How to Stay Calm (Even When Someone is Bugging You)

If you’re anything like me, can get to a quiet, peaceful, calm, contemplative state when you’re all by yourself pretty easily. 

Maybe you meditate, maybe you practice yoga, maybe you’re writing in a journal. Or maybe you’re just sitting quietly under a tree somewhere.

However you get there, you get there. And you’re relaxed and pretty sure you’ve learned the secret to being this blissful all the time.

And then you get a text message about a problem at work. Or your husband comes in and tells you the dog threw up on the carpet and it’s your turn to clean it. Or something in your body starts to hurt or feel funny.

BAM!

That inner peace is gone, y’all, gone. 

HOW THIS SHOWS UP IRL

Here’s me last night: All is well. I’m re-watching The Social Network and my husband and I are discussing how we feel about Mark Zuckerberg now vs. when we first saw the movie in 2010. All is well.

Five minutes later I’ve fed the cats and closed them in their “wing” (they get the third bedroom at the other end of the house that my husband uses as his office). My husband comes out into the kitchen and says, “Is there any reason you don’t ever check to see if the cats need water?”

EEEE EEEE EEEE!!! Alarm bells! Ego alerted! Must get angry! Must lash out! Must respond!! EEEE EEEE EEEE!

The first thing I said was, “I do check to see if the cats need water!” Luckily, this was a relatively mild response compared to how I was actually feeling. And it’s true, I do check, but I hadn’t noticed their water was low when I fed them.

I don’t remember what my husband said after that (because I was having an ego flare, guys, no words could further enter my brain!), but I do know that I was aware enough to know that I’d had a button pushed and the way I was feeling wasn’t the real “me.” 

Nope, it was that fragile human mind of mine, coming up with a list of reasons my husband was wrong, wrong, and more wrong, and why I had to punish him. 

Here’s what I did

Instead of responding, I got silent. 

Not that kind of silent where you’re waiting for the person to ask you what’s wrong and trying to goad them into an apology or to make them see your point of view (been there!), but a silence in which I simply listened to my mind yelling and screaming and went on with my night time routine.

I headed into the bathroom after that, fuming loudly, but only in my mind.  At the same time the internal yelling was going on, I, the deeper part of me, was watching the thoughts and trying to just let them pass by. I was certain that if I didn’t attach to them and time passed, I would be fine. There was no reason for me to fight or try to prove anything.

I went back into the bedroom and sat down, picked up my book, read until I was too tired to do anymore, meditated, then went to bed.

I wasn’t upset anymore. I was calm. When I woke up this morning, I didn’t even remember the encounter. All was well again. 

WE ALL HAVE THE CHOICE TO STAY CALM

We all have this choice all day long. We can choose to let our minds and egos take over, getting upset at everything that doesn’t go “our way,” or we can choose to let that angry junk our minds spew just float by, like detritus in a river.

Let me say it again: WE ALL HAVE A CHOICE. 

Eckhart Tolle said something in one of his books that was along the lines of:  You can have inner peace all the time, and if you’re letting things get to you, that’s on you. If you really cared about peace, you would choose to stay aware and calm.

That has stuck with me. I do have a choice, and so do you. Sure, you can get attached to the thing the person said and prove them right, damnit! Or you can let it go. 

(Okay, okay, I hear you. What if they said something really, really mean?? Or something really, really not okay??? All actions are more powerful when they come from a place of presence and peace. Let yourself come back to the present moment and be in a place of calm and wait to see what feels right to do. Rash decisions do not make situations better.)

So here’s how you can choose to stay calm:

#1 Make a choice, right now, that being calm/peaceful is the most important thing to you.

You want it, and you want it bad. You want it more than your need to be right. More than your desire to win a fight or prove a point.

Imagine how life would be if things in your day went smoothly, instead of feeling ruffled all day long, each time someone questioned you or your choices.

Darn good, that’s how.

Say it out loud: “I choose peace over being right.”

#2 Bring your attention to what your mind is saying about what happened

Next time something ruffles your feathers, notice what your ego is saying about it. Eventually you’ll get to a place where you don’t immediately react, but for now, just practice noticing what your mind is telling you.

It’s going to try to suck you in. It will tell you why the other person is wrong, why they shouldn’t have done it, and why it must all be fixed RIGHT NOW.

But you don’t have to give into that. You’re allowed to see your mind for the ranting and raving lunatic madwoman that it is. And then you can just let it go.

#3 Hold the vision of inner calm in your mind. 

This is something you can work towards. It is not an overnight thing. At all.

I wish there was a switch you could flip to never, ever get annoyed again. It’s just not that simple, though. But holding a vision of calm can help. It may remind you to breathe. It may remind you of your promise to choose peace over being right.

#4 Keep Practicing!

You’ll have opportunities every day (unless you live alone on a mountain, I guess), so use them. Don’t get mad, get present. Don’t react in anger, pay attention to the stories your conditioned mind is telling you.

I care about this so much because I, for one, would rather spend a greater percentage of my life in a state of calm. And if I’m calm, it makes the lives of those around me better. Imagine having a parent who can stay calm! Imagine having a coworker who can be chill no matter what! That’s why I want to spread this information around. The more of us who can detach from the ego and live in a state of relative peace, the more the people around us can also live a better life. It will spread. 

So…what do you choose?

(Wanna stay calm? Get the free checklist!)