Top Three Tips for Keeping Your Cool This Christmas.
Christmas is coming and once again bringing family drama as its plus one. You will find yourself making chit-chat with everyone from the cousin who broke your skateboard to the mother-in-law who thinks her son could do better. Avoiding conflict is difficult but important, so here are three ways to keep your Christmas calm.
Number one: Do not predict the future.
Avoid dwelling on anticipated conflict. Your brain will react to a mentally visualized conflict as if it is actually happening, releasing stress hormones and increasing muscular tension throughout your body. Not only does this leave you effectively suffering through the dreaded situation several extra times, you can become so emotionally charged that you actually cause the conflict yourself.
Keep your mind free of negative thinking by staying busy. Make a complicated dessert to challenge yourself, sing along to some favorite songs, or make Christmas phone calls to give distant friends your good wishes. If you fill your mind with positive thoughts and words, there will be no room for negative ones.
Number two: Ignore the past.
When you dislike another person you build an internal list of their faults, which modifies your reaction to everything they say and do. No matter what your problem person actually does, you react to both it and everything they have done previously. This is a major barrier to ever improving the relationship, and also makes your reactions seem unreasonable and out of context to both the problem person and everyone else present.
Letting go of the past can be extremely difficult, especially because your emotions are often inclined to pursue their own agenda of vengeance despite the ruling made by your conscious mind. Fortunately, emotions can be manipulated. Just like you can stress yourself out by visualizing conflict, you can induce a positive emotional state with a different visualization. This concept does carry a certain “new-agey pseudo-scientific” tone, but is actually well supported by research.
Visualize a conversation with your problem person: they are distraught, repentant. They bare their soul and beg forgiveness for past misdeeds. They implore you to be patient with them today while they take the long journey from the person they are now to the person they should be. You agree that their behavior has been poor but thank them for their apology. You agree to give them another chance with you and to tolerate a bit of bad behavior while they sort themselves out.
When you first picture the imaginary apology unintended negativity will creep in; your problem person might say something nasty or give you a dirty look. Uninvited negativity is your existing emotions’ way of trying to correct your thinking to better align with reality, which would usually be helpful. Since this visualization is intended to contradict reality you must consciously reject all negativity and repeat the visual many times until you can clearly imagine a positive version of the entire conversation.
Now that you are emotionally receptive to the idea of playing nicely you must also consciously choose to do so. React only to the present and, as you imagined you promised, forgive a reasonable amount of poor behavior.
Number three: Maintain your own good behavior.
No matter what situation your problem people put you in, do not act in a way that you will later regret. While someone is provoking you it will seem perfectly reasonable to throw champagne in their face and tell them that their hair looks like a cheap wig, but you will not feel good about it in the morning. Before reacting, ask yourself: Would King Kong do this? If the answer is yes, you should not. That means loud vocal displays, aggressive body language, and chest thumping are out.
Often the best way to react to provocation is to calmly state in impersonal terms what the other person did wrong, for example “You say things which serve no purpose except to be offensive. Stop it. Christmas is not a day to heckle your family.” Being formal and unemotional achieves two things:
1. It allows you to stand up for yourself while still appearing to be a reasonable, mature person.
2. It is absolutely infuriates the person attempting to provoke you. Bonus!
So remember:
- Avoid preemptive stress. Keep your mind on nice things.
- React only to what happens on the day, not all of history.
- Act like your best self. Do not rise to provocation.
If you can manage these three, Christmas conflict is sure to pass you by.