When we’re stressed and scared, sometimes our good sense flies out the window. We feel the most pressure to make a decision and have the least confidence that what we are doing is what we should be doing. When we are in inner turmoil, it seems that our moral compass has gone into hiding.
Sure, there are times, when it is truly an emergency. We must rely on our quick decision making skills to avoid crashing and burning. These short-term in the moment decisions are not the ones that cause us the most suffering.
It is the longer term decisions, “Should I take this job?”, “Should I make this move?”, “Should we break up or try to make it work?” that we shouldn’t rush. When we allow ourselves to calm down and resolve our inner turmoil, the answers to these difficult questions become more clear.
We can take time to remember that love and compassion is what brings meaning and fulfillment to our lives. We all get triggered and have feelings of anger, jealousy and resentment. These feelings raise our stress levels and encourage us to act and change. I don’t see them as negative. Although, like me, you would probably prefer that these stressful feelings didn’t return quite as often as they do. They do drive us to make decisions and changes in our life. Our decisions may be better for us when we spend some time investigating the reasons we are upset and the needs we have that aren’t getting met.
When we better understand our unmet needs, our inner turmoil diminishes. When we are calm, the healthy paths forward seem more clear, and we make better decisions.
This is not a “one and done” fix. It is more like peeling an onion. As we get better at finding our calm center, new understanding appears. We will experience our lives in a new way. We get triggered and the stress returns. We can improve our ability to allow the calm to return before responding. And our lives start to unfold in ways that bring us and those we love more peace and happiness.
So, in our most stressful times, let us remember — When we are peaceful and calm, we will know what is right.