15 exercises to increase your frustration tolerance.
Increasing the tolerance for frustration can have positive effects, both for our personal development and for our interpersonal relationships. Let's see how to achieve this effect.
Frustration tolerance affects not only how you react to any results you achieve, but also the attitude you adopt in the first place. But how much does frustration tolerance affect your behavior, your relationships and your personal growth?
Being tolerant of yourself and your frustrations is part of learning the art of living. As you know, life will not always satisfy your wishes. There are times when the path to what you long for is straight while at other times you will only encounter obstacles. What should you do in the latter cases? Be discouraged or accept the difficulties?
Frustration tolerance
As humans, we tend to have heterogeneous desires. For example, wanting a car, a job, a certain cell phone, a university degree, etc. Therefore, you tend to strive for what you want and wage a constant struggle to eliminate what you don't like. Both having and letting go are born out of longing for what you lack. For example, "I have to have a motorcycle" or "I have to stop being this way to become a better person". As humans, we are all creatures with needs.
But what happens when life seems to insist on blocking your path towards the realization of your desires? You get frustrated. The tension between what you long for but cannot have generates anger, feelings of inadequacy, discomfort, anxiety and despair. This feeling is based not only on the difficulty of achieving what you want, but on the way in which you interpret and deal with your unfavorable results.
The impossibility of achieving everything you aspire to is an inherent aspect of being human. The frustration you experience brings you down to earth. What can you do about it? The key lies in being tolerant and learning to manage and accept the discrepancy between what is ideal and what is realistic.
Frustration tolerance is central in this context. It is the ability to deal with unpleasant feelings in the face of events that do not go as planned and that block the way to what you desire. It is the art of accepting what does not meet your expectations.
Characteristics of people with low frustration tolerance
If you cannot tolerate frustration, you will display the following:
A tendency to put things off or exhibit avoidance behavior due to your inability to tolerate frustration.
An impulse to "fix" situations due to your impatience.
Excessive feeling of discomfort.
The pursuit of instant gratification.
That tendency to give up in the face of challenges.
Avoidance of tasks and responsibilities that may cause you anxiety or frustration.
But you can learn to be tolerant of your frustration. You can actually train this capacity by experiencing small frustrations. The best way to learn to tolerate frustration is to embrace it and allow yourself to experience the feelings it evokes. Therefore, every moment of frustration is the perfect moment to practice.
and here you can increase your frustration tolerance.
Exercises to increase frustration tolerance
Practice makes perfect. If you want to increase your frustration tolerance, you need to practice continuously, all the time, and in every uncomfortable or unfavorable situation that comes your way.
1. Keep your peace of mind
In the face of frustration, it is important that you learn to remain calm and not let it affect you. To do this, you can perform a stoic exercise suggested by Massimo Pigliucci and Gregory López in their book Live Like a Stoic. This exercise is performed in three steps:
Imagine a situation that you probably have to face today and that can be frustrating.
Repeat to yourself mentally, "I want to do this activity, but I also want to stay calm by accepting what might happen."
Imagine yourself acting calmly in the face of this frustrating situation.
2. Accept your frustrations
Acknowledge the feeling of frustration you are experiencing and the thoughts you have about it. Accept how you feel, not from an accusatory perspective, but from a perspective of curiosity and kindness.
Accept your feelings and open yourself to the present so you can move more effectively toward what you value. To promote acceptance, try the following:
Embrace the experience as you would a crying child.
Approach your experience in much the same way you would approach someone with a serious illness.
Breathe in the experience the same way you would breathe in a deep breath.
Give up the fight with your experience the way a soldier would give up his arms to return home.
3. Notice what you feel
Once you've identified and accepted the feelings that accompany your frustration, distance yourself from them to see them from a larger perspective. This will help you gain a better perspective on your frustration. Here are some strategies to help you distance yourself:
Consider the process. See yourself situated in a long process and on a path of continuous growth.
Look for contradictions. Embracing and accepting contradictions improves your tolerance for uncertainty.
Change your perspective. See your feelings from another person's perspective.
Verbalize what worries you. Identify what you are thinking as what it is (a thought) and the feeling of rejection as what it is (a feeling). You can phrase it as “I think that…” or “I feel the feeling of…”
4. Breathe and stay calm to increase your frustration tolerance
Sit comfortably, close your eyes and place one hand on your stomach, with the little finger just above the navel. Your stomach should rise during each inhalation. As you exhale, the stomach should return to its original position. Inhale through the nose and exhale through the nose or mouth.
Take a slow, deep breath through your nose for four seconds. Hold your breath for seven seconds. Then exhale slowly through the nose or mouth for about eight seconds. If you want, you can mentally and slowly repeat the word "calm" or "quiet" each time you exhale.
Relaxation and emotional self-control techniques are extremely useful in increasing your tolerance for frustration because they help you regulate and manage your emotional activation.
5. Anticipate future frustrations
Marcus Aurelius suggested an exercise in his work Self-Reflections to help you deal with frustration and increase your frustration tolerance. Pigliucci and Gregory (2019) suggest that this exercise should be performed as follows:
Every morning write down some situations that may not turn out as you expect and that may make it difficult for you to satisfy your wishes. This will help you reduce the impact of unexpected setbacks.
Then set a reminder or use a mantra that reminds you to try to improve and increase your frustration tolerance.
6. Increase your frustration tolerance through small setbacks
To increase your frustration tolerance, you can expose yourself to some adversity or mild discomfort. They help you develop acceptance. Facing small difficulties actually helps you expand your comfort zone while preparing yourself to face any setback or frustrating situation. Again, Pigliucci and Gregory (2019) formulated an exercise that can help:
Take a minute or two to list the types of discomfort that frustrate you.
Choose a discomfort that you want to be more tolerant of. Make sure your choice is not too difficult.
Design an action plan and continuously expose yourself to it.
7. Use your frustrations for personal growth
If there is nothing you can do to get what you want, learn to use that adversity to grow. As the saying goes, What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So when you are in a frustrating situation, see it as an opportunity to cultivate frustration tolerance. Yes, if life insists on thwarting every plan you make, show it how tolerant you can be.
At the end of the day, reflect on how you could have done things better and when you felt you couldn't tolerate your frustration. Think about how you reacted, what you felt and thought, and formulate new options for responding to these types of situations.
8. Change your way of thinking
Another exercise to increase frustration tolerance is cognitive restructuring (CR). This cognitive technique is based on the assumption that thoughts influence feelings and behavior. Therefore, modifying them can change what you feel in a certain moment.
Generally speaking, the feelings associated with frustration are fueled by how you interpret a situation. So restructuring your way of thinking will cause a change in how you experience it.
To use CR to promote frustration tolerance, identify what you think, feel, and do when you feel frustrated. Question the veracity of your ideas, look for evidence against them, and change them into more adaptive ones.
Discover: 8 strategies to calm your nerves before a match or competition
9. Perform physical exercise to increase your frustration tolerance
To increase your tolerance for frustration, you also need to be healthy. Physical exercise is a really useful strategy. In fact, you will be able to improve your emotional regulation by adding it to your daily routine. This is crucial to face difficulties.
Exercise is necessary for body and soul. An article written by the American Psychological Association (APA) highlights that physical activity improves mental health by reducing anxiety and depression and improving mood. So start practicing if you want to increase your tolerance for frustration.
10. Develop your problem solving skills
Fostering your problem solving skills can be a really effective exercise in increasing your frustration tolerance. Knowing how to solve difficulties will make you feel more confident and competent in the face of adversity and frustration. To develop this skill, do the following:
Identify the problem
Design new solutions
Evaluate each solution option
Choose an option and take action
Monitor the results.
By learning how to solve the problems that make you feel frustrated, you can increase your ability to deal with difficult circumstances. This will reduce the emotional stress associated with them.
11. Seek professional help
Going to a psychologist is always a good way to strengthen yourself. Therefore, if your low frustration tolerance is significantly affecting your life, do not hesitate to ask for help. A trained and qualified specialist can give you tools to help you.
Final considerations
Living means learning to accept life as it is with all its setbacks. You will not always get what you want or achieve the goals you have set for yourself.
For this reason, it is important that you learn to apply these exercises to increase your tolerance for frustration. This means that you will not activate unnecessary resistance that disrupts your existence when faced with problems that frustrate you.
For example, one wants to appear great and guide the other, but in reality it is not so, but because of pathological jealousy, he wants to achieve what he wants, for example, the Arabs in Switzerland.
12 Exercise to eliminate despair and give yourself hope.
14 exercise and boost your confidence.
15 never compare yourself to others you should for yourself as a person strengthen your self-esteem and you are not less than others
with kind regards
Samuel
samuel.ku35@gmail.com
for more information visit my blog #psychologi-analyses where there is a lot of internal information.
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