Healthy Town blog: Dealing with rudeness

I heard about a new rule last week, a four-second rule. It might take a while to get used to putting it into practice, but I’m open to embracing it!

I was attending a talk from psychotherapist Trish Murphy, as part of Healthy Town 2015 in Athlone, when she introduced the tricky topic of annoying people, rude people, people who just get you hot under the collar.

How do you react to things like someone taking your phone and breaking it, or when your hairdresser makes a mess of your hair, or when someone takes the parking spot you were aiming for?

Holding on to anger for a long time doesn’t help. You just can’t let the rude person who skipped the queue take charge of how you are feeling. “The truth is you decide how long it lasts,” she said.

She told the audience gathered at the Sheraton Athlone Hotel: “I have the four-second rule. Four seconds is long enough to suffer from someone’s rudeness or bad behaviour. You accept that they are behaving like that.

“If somebody is rude to you, you have a choice. Stay and argue or move away. Accept that they are rude!”

Easier said than done, but if you religiously apply the four-second rule, that should be no bother, rather than analyse time and again afterwards, which many of us are prone to doing!

Also, another useful tip: listen to the sound in somebody’s voice; there’s a hint in the tone, not necessarily in the words spoken. And pause before you react. Take a deep breath! It will save a lot of words that you might regret later.

Trish’s use of everyday examples to highlight her various points worked well. She went through some useful advice on dealing with negativity, never an easy thing to handle.

“What happens to us when we experience negative emotions?” she asked. We tense up physically, she said.

“We have a complex relationship with our emotions from quite a young age. It happens to all of us. I don’t think any of us escape this.”

So, what about sulking? When you sulk, what do you hope is happening? You hope the other person is missing your company and that your behaviour has an impact on them. But in reality, it’s the ‘sulker’ who is suffering! Ouch!

Dealing with adolescents contributed to much input from the floor. There are so many issues and it’s difficult to know what to do at times. There’s peer pressures, anxiety and of course discipline. There’s no one solution to fit all, but a few good words of advice: “Never do (talk to teens about) consequences when you are upset or tired.” (This one might take longer than four seconds to resolve!).

The emergence of the internet has impacted on teenagers no end. “It can take you to very dark places. We are in a different world to the world we grew up in,” she added.