The goal is to find the middle ground: not fighting, not flighting, and where you can be more in tune with the other person. “It’s almost like a freeze response,” Chronopoulos says. We might not be making a lot of noise, but we’re far from calm or looking to improve the situation. If we decide to not yell and end up holding anger in, the same process is still taking place: the tense muscles, shallow breathing, narrow focus. ![]() ![]() We’re yelling at someone, and our attempt to control the situation triggers that person, setting off the aforementioned emotional and physiological reactions, and possibly creating a shoutfest (which is anything but festive).Īnd there’s one more part, which gets overlooked: the flight element. “The prime directive is to defend, escape, or fight.” “When we’re in survival mode, we’re not thinking about creative solutions as effectively,” she says. Adrenaline makes everything go faster, and our attention narrows. Since our history factors in, we can start making assumptions. Our blood pressure rises, breathing becomes shallow, and muscles tense up. We take it as an insult, get frustrated, and the brain’s limbic system sees it as a threat and sets off the fight-or-flight response. We could be in a debate and feel like we’re not being heard. The question, as Antonia Chronopoulos, clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, asks, is “How do you regulate yourself in a tense situation?” Start with the basicsīefore you can stop, it helps to understand why we yell in the first place. What helps is to play detective to uncover your triggers, then set reasonable expectations, because underlying the yelling is stress, something that isn’t disappearing. It’s good to have that desire, but you need more to make it happen. ![]() Next question: How often do you reach that intensity? “Too often” is that answer. Now, concert-level volume has its place, like for saying, “There’s a bear behind you” or “Power line down.” But the big question is, how often do those situations come up? The answer is, rarely. It’s getting you frustrated, maybe a little offended, so you go for a different approach. You’ve been trying to get your point across, but it’s not getting through.
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