How to stay calm during conflict. The only thing we can control in conflict is our own reaction

“Conflict disrupts brain function. We expose ourselves to a similar state every time we try to defend ourselves in anticipation of a threat. Unlike the animal kingdom, we do not fight like a badger and a coyote or run away like a rabbit from a fox. At the same time, our main impulse for the purpose of self-defense is the automatic and our unconscious.”

Diana Musho Hamilton

Conflict is an integral part of the lives of each of us. Even the most calm and seemingly collected person goes through conflict situations at some point in his life. As a rule, people do not tend to control the scenario according to which further events will unfold. The only thing we can control is our own reaction. This does not at all mean easily overcoming that very “automatic and our unconscious”, no. But, it is quite possible for a person to learn to recognize, as well as acknowledge and, finally, manage his negative emotions.

We can, to some extent, override this innate response. You just have to learn to remain calm in any situation, especially in the midst of an argument.

1. Take a deep breath

The ability to remain calm and focused during a conflict situation directly depends on the ability to remain in a relaxed state. Somewhat superficial and shallow breaths are a completely natural response of the body to the stress received. In order to get rid of discomfort, you should practice deep breaths, thanks to which common sense is activated. Try this: inhale deeply through your mouth and exhale through your nose. This combination stops the production of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol.

2. Focus on your body

Concentrating on sensory experience while highlighting the physical properties that arise during a conflict situation allows you to consciously modify them. When a person’s attention switches to the body, one can feel tension, shallow breathing, etc. The moment you notice tension in your body, try to relax your upper arms as much as possible and return to a state of neutrality. Such a position of yours will demonstrate a positive attitude that will be able to extinguish the conflict that has begun.

3. Listen carefully

It is common for a person to initiate a dispute when no one listens to him as an interlocutor. It's hard enough to settle an argument if you don't listen to what you're told. Try to focus your attention on what the other person is saying. Do not rush to interrupt him with your thoughts and comments. You will be given a similar opportunity to speak after your interlocutor has spoken.

4. Try to ask open-ended questions

An open form of questions is extremely important if you want to resolve a dispute. In addition, this is an indicator that you listen carefully and show respect for your interlocutor, who in the process of dialogue learns to formulate his own point of view. Not everyone manages to immediately learn to ask so-called open questions. At the same time, it is important not to ask simple questions, which imply short answers like yes/no. It is much more important to use interrogative constructions with the inclusion of words such as why, why, etc. Try it right now, paying attention to the difference in words.

5. Try to speak quietly

The easiest way to avoid escalating the conflict is to raise the tone of your voice or, conversely, lower it. It is important to understand that the volume and tone of your voice are related to blood pressure. When it reaches high levels, it becomes more difficult for a person to understand the meaning of the things said. Try to dispel the other person's anger without raising your voice. This is the only way you can convey a feeling of complete calm.

6. We agree to disagree

Not every conflict situation has an end result that would suit both parties. To prevent the situation from getting worse, try to remove yourself from this conversation.

According to the law, which is called interpersonal conflict, there are two participants in it.

Self-withdrawal involves several reasons, when the hostility of the interlocutor gains momentum, and communication gradually reaches a dead end.

For example, if you don't consider yourself a self-awareness guru, you might actually get angry at some point in the argument. Man is an emotional being, which can be skillfully used, both for harm and for benefit. If you follow at least a few of the above tips, you can feel confident in any conflict. By your behavior you will be able to gain trust in the eyes of strangers, demonstrating the calmness and balance of your character

Dear friends,

In touch is Ekaterina Khodorova, a specialist in Purpose and Master of the Alpha-Z flow.

Today is the second article “based on your requests”, inspired by the results of a survey on conflicts. Once again I want to thank everyone who responded.

In this article you will learn:

how to maintain composure in conflict
What is karma and lessons of the soul

In the previous article, you read about how to end a conflict and pacify an angry person. This article is about how to maintain composure yourself during a conflict. Obviously, you will not be able to use the “three moves” (), save the relationship and help the person not lose face if you yourself are angry and not restrained.

If you are pissed off, it means that you easily penetrated the protective energy shell with your “astral tentacles” (yes, they look something like this)). Where it's thin, that's where it breaks.

During a conflict, your opponent shows you where to pay attention within yourself.

Such situations can lead either to repeated conflict and alienation, or to self-discovery. Personal development will happen if you understand what a particular conflict teaches you.

People and situations are magnetized according to the correspondence of energy vibrations.

What you emit is what you attract. Heavy vibrations depend on many factors: the presence of blocks, injuries, resentments, destructive thoughts, meat-eating, etc.

If you only try to directly influence your vibrations, namely, with the help of yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, then all these will be temporary measures that are needed in huge quantities in order to develop into quality over time. And you still need time for real work and family life. That’s why we often see “schizoteric people” who run away from real life into spirituality. Although competent practices should involve us more and more in social life with all its lessons and gifts.

Therefore, the best way to self-control and conflict prevention is to understand yourself and your karma.

Karma is not a punishment for something, it is the cause-and-effect relationships and circumstances of your life that happened in order to... In order for what? But here everyone has their own personal Soul lesson, which pushes them to develop a certain skill or quality. If you want to see cause-and-effect relationships in your life according to the type situation - lesson - skill - quality, then welcome to the master class.

To maintain self-control, here's what you need:

UNDERSTANDING why conflicts occur in your life and what they teach, what quality of the Soul you are working so hard to develop. Here it is important to recognize which subject of the University of Life is taught by the person who is now standing in front of you and heart-rendingly yelling as hard as he can or is ignoring you. Who am I and who is he in my life?
Energy fullness and internal integrity.
The ability to “come to your senses.” The body, emotions, thoughts do not belong to us, and only a formed personality has the opportunity to “come to one’s senses”: to one’s thoughts, feelings, emotions, body. Don’t just include an observer, but make them your own. The topic of personality as an energy-information formation within a person who has access to a source is worth discussing separately. It won't work in a nutshell.

Self-knowledge occurs through the mirrors of relationships. The outside world shows us who we are and where we are striving.

Thanks to understanding, most conflicts will disappear automatically. Because everything happens so that we understand something.

Remember that in most cases, people needed critical situations on the verge of life and death to rethink their lives. It’s one thing if we learn it ourselves, it’s another thing if we are pushed towards it like a clumsy carcass without initiative).

To understand the lesson of the soul, there is a special technique that I will teach at the master class. It helped all my students who took it. It consists of two parts: one psychological, the other esoteric.

If before, after, during a conflict you understand what the world, soul, etc. wants from you, then you will be able to maintain composure, because you will see further and more, the whole situation will become available to you. Accordingly, you will not be involved in emotions or thoughts, you will be able to observe and control yourself. At the most crucial moment, you are focused not on how to hurt your opponent more, but on what quality you need to show and how to maintain the relationship. You will learn about these qualities in class.

Having certain esoteric knowledge, you will be able to support and fill with energy not only yourself, but also your loved ones. You will master your own world.

If earlier teachers were pain, death, despair, “mad”) people, now you will be able to choose your own teachers, because you understand what you are moving towards.

How to do this cannot be explained in a few words. To do this, we made a very rich master class...

Thanks to this activity, you will understand your soul lesson, stop judging yourself and others, and be filled with first-class energy and the quality that you so need to get through your difficult situations.

Conflict is one of the types of stressful situations that wreak havoc in the human brain. When we feel threatened, our natural instinct is to defend ourselves. In the modern world, of course, we rarely have to run away from wild animals to save our lives, but the basic impulse to self-defense appears automatically on a subconscious level.

The two amygdaloid bodies (tonsils) are located deep in the temporal lobe of the brain. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score ( The Body Keeps the Score) calls this structure a “smoke detector” because the amygdala is responsible for the feeling of fear and prepares our body to respond to a dangerous situation. Therefore, maintaining composure in stressful situations becomes very difficult.

Why we find it difficult to maintain composure during conflict

When danger arises, the amygdala acts as an alarm system, triggering the release of a whole cascade of chemicals into the body. Stress hormones - adrenaline and cortisol - act immediately, preparing the body for the fight or flight response.

When this instinctive function takes control of the body, an intense emotional reaction to the perceived threat is triggered ( amygdala hijack, literally “tongue hijack”). As a result, the human body undergoes changes characteristic of stress:

increase heart rate;
increased sweating;
rapid and shallow breathing;
the appearance of tremors in the limbs and voice;
blood flow to the face;
neck tension;
involuntary clenching of the jaws, etc.

The sensations that arise during stress cannot be called pleasant, however, they are not intended for relaxation, but for lightning-fast actions for the purpose of salvation.

An active amygdala also immediately shuts down the neural pathway to the prefrontal cortex, which can result in a somewhat disoriented state during conflict.

Complex decision-making is blunted, as is our ability to analyze multiple possible scenarios. In such conditions it is difficult to maintain composure. As our attention narrows, we notice only what makes us feel the most secure (in times of conflict, the belief that we are right).

But it is not only emotions and the ability to think and analyze sensibly that fail a person in a stressful situation. During a conflict, one cannot rely on memory. It happens that during a quarrel with your spouse, you cannot remember a single good moment, because only your partner’s shortcomings and mistakes come to mind?

This happens because the brain sacrifices memory function to cope with the current threat. For this reason, it is so difficult for us to remember pleasant things from the past that would help us calm down and pull ourselves together. Instead of colorful memories, a red warning light is lit in the brain with the inscriptions: “Danger! React", "Danger! Defend yourself!”, “Danger! Attack!

How to learn to maintain composure in stressful situations

Being in the power of the amygdala, we cannot consciously choose the way to react, because we are hampered by the old protective mechanism of the nervous system, which has long worked and made the decision for ourselves.

Is it possible to somehow bypass this mechanism and force the amygdala to obey your will during a conflict? This can be done by practicing mindfulness in stressful situations.

Mindfulness during conflict allows you to maintain composure and bypass the nervous system's subconscious reaction to stress. Instead of blindly following the amygdala's lead and later justifying your aggressive reactions, you can learn to control your behavior and, over time, develop freer and more helpful ways of interacting.

The first thing you need for this is the desire to overcome negative thoughts and develop the habit of adequately responding to a conflict situation. Like any other skill, it takes some practice.

To maintain self-control during a conflict, you must be willing to overcome negative thoughts and develop the habit of responding adequately to a conflict situation.

There are different ways to take control of the nervous system and emotions, but they all build on a common basis. Below are four simple steps to follow in the face of conflict to maintain composure when your nervous system calls for fight or flight:

monitor your reaction;
fight negative thoughts;
listen to the body;

Step 1: To Maintain Composure, Monitor Your Reactions

The first step towards awareness and self-control in a conflict situation is the need to notice changes in tone of voice, heart rate, breathing, etc., characteristic of such a situation. Each of us has a characteristic set of body reactions that tell us about a potential threat. Try to notice them in time. If you are not aware that you are in a stressful situation, it will be impossible to maintain composure.

Step 2: Banish Negative Thoughts

This task is not easy to complete, especially during a conflict, but you will have to try. It is necessary to completely abandon preconceived judgment of the opponent. This is difficult, because our mind, when we begin to “boil,” is filled with various thoughts, most of which are negative. However, it is necessary to try to abstract from them, to stop thinking about what is happening at least for a minute, since there is a feedback between our thoughts and the body. If you continue to beat yourself up, adding fuel to the fire, the level of stress hormones in your body will only increase and prevent you from looking at the situation soberly and maintaining composure.

Step 3: Mentally Scan Your Body

You will have to pay attention not only to the emotions that arise, but also to the sensations in your body. Open your mind and mentally scan your body, noticing what sensations arise in it - perhaps an unpleasant sensation in the chest, trembling in the limbs, a feeling of tightness in the neck or another part of the body. Pay attention to the different nature and intensity of sensations. At this stage, do not try to consciously suppress them, just feel how your body reacts to the current situation.

Step 4: Start Breathing Properly to Maintain Composure

Proper breathing allows you to maintain composure in stressful situations - almost all psychologists say so. There are different characteristics of breathing, but in times of conflict and/or stress we only need to pay attention to two of them: rhythm and evenness. If you focus your attention on these two indicators for just a couple of minutes, the production of cortisol and adrenaline will stop.

Maintaining a breathing rhythm means inhaling and exhaling, maintaining a certain interval between them. For example, inhale for a count of 1, 2, 3, 4, and exhale for a count of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Inhale again for a count of four and exhale for a count of 6 to control your breathing.

It is also necessary to maintain evenness of breathing, that is, the amount of air inhaled and exhaled (depth of inhalation and exhalation) should be the same.

After this, feel how balance is restored in the body, and self-control and the ability to think soberly, listen to your interlocutor and adequately respond to his remarks return to you. This will take practice, but over time you will learn to replace negative emotions with positive ones.

Diana Musho Hamilton

We can, to some extent, override this innate response. You just have to learn to remain calm in any situation, especially in the midst of an argument.

1. Take a deep breath

2. Focus on your body

3. Listen carefully

4. Try to ask open-ended questions

5. Try to speak quietly

6. We agree to disagree

Not every conflict situation has an end result that would suit both parties. To prevent the situation from getting worse, try to remove yourself from this conversation.

According to the law, which is called interpersonal conflict, there are two participants in it.

Self-withdrawal involves several reasons, when the hostility of the interlocutor gains momentum, and communication gradually reaches a dead end.

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It is impossible to do without conflicts in life. There are so many people, so many opinions, and their clash is a completely normal process. But how can we learn to perceive conflicts constructively and calmly, and how to behave calmly during a quarrel? What to do when a torrent of accusations falls on you and a volcano of feelings boils in your soul, the following tips will tell you.

Don't clench your hands into fists.

During arguments, people instinctively clench their hands into fists, thus preparing to defend themselves and their territory. We inherited this gesture from those ancient times when all conflicts were resolved through physical force. In the modern world, this is far from relevant, especially when arguing with loved ones and dear people.

As soon as you notice that your hands are instinctively clenching, straighten them.

This way, the outflow of blood will resume, and you will be able to more soberly assess the situation and perceive it calmly.

Avoid eye contact.

If you are provoked into a conflict and all your attempts to resolve it peacefully are useless, do not look your opponent in the eyes.

Look away from something else and focus on it.

Then the other side of the conflict will see that you are not in the mood to continue the quarrel and will “quench your ardor.”

Touch your lips with your fingers.

Use one or two fingers to lightly sweep over your lips. There are many parasympathetic nerve fibers and endings located on the lips.

This movement will help activate the nervous system and it will begin to work, restoring the body.

So calm and a significant feeling of calm will come very quickly.

Train your reaction to conflict situations.

In everyday life, the themes of quarrels and conflicts are usually repeated.

Take a few minutes a day and try to analyze what topics you most often have quarrels about at home, at work, in society.

And then, imagine an ideal calm reaction to such irritants. Scroll through the plot several times in your head, remember the line of behavior. And when a similar situation arises, simply reproduce the ready-made template.

Let's ventilate words.

When people quarrel, it is not so much the actions that become offensive, but the words, accusations, and reproaches directed towards you.

The technique of “ventilating words” is very good to use when your opponent is about to accuse you undeservedly.

Imagine that between you and another person there is a fan that carries and returns all the offensive words back to the offender. His barbs simply don’t reach you.

We are building the Chinese Wall.

The resentment will only be activated when you accept it and agree with it.

In order to remain calm in quarrels and have common sense, imagine that a large wall has been erected between you and the other person. All the barbs, accusations, cruel words do not reach you, but line up in front of the wall. And it’s only up to you whether to open the door for them, whether to let them into your heart.

Imagine that the offender is a small child.

Remember how children swear. They shout, blame each other, say that they will never be friends again, but after a few minutes they play as if nothing had happened.

Imagine that your opponent is a small child. You won’t get offended and yell at a stupid kid who doesn’t understand what he’s doing, and then he’ll regret what he did. And you are an adult, experienced and wise person who waits calmly and patiently until the child expresses everything he needs.

You take everything said without offense and do not take childish meaningless insults seriously.

Take everything to the point of absurdity.

If you cannot prove anything to another person, all your arguments are suppressed in a stream of anger, you feel that you yourself are about to flare up with rage - start bringing everything to the point of absurdity.

Make a mountain out of a molehill. Show the reason for the quarrel on an unrealistically large scale, spin it into global problems.

In this way, you will disarm and unsettle your opponent, and such hyperbole will cause nothing more than laughter.

Imagine that you are in the theater.

When you feel that a quarrel is flaring up and may take on the appearance of a terrible beast, imagine that you are in the theater, and, as you know, “our whole life is a game.”

Your offender is an ordinary actor who plays his role, he just needs to finish playing it and then everything will be fine.

And you are also an actor, only you improvise. You need to show yourself as a sensible, non-conflict person who, regardless of the situation, always behaves calmly and logically.

Try to play this role in such a way that they immediately give you an Oscar.

Never raise your voice.

A person who screams during a quarrel hears only himself. For normal interaction in a conflict situation and to maintain calm, always speak quietly and slowly in such situations. Then you will draw your opponent’s attention not to his screams, but to yourself and your words. Slow speech will help you not to say something unnecessary, but to think again about whether it is necessary to say it or whether it is better to remain silent.
Always remember the words of “men in their prime” - Carlson: “Calm, Baby, just calm!”

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