Problem People: They suck, but your making them worse.

Interactions with other people and creatures are the petri dish for EVERY thing of value in life as a human.  So paying attention to and optimizing how you interact with others has an incredible life benefit for every ounce of effort you put in.  

The world has a lot of dicks in it and a few are bound to get worked into daily life.  Dealing with them effectively will turn them into a positive influence instead of a constant rainy day you can't control.

A simple preset system and philosophy for dealing with problem people is an extremely powerful tool.  Problem people, especially when they have authority over you, screw up your entire biology.  They can make you think irrationally, rewire your hormonal balance, and can spin you into depression, anger, and self loathing for no good reason and often not even on purpose.   This biological reaction makes it extremely difficult to react productively.  Problem people make you emotionally stupid.  So “proacting,” in advance and while your still smart, is the solution. 

Different systems will work for different people and I’ll make some initial research suggestions further down the page for places to start figuring out what works for you.  But what’s important is the guiding philosophy behind the system.  This will determine how well it works in the short and long run.  Make sure the system boosts understanding, compassion, and respect for the problem person and yourself at the same time.  Don’t make yourself feel good at the expense of the other person, and don’t raise your respect of them at the expense of yourself.  Aversion and hate from the other person and yourself will screw yourself further and multiply the damage the problem person initially caused. 

Just remember the following:

If every baby was given the intelligent powers they have as an adult but without any experience of the world, every single person would chose the same thing when filling out a form of how they’d like their life to go.  They would want as many people as possible to love them, they would want to love lots of people, and they would want to do no harm to others and leave a positive impact on the world.  Every single person ever created, including Hitler and psychopaths and rapists, would fill that out.  But life gets complicated, suffering happens, culture and ideology and points of view are confusing, the brain can be a wonky weird thing that doesn’t work correctly or logically, and problem people are created. 

When they do problem things that make our lives horrible, it’s not because they are demons sent to make us unhappy for their own personal gain, it's not that they are inherently inferior or more selfish, it’s that their confused and hurt and dealing with bad information and bad coping tools.  Being selfish and hurting people for your own gain isn't the road to happiness, any tumblr page on spirituality will tell you this.  So when someone is going down that road, their trying to escape from suffering just like everyone else, but their suffering more and their using the wrong roadmap.  They don’t want to do harm.  They want to leave a positive impact with lots of love for everyone.  Something about them just got messed up along the way and they are suffering because of it.  Acknowledging this doesn't make their actions any less harmful, but it allows for your response to those actions to be more helpful to your own life and the rest of the world.  

Here are some research starting points for developing a system for interactions with problem people:

1.     Your own body language can help you change your attitude. 

Especially if a superior is giving you a hard time, your self-esteem can start to lower (because of hardwired pack mentality circuits in the brain, studied extensively in baboons) despite all you know logically about how awesome you are.  Change your body language so that it reasserts your confidence.  Run to the bathroom or close your door, and when no one is looking, flash an awesome super hero power stance.  Doing it in front of the mirror has been suggested to emphasize the effects.  Hold the position for five seconds or more, and then flash another one.  Have fun with it and be crazy.  Do it in front of your coworkers to inspire them to feel good about themselves as well, they probably feel the same way about the boss as you do.  This helps to reset the chemicals in charge of your self confidence.  Thinking it will only get you half way there, when your body gets involved it becomes much more powerful.    

2.     Create a healthy plan for depression or low self-esteem. 

Many people seek immediate physical comfort after a stressful day at work.  Especially when dealing with problem people that create anger and depression.  This can turn into junk food, drug, alcohol, tobacco, and TV addiction (or some combination thereof).  This of course exacerbates the self-esteem problems instead of solving them.  The short term benefit often only lasts for five or ten minutes.  So come up with a plan in advance for dealing with depression and anger.  Do extra walking, break out of your routine, meditate, throw rocks off a cliff, call a friend, etc.  Just know what it is before hand and make sure it’s strong enough to overpower unhealthy urges.  Don’t underestimate the power of your lizard brain if you’ve had problems with it in the past.

3.     Recognize developmental problems in your childhood but don’t let them determine problems in your present. 

Some people who have an extra hard time with problem bosses may have had a hard time with problem parents in their childhood.  Or maybe if you always got picked last for kickball you may have a harder time as a manager of other employees or in leadership positions.  This is one of the punch lines of life.  Since the brain is so malleable as a child, getting beat up by your dick step dad for three years can determine the shittiness of the next seventy years of your life.  Therapy can help if it’s causing major emotional problems for you.  But also remember “My mommy didn’t hug me enough as a child” is a cliché for a reason.  No one has the perfect childhood, when they do, it usually becomes a problem how perfect it was, making it just as imperfect as everyone else's.  The fact that you're now scared to stand up to your boss because you had an overpowering parent is completely ridiculous in logic, but rooted in biology and neural development.  

Good news is that once you recognize it, decide that you’re not a victim doomed to a life of suffering for no reason, you can start to change it fairly quickly.  Recognize things like negative automatic decisions or negative knee jerk reactions, and set up systems to protect against them and rewire them for the better.  Whatever you do, don’t accept your hard childhood as an excuse to suffer needlessly.  It wasn’t your fault you were abused or neglected or bullied.  But as soon as you recognize as an adult that it’s causing you problems, the negative effects of that childhood are completely your fault if you decide not to fix them.  Don’t worry about goals and benchmarks in this venture, just be sure to always be increasing your awareness of your own mind and always growing for the better.  You're going down the same journey as everyone.  Don't feel disadvantaged or unlucky.  Lots of times, a realization that the mental problems from a hard childhood can be solved, can produce more tools for success and happiness than you would have had without the suffering in your childhood.  

Hack Your Brain to Wake Up Early & Effortlessly Every Day with the 3 Step Pavlov Method

America’s standard wake up method sucks.  Ugly air raid alarms that slap you in the face can ruin every single morning for the rest of your life.  Hitting the snooze for ten minutes only puts you through the mental scarring all over again.

If you can take 45 minutes to plan out a sleep method that pleasantly wakes you up when you want  then spend thirty minutes setting it up, you could make every single morning for the rest of your life incredibly better.  So you should.  Take a Saturday and plan it out. 

A place to start is my method.  I created it based on what we know about the neuroscience of habit formation and the bits of information science has discovered about circadian rhythms and biological clocks.  It’s not the absolute healthiest method of controlling sleep, but it’s the best way I know to sleep effectively and still live in a 9 to 5 work hard and play hard society.  

The Pavlov Waking System

Step 1:  Decide a reasonable time you could wake up every single day, even on weekends. 

Most people immediately shoot for 4:30 am, but make sure you’re willing to go to sleep early enough to get 8 hours of sleep at least 4-5 nights of the week.  I go with 7:30am.   

Step 2:  Pick a no-calorie cold drink you enjoy and leave it on your nightstand every night.  Iced coffee, iced tea, and water all work great. 

Step 3:  Start setting your alarm for the same specific time every single day.  When you get up on time, get up and chug down the beverage you left by your bed.  If you hit the snooze, don't chug the drink.  Since you’ve been sleeping you haven’t had anything to drink, and drinking a big amount of anything when your thirsty will give you a rush of endorphins. 

This pleasure rush will lay the groundwork for a subconscious habit.  After doing this for a week or two, your body will learn that pleasure is synonymous with waking up at 7:30, not sleeping in.  You won’t have to fight yourself to get up any more, you may even have to fight yourself to sleep in. 

When you get your “I want to accomplish everything” brain and your “I want to do everything that feels good right this second with no attention to consequences” brain going in the same direction, life gets a lot easier, and often a lot more awesome.  

Steroids for the Pavlov Method (make it work faster, better, and stronger)

1.     Train yourself outside of your regular sleep schedule.  This will speed up the process and allow you to engineer the emotions and fine points of your waking habit more intentionally.

I did this initially to reinforce my habit and leave less room for failure.  When you have some spare time during the day and you feel thirsty, you can take ten minutes to reinforce your waking habit.  Recreate the environment in your bedroom as much as possible to when you wake up.  Put on sleep clothes, turn off lights, get in bed, and set your alarm for three minutes.  Close your eyes and rest, when the alarm goes off jump out of bed mimicking the type of mood (keep it realistic) you’d like to have every morning, and chug down your drink.  The more you expose yourself to the sensory triggers of the morning, repeat the muscle movements of waking up, and then produce a chemical reward, the stronger and more subconscious your habit will become.  Waking up with beaming hope and energy for the day will eventually be like backing your car out of the driveway.  Happiness will be on autopilot and your set default.   

To boost the chemical reward, fake a beaming smile right after you chug your drink, genuinely congratulate yourself (out loud if your brave enough), and massage your own shoulders and forearms for ten seconds.    

2.     Make your alarm pleasant and distinct from all other sounds. 

Use your cell phone and get a customizable alarm app.  There are tons that are all basically the same.  I use “Alarm Clock Xtreme Free” for Android.  You want several key functionalities.  The first is to customize the sound of your alarm.  Make it a recording of your mother yelling at you about getting your prostate checked, or the sound of a koala purring, it doesn’t matter as long as you never hear it regularly throughout the day.  Making it the same as your ringtone or a song you enjoy or as an alarm you use for other things throughout the day will screw up the Pavlov Method. 

You may also want to look for the functionality of gradually increasing volume.  I use this feature to wake me up more gently.  Most full featured apps have the ability to slowly increase your volume from nothing to full blast over the course of a set period of time.  I use 1 ½ minutes.  This will wake me up more gently, but also not allow me to stay in bed for more than twenty seconds after I wake up. 

3.     Every single night, set your alarm far enough away from your bed so that your forced to get up to turn it off. 

When you wake up in the morning, especially if you didn’t get enough sleep, your lizard brain is in control.  Set yourself up with safeguards like these so that you can stick to your plans even if your half asleep and don’t understand the meaning of anything except crushing your alarm and going back to bed.  (If I drink too much or stay up too late, I have this problem in a major way.  My girlfriend has watched me get up out of bed, with only one eye half open, walk across the room to turn off my alarm, not understand how buttons work as a half asleep zombie, and just start pounding the phone against the wall until it stops, and then stumbling back into bed and going back to sleep.  Set yourself up the night before like the person your waking up is not you.  They definitely won’t be in the same motivated rationale mindset as you are in the moment. 

4.     Acknowledge that you’re not Superman and you need sleep. 

Waking up at the same time everyday helps you manage your sleep much better if you do it responsibly.  On nights that you only get four hours of sleep, you can still wake up on time, not screw up your work schedule or miss appointments, and then either take a nap or go to bed earlier the next night to make up for it.  Perfect system.  But if you start only getting four hours of sleep every night you’ll crash quickly.  Don’t let your hubris allow you to believe you can still get things done without ample sleep.  It’s as important to your brain in many ways as food and water.  You lose intelligence, decision-making ability, mood control, and impulse control the longer your sleep deprived.