Frustration is an unpleasant feeling to experience, but it can pay off for you later if you make a point of it. You can use it to go from frustration to self-control to achievement of something difficult you want to accomplish. This doesn’t mean you should crave or enjoy frustration, just use it to your advantage when it comes along. While it’s important to address issues that cause you frustration in a timely and effective manner, it’s also important to be thoughtful about the way you address it. Managing frustration is an exercise in self-control, and the self-control you develop from managing frustration appropriately is transferrable to self-control when trying to succeed at something you’re trying to do. View frustration as an opportunity as much as you acknowledge it to be an unpleasant feeling.
- Frustration makes self-control difficult, but self-control is a critical skill to master
- Practice frustrating activities deliberately to develop stronger self-control
- Link your increased self-control to pursuing things you want to gain or accomplish
Frustration makes self-control difficult, but self-control is a critical skill to master
Most people view frustration as a purely negative pain in life. They usually seek to minimize it by choosing options that are convenient now even if those options are costly or cause problems in the long run. Or they avoid issues that are frustrating even though it would ultimately benefit them (and maybe others they care about) to get those issues resolved. It’s an understandable temptation for anyone to want to take the easy way out of frustration.
The problem with trying to escape frustration instead of embracing it is that in addition to not resolving the frustration once and for all, an opportunity is lost. That opportunity is the chance to strengthen self-control, which gives a person the ability to persevere and maintain focus through progressively more challenging situations. As hard as it is to maintain composure and respond thoughtfully in the face of frustration, this is a critical skill that will bear very desirable fruit in the future if you recognize the opportunity and seize it.
When was the last time you accomplished anything constructive without self-control? The answer is never, because you’re even using self-control when you do the things you’re good at; your self-control in that situation is what makes something you’re good at feel “easy”.
Practice frustrating activities deliberately to develop stronger self-control
If you struggle with managing frustration well and want to practice getting better, one way is to perform tasks that are difficult before the next frustrating situation happens to you. Try to build a house of cards on a smooth surface and keep track of how you feel and react when it collapses. Most people just focus on the negative aspect of this emotion, but you can do better. Instead, have a pen and paper handy and deliberately practice self-control. Think about the way a young child reacts when a tower they are building collapses and resolve that you can control yourself better than that in this exercise. Perform three attempts to construct the card house and note your reaction each time your house of cards collapses:
1. After the first collapse, take a deep breath and count to ten either aloud or consciously in your head. Exhale a long breath as you count. Write down how you feel and if the pause in your reaction from focusing on counting to ten helped diffuse the intensity of your frustration. Take another deep breath with a slow exhale before starting your next building attempt.
2. After the second collapse, do the same thing as in the first step. Remember to take another deep breath with a slow exhale before starting your next building attempt.
3. After the third collapse, do the same exercise once more. Analyze your results.
If you succeed at not losing your temper after these three attempts, reward yourself with something small like a chocolate square or a ten-minute nap or break. Make a chart like the one below to keep track of your progress and post it in a place where you’ll see it every day to remind you that you can build greater self-control through one deliberate exercise in frustration at a time! This exercise is only offered as an example, and you can try others that you think would help you develop greater self-control.
Day | Marking “X” for each time I succeed at self-control in an activity | ||
1 | X | X |
|
2 | X |
| X |
3 | X | X | X |
… | … | … | … |
Sample chart you can make to track your deliberate cultivation of self-control through planned frustration.
Of course, you’ll want to build on this and eventually try for more than three attempts at a time or move on to more challenging and frustrating activities as your self-control starts to increase. Progress naturally and don’t put pressure on yourself to reach a certain degree of self-control by a specific date, just focus on sustaining a steady and deliberate program to strengthen your self-control ongoing. The more you practice, the more you’ll find ordinary situations where you feel frustrated but are in the habit of recognizing the opportunity to strengthen your self-control instead of reflexively reacting and being controlled by your emotions.
Build self-control one day at a time knowing it will help you do things in the future that are out of reach today.
All of this is not to say you should bottle up your frustration (or anger), but that you should not let it drive immature or destructive behavior. Channel it constructively.
Link your increased self-control to pursuing things you want to gain or accomplish
With a program for proactively building self-control in place, write down a few personal goals and aspirations on a sticky note. Put those sticky notes on the side of your chart to remind you how building your self-control one exercise at a time will make it easier to work through the frustration standing between you and those goals and aspirations you wrote down.
“Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.”
~Proverbs 16:32 (ESV)
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
~ Jacob Riis
If you practice the card house exercise enough times, eventually, you’ll get good enough at it to build a house you’re proud of. The pain of frustration is followed by the joy of triumph. Take that accomplishment beyond building card houses knowing that the same self-control and the determination it enables will help you overcome bigger and more meaningful challenges you’ll face in life.
Conclusion
Don’t view feelings of frustration as purely negative; they are an opportunity for you to grow, if you choose to see them that way. To grow self-control, you don’t have to wait for frustrating situations to happen to you. You can create situations of planned frustration to increase self-control. Use planned frustration to proactively take control of your emotions instead of letting them suddenly take control of you in real life situations. Achieving any goals and aspirations you have almost always requires you to overcome barriers that will cause you frustration when you first encounter them; will you break through the barrier to move past it or will you let the barrier break you and keep you where you are?
Channel feelings of frustration into self-control that will help you be more successful!