Who or what presses your hot button?

Peaceful Warrior got me thinking about how easily I let external factors affect my life. I am totally aware of how I allow these external factors weigh on my mind and cause me emotional pain. This makes it all the more frustrating that, even though I know I should just accept things the way they are, I find it hard to do so.

I’m not unique in having these feelings.Most (if not all) of us have our hot buttons. We have our way of responding to the hot button being pressed. Studies have shown that in emergency situations, how someone responds can mean the difference between life or death. Some people become so paralysed with fear they will sit in a sinking ship and accept their fate. Others will seek a way out of the situation and keep fighting until they are saved.

This story illustrates what I’m talking about very well

“Mole was driving along a motorway with his friend Badger. Mole was enjoying the drive and feeling very good about the world until another car, driven by Rat, cut aggresively and dangerously in front of him.

Mole was furious. He put his foot on the accelerator and chased after Rat, flashing, hooting, and gesticulating. Mole was shouting and cursing, purple with rage. Rat simply laughed to himself, made a rude gesture with his fingers, and accelerated away.

Mole was quite upset for the next hour. His day was totally spoilt. He felt frustrated and inadequate, as if his whole sense of masculinity had been called into question. He had been challenged and came off second best.

Badger had noticed his friend’s behavious but had chosen to say nothing for the time being. He waited until the time was right. Finally Mole turned and said to him : “That sort of driver makes me so angry.”

Badger replied, “Forgive me, but I’m really curious. How exactly do you allow yourself to get angry because of what another driver does?”

Mole was speechless. He had expected support. “What do you mean?”

Badger said, “What that other person did was simply information about him. How you responded is information about you. How exactly did you make yourself angry as a response to the other driver’s behaviour?”

And so it was that Mole began to realise that he could choose his response to different situations. He could get angry if he wished, or stay calm and dismiss someone else’s behavious as information about them. It didn’t have to affect him.

After that, Mole began to enjoy his driving a lot more. Badger felt a lot safer in Mole’s car, and Mole’s wife noticed her husband was much less stressed and aggressive.

One day Mole told Badger that he’d found a great quote in a book he was reading.

“No one presses your hot buttons. You just leave your control panel open.”

“That’s what I used to do,” Mole said, stressing the used to.

Flicking through the Guardian’s Weekend supplement at breakfast, an article in the “Mind” section ties in very well with Mole’s story too.

Oliver Burkeman writes that stress was invented in 1936 when Hungarian biologist Hans Selye defined it as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change”. Burkeman goes on to say that “Strain” is really more faithful to Selye’s intended meaning : That the problem lies in how we respond to forces, rather than the external forces themselves.

It’s very easy to say respond differently and things will change. Doing it in practice is damn hard, and it’s a nut that I haven’t cracked yet, but crack it I must.