Take a deep breath and count to 10 Reaction

I read something pretty interesting from Tony Buzman's book 'Head First' and thought I'd share it with you.

I don't know about you, but I'm usually a person that reacts pretty quickly in an emotional manner to things, causing me quite a lot of emotional stress which is unnecssary at times, perhaps this is something that is more pertinent to women, however I thought I'd share it anyway... here's an example of what I mean (taken from Tony's book)

Imagine you are driving a car and you come to an intersection of traffic lights, you stop your car at the red light and dutifully await for it to turn green.

As the light turns green, you take your feet off the breaks and as you accelerate, you find a car hurtling across from the junction to your right, who had obviously jumped his red light at a ridiculous speed, and misses you by only a few inches.

Thereby making you realise that you were a split second away from serious injury or death. How would you react?

 Here are some common emotional reactions:

Make an obscene gesture

Insult the intelligence of the driver

Pound furiously on the horn

Raise your blood pressure, adrenaline, heart rate and stress levels

Engage in a lengthy conversation with any passengers in the car focusing on the imbecilic nature of the driver

Carry the experience to work

Store the story to-be-constantly-reviewed as an example of how the driving community should not act in such irresponsible ways

• Reading this, I thought... yup, I would probably have a few of these reactions combined...

But then, I  never really stop in those 'stressful' moments to think of any possible reasons/ explanations for the drivers behaviour? ! Such may include...

The driver discovered his family were hurt in a serious accident in the road ahead

The driver was in the middle of suffering a heart attack

Hiding behind the seat of the driver was an escaped convict with a gun pointed at the drivers head

The accelerator of the car had been jammed in the floor

etc etc etc...

If, like Tony says,  we were to take a deep breath and count to 10 at situations which, at face value, maybe very negative, perhaps we would save ourselves a lot of 'I had a bad day' syndromes. I found this very useful and mind expanding so I thought I'd share it with you. haha, hope you like it :)

(Pls note, the above case study is not a direct quotation and rather a succint conclusion of the material read)

 PS it could be the driver was a reckless teenager who decided to get smashed as well... haha but the point is, is it really worth jumping to conclusions and causing ourselves so much distress? Maybe yes, maybe not.