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How to Reset and Reconnect After a Fight or Argument

AHA Publisher — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 08:00:39 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #341) and blog, I talk about ways to reset and reconnect after a fight or argument. Arguing with friends, family members or loved ones is inevitable. It’s impossible for us to get along all the time, especially when we spend a lot of time with certain people, such as during the holiday season. We are all unique, and we all see the world in different ways. This is a wonderful thing. It makes the world interesting—it makes living in this world a wonderful learning experience. However, it can also lead to a lot of misunderstandings, miscommunications, and conflicting opinions! It is important that even when these arguments or misunderstandings come up, we find ways to make amends—to bridge the divide as best we can. Yes, this can be a challenge, and it can take some time, but it is possible. Here are some simple tips you can follow to reconnect with a loved one, colleague, or friend after a fight: • See arguments as a natural part of life. The first thing to remember after a fight, especially when you feel sad, angry, or frustrated, is that arguments between friends, family, and loved ones are normal. • Recognize that arguments can be beneficial. In many cases, these arguments allow for healthy emotional expression and can help prevent the buildup of resentment or grudges. It can also help you better understand the other person and help them understand you. Arguments may even lead to better boundary setting because both you and the other person communicate what you can and can’t deal with. Arguments can also lead to compromise, an essential part of any relationship. A reasonable amount of arguing is actually quite ordinary and can be healthy because it is in the messiness we can repair and grow. No “mess” means there is nothing to repair or change, which means no growth. It’s how you argue that is key! • Give yourself time to calm down. Most likely, the fight involved many emotions, as well as some accusations and defense mechanisms. Even if you managed to get the root issue resolved, your cortisol levels are probably still quite high. This is why it may be a good idea to take a break and distance yourself from the other person for a little bit—see this as gathering and processing time. Work on calming yourself down; go for a walk, do some deep breathing, practice yoga, or whatever works for you. • Make sure you address the issue(s) that come up. Once you have managed to calm down, it is always a good thing to readdress some of the issues or problems that led to the argument. This doesn’t have to happen on the same day—you may even need a few days to process what happened or calm down. There is no set way or time to do this, but re-addressing the issues can lead to healthy conversations, compromises or boundaries that could prevent further arguments in the future. I know that doing a “review” of sorts may seem stressful or repetitive, and you may feel like you just want it to go away and move on, but this can be beneficial. Think about how, with certain people, you tend to have the same fight over and over again. When you “redress and assess” the fight, you can really get to the core of why you disagreeand possibly prevent it from happening again. This is particularly important if you could not resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. • Apologize. Sorry is a powerful word. It acknowledges the other person’s pain, anger, sadness or frustration, and indicates that you don’t want them to feel that way. This can be very tough to do because our pride often gets in the way, but it can also be incredibly freeing, especially if followed by action so the apology doesn’t seem like an empty gesture. • Laugh. One great way to reconnect after a fight is to tell a little joke or bring up a funny topic or memory that you both have in common. When you laugh with someone, you are literally resetting your brain and reestablishing the connection that you have. • Get to the root of the issue(s). Make sure you get to the root of why you had the fight, or it may happen again in the future. One way I recommend doing this is using mind management to do a mental “autopsy” on why you both reacted in the way you did. To this end, I recommend doing a Neurocycle—the 5-step mind-management system I have developed over the past 38 years that is based on my research and practice. (I discuss this in detail in my book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, my app Neurocycle and in my recent clinical trials.) The 5 steps are: 1. Gather Awareness of how you feel about the argument emotionally and physically. What are your warning signals? Frustration? Depression? Anxiety? Irritability?Does your brain feel tired even though your mind doesn’t want to stop? Are you battling with gut and intestinal issues like bloating? Are you experiencing bursts of aggression? Are you more irritable than normal? 2. Reflect on why you feel the way you do. Go through each of these warning signals and ask yourself “Why?” Dig deep and be honest with yourself. Ask yourself questions like “Why am I frustrated? I’m frustrated because…” 3. Write this all down to help organize your thinking and get more insight into what is going on in your life. 4. Recheck what you have written and reflected on. Take each of the warning signals you have gathered, reflected on, and written down above, and see them for what they are: signals that something is going on in your relationship that needs to be addressed. Then, work out a relationship“antidote” (new thought pattern/behavior) for each one. 5. Active reach. Take action to work on the issue you are dealing with in your relationship. But, remember to give yourself and the other person grace! Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it will take time to develop this newly reconceptualized way of responding, so keep on keeping on. To read the original article click here.

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Keep Your Friends Close and Your Cortisol Levels Low for Life

AHA Publisher — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 07:00:47 +0000

Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology via EurekAlert – Directing a meeting, dialing up an old acquaintance, dictating the perfect tuna salad sandwich across a drive-through window. For business and for pleasure, human beings are in constant communication. Our proclivity for socialization is lifelong, equally prominent in the lives of adolescents and adults. A recent study determined key differences in the ways that various age groups communicate, as well as one conversational component that stands the test of time: friendship. Specifically, bonds between individuals who identify as female. Led by former Beckman Institute postdoctoral researchers Michelle Rodrigues and Si On Yoon, an interdisciplinary team evaluated how interlocutors’ age and familiarity with one another impacts a conversation, reviewing the interaction’s overall effectiveness and stress responses generated as a result. The study, titled “What are friends for? The impact of friendship on communicative efficiency and cortisol response during collaborative problem solving among younger and older women,” was published in the Journal of Women and Aging in May 2021. Two hypotheses form the foundation of this female-focused study. First, the tend-and-befriend hypothesis, which challenges the traditionally masculine “fight-or-flight” dichotomy. “Women have evolved an alternative mechanism in response to stress,” said Rodrigues, who is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University. “In order to deal with stress, women can befriend female peers.” The team also tested the socio-emotional selectivity hypothesis, which postulates a social “pruning” as humans advance in age and pursue more intimate, higher-quality circles of friends. The introduction of age as a variable is novel in the field and stems from an interdisciplinary Beckman collaboration. “I was working with several different groups in several different disciplines, coming from the perspective of studying friendship but having previously done research on adolescent girls, but not older women,” Rodrigues said. She combined forces with then-Beckman-postdoc Si On Yoon, who was studying the cognitive mechanisms of natural conversation across the lifespan, including healthy younger and older adults. “My research program was focused on language measures in social interactions, and I was glad to work with Dr. Rodrigues to develop an integrative approach including both language processing and physiological measures to study social interactions,” said Yoon, who is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa. The interdisciplinary team merged both theories into a single query: Across women’s lifespans, how are the tendencies to “tend and befriend” as well as socially select reflected in their communication? They tested a pool of 32 women: 16 “older adults” aged 62-79, and 16 “younger adults” aged 18-25. Each participant was either paired with a friend (a “familiar” conversation partner) or a stranger (“unfamiliar”). The partnerships underwent a series of conversational challenges, wherein the participant instructed her partner to arrange a set of tangrams in an order that only the former could see. The catch? Each shape was abstract, their appearances purposefully difficult to describe. “You could look at one [tangram] and say, ‘This looks like a dog.’ Or, you could say, ‘This looks like a triangle, with a stop sign, and a bicycle wheel,'” Rodrigues said. This exercise helped quantify each conversation’s efficiency: partners who achieved the desired tangram arrangement in fewer words were considered more efficient, and pairs who needed more words to complete the task were considered less efficient. The researchers found that while the younger adult pairs communicated more efficiently with familiar partners than their older counterparts, they communicated less efficiently with unfamiliar partners; alternatively, the older adults demonstrated conversational dexterity, quickly articulating the abstract tangrams to friends and strangers alike. “A referential communication task like this requires that you see where the other person is coming from. It seems like the younger adults are a little more hesitant in trying to do that, whereas the older adults have an easier time doing that with strangers,” Rodrigues said. This was not predicted based on the socio-emotional selectivity hypothesis, which anticipated a correlation between age and social isolation. “Even though older adults choose to spend more time with people who matter to them, it’s clear that they have the social skills to interact with unfamiliar people if and when they choose to,” Rodrigues said. Rodrigues’ team also measured salivary cortisol to quantify and compare participants’ stress levels throughout the testing process. “When you experience something stressful, if you have a stress response system that’s working as it should, the result is an elevated amount of cortisol, our primary stress hormone, which then tells our bodies to release glucose into our bloodstreams,” she said. “That’s reflected in our saliva about 15 to 20 minutes after we experience it. If we see a rise in salivary cortisol from an individual’s baseline levels, that indicates that they are more stressed than they were at the time of the earlier measurements.” Across both age groups, those working with familiar partners had consistently lower cortisol levels than those working with unfamiliar partners. “A lot of the research on the tend-and-befriend hypothesis has only focused on young women, so it’s great to have these results that pull that out to the end of life. We can see that friendship has that same effect throughout the lifespan. Familiar partners and friendship buffer stress, and that’s preserved with age,” Rodrigues said. To read the original article click here.

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