Dr. Ryan Martin

Yeah, that's one of the real challenges when it comes to dealing with feelings or dealing with emotions, is that by definition, when you're having them, you have a different set of thoughts than you would have without them.

By definition, part of what they're doing is influencing your brain in ways that make it harder for you to potentially think rationally or more reasonably.

And so, so much of this is actually training ourselves to do exactly what you're describing, which is to kind of stay calm in the moment and think through the situation in a more rational way and interpret those consequences in a more rational way.

And that takes practice.

And actually, what you're describing, I think, is a really important part of that practice, which is to reflect on it after the fact and to ask yourself what are some tough questions to ask yourself in the moment, but that are, hey, why did I react this way?

What was I going through?

Why was it so hard for me in this moment to to to think more clearly?

Why did you know?

And in doing that, I liken this, so I'm a big sports fan, I actually liken this to watching game tape, right?

So after a soccer game, you know, we sit down and we watch the footage and we talk about the mistakes we made and we talk about what we could have done differently.

I think that reflecting on your experiences can play that role for you.

and can help you get ready to do something a little bit different next time.

And the problem is sometimes when we reflect back on that, we don't do the work at looking at ourselves.

We do the work of looking at how everyone else behaved.

And so we've got to turn that around a little bit and say, OK, what what can I do differently next time?

So I had this conversation with my son over the weekend.

He was playing basketball.

He was disappointed in his playing time in between games.

We sat down and talked and I said, here's the thing.

I agree with you 100% that you should be frustrated with your playing time.