial ContagionPeer Effects with Random Assignment: Results for Dartmouth RoommatesEmployee Lateness Behavior: The Role of Lateness Climate and Individual Lateness AttitudeThe Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years

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3 Simple Ways to Make Your Good Habits Automatic

1. Create Habit Algorithms

Anytime you want to establish a new behavior, fill out this simple formula:

After I have [existing habit], I will [new habit].

For example: “After I have brushed my teeth in the morning, I will do 20 minutes of yoga.”

Hundreds of scientific studies show that people who plan this way are about 300 percent more likely to achieve their goals1.

And the reason it works so well is that it forces you to turn vague intentions into specific algorithms.

That way, you’ll remove the cognitive load of continually deciding when to do the behavior.

Instead, you simply execute the algorithm whenever the situation arises.

2. Build Behavior Chains

Whenever you want to create a routine with several habits, use this formula:

[Existing habit] → [New habit 1] → [New habit 2] → [New habit 3], etc.

That way, you’ll turn the individual habits into one single routine where each behavior acts as a trigger for the next2.

If you, for instance, want to create a morning routine, your behavior chain might look something like this:

“Brush teeth → 20 minutes of yoga → 10 minutes of meditation → Take a shower.”

If you just brush your teeth, which you are already very likely to do, that will initiate the rest of the morning routine.

3. Design Your Environment

We like to think that we do what we do because of who we are.

But in reality, we often do what we do because of where we are.

The triggers in your surroundings are constantly nudging you in different directions3.

For instance:

If you have cookies on your kitchen counter, you’re likely to eat them.If you have credit cards in your wallet, you’re likely to spend money.If you have games on your phone, you’re likely to play them.

In many ways, you shape your environment, and then your environment shapes you.

So, ensure that the triggers in your surroundings support your desired habits.

FootnotesGet Your Team to Do What It Says It’s Going to DoHabit Stacking by S.J. ScottNudge by Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein

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Reframing: A Powerful Technique To Overcome Negative Emotions

In 480 BC, the Spartan warrior Dienekes was preparing his men to fight the Persian army.

As the Spartans were settling into the mountain pass of Thermopylae in central Greece, they got some alarming news.

A man had caught a glimpse of the Persians and reported that their army was vastly larger than anything he had ever seen.

“When they discharge their bows,” he said, “the arrows are so many that they block out the sun.”

But surprisingly, Dienekes didn’t get riled up.

Instead, he calmly replied: “Oh good, then we will have our fight in the shade.”1

The Power of Reframing

Dienekes response isn’t just incredibly badass—it’s also a great example of reframing2:

A psychological technique that consists of identifying and then changing the way situations, experiences, events, ideas, and emotions are viewed.

In other words, it’s a way of altering your perception of things.

And that can be very useful because it’s not the things themselves that disturb us; it’s our perceptions about them that do.

To use psychology speak, it’s not “stimulus → response”; it’s “stimulus → perception → response.”

And that’s an empowering insight because it means that we can change how we feel and act in any situation — simply by changing how we frame it.

There are countless ways you can reframe any situation you’re in, but you can use the following widely applicable frames as inspiration3:

The Cosmic Perspective Frame

Our minds tend to inflate our everyday problems.

So, even minor annoyances often appear overwhelming.

You can overcome this by taking a cosmic perspective.

Imagine that you’re floating so far away in space that the Earth is just a tiny dot in the distance.

Then, return to the difficulties in your life.

From this new vantage point, you’ll probably find that what weighed you down isn’t as heavy after all.

The Temporary Gifts Frame

We tend to assume that we own the things in our lives.

But that’s an inaccurate and unhelpful assumption.

Because, in reality, nothing is truly ours to keep.

Everything— including your health, possessions, and loved ones — is on loan.

They are temporary gifts you’re welcome to enjoy but eventually will have to return.

By adopting this frame, you’ll feel much more appreciation for the blessings in your life and much less like a victim when they are taken away.

The Mental Training Frame

Most of us consider adversities bad — obstacles that get in the way of our happiness.

You can change this view by perceiving obstacles as mental training opportunities:

A highway traffic jam is patience training.A meeting with an unpleasant person is compassion training.A setback in a personal goal is persistence training.

This way, you can turn everyday annoyances into challenges that make you stronger.

The Downward Comparison Frame

This frame is all about imagining how much worse off you could be:

If you’re frustrated while waiting in line at the store, be grateful that you live in a country where food is abundantly available.If you’ve had a cold for weeks, think about all the people in your local hospital fighting much more serious diseases.If you feel mistreated by someone, imagine all the people who have been oppressed, enslaved, and even tortured.

Changing your perspective this way will make your problems appear much smaller — or even laughably trivial.

The Historical Context Frame

It may not seem like it on the news, but whatever is happening right now has happened many times before.

Diseases, wars, natural disasters, poverty, and greed have all been around long before we were born.

The world hasn’t gone crazy — it’s been crazy all along.

Keep that in mind, and you’ll drastically reduce your anxiety, stress, and fear about what’s going on in the world.

How to Use Reframing

Here’s a simple 5-step process you can use to stop reacting instinctively and start responding deliberately:

Pause and reflect — Use strong negative emotions as a trigger to take a brief mental break.Notice your thoughts — Become aware of what your inner dialogue is saying about the situation.Question your assumptions — Let go of unhelpful interpretations about what’s happening.Consider alternative frames — Ask yourself how you can perceive the situation in a more helpful way.Reassess your feelings — Notice to what extent your new frame alleviates the negative emotions.

The more you practice reframing this way, the better you’ll get at it.

Change the Frames, Change Your Life

The quality of your life largely comes down to the quality of your thoughts.

And it’s in your power to choose whatever thoughts you want.

So, I encourage you to practice reframing in your everyday life.

Over time, it can fundamentally change how you think, feel, and act in difficult situations.

FootnotesDienekesA Concept Analysis of Cognitive ReframingHat tip to the Stoic philosophers for providing these frames.

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Goodhart’s Law: How to Create the Behavior Change You Actually Want

In the 1940s, paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald went on an expedition to the island of Java in Indonesia.

He wanted to find as many hominid bones as possible, so he decided to enlist the help of the locals.

As an incentive, he promised anyone who helped him ten cents for every hominid bone they brought him.

It seemed like a reasonable arrangement.

Until von Koenigswald, to his horror, discovered that the locals enthusiastically had been smashing big bone pieces into smaller ones to maximize their income1.

Goodhart’s Law

The story of von Koenigswald’s Java expedition provides a striking example of Goodhart’s Law2:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

It’s named after the economist Charles Goodhart, who described the same core idea in different words3:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

Goodhart’s Law highlights a phenomenon that we often overlook:

When we try to incentivize a behavior with a measurable target, we tend to focus so much on achieving the measure that we lose sight of the object we had in mind.

Here are some examples:

Education: Grades can make students focus on their tests rather than developing deep knowledge about each subject.Health care: Rating systems can make hospitals decline sick people, as those patients are more likely to lower the hospital ranking.Politics: Approval ratings can make politicians focus on being likable rather than getting meaningful changes done.

I could list many more examples here, but you get the point: Incentives often lead to unexpected and unwanted results.

Some Personal Examples

I’m a big fan of habit tracking, and I’ve been doing it for many years.

It’s a behavior change strategy that has generally served me very well.

But not always.

For instance, I’ve sometimes found that measuring my meditation habit can be problematic.

One of the reasons I meditate is to relieve stress, and the risk of ruining my meditation streak can actually become quite stressful.

So, on more than one occasion, I’ve found myself stressing over a habit that’s supposed to reduce my stress.

I’ve also been guilty of things like:

Decreasing my productivity by doing the easiest tasks first.Putting my health at risk by running with cold symptoms.Ruining my focus by rising early after a poor night’s sleep.

… Just to add checkmarks to my to-do list and keep my habit streaks going.

Not a very wise approach.

How to Leverage Goodhart’s Law

Goodhart’s Law teaches us that we can’t expect to improve something just because we start measuring it.

Incentives are way more complicated than that.

So, whatever you decide to measure, be aware of your tendency to “game the system.”

Continually review your progress and ask yourself if your target is really bringing you closer to the objective you have in mind.

If it’s not—tweak it or switch it out and try again.

Because unless the target is truly effective, even a perfect score can be perfectly useless.

FootnotesA Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson‘Improving Ratings’: Audit in the British University SystemProblems of Monetary Management: The UK Experience

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