Mr. Baklayan, whether in line at the crowded supermarket or in the queue at the emergency medical service: One of the biggest challenges seems to be your own patience. How can we keep calm in such moments?
First of all, you should ask yourself: is it really important that this is now ten or 15 minutes faster? Is it really important to speak to the doctor immediately if I don’t have a severe fever, or is that enough in the afternoon? Are my expectations realistic at all? The tricky part of our psyche is: We see everything only through our eyes, the world is always about us. Of course, this is not the case and this leads to error maintenance. 40-degree fever is, of course, something else, it is an emergency, not a question of patience.
So the best thing to do before shopping or calling the doctor is to make sure that many others have the same goal.
I agree. Let’s take the example of a supermarket checkout: It is really exciting that, given the current situation, you can expect that shopping will go quickly. This basic mistake could be anticipated in advance by realistic expectation management and said: I go shopping and the probability is high that there is a lot going on. This also applies to calls to the doctor, test results from the laboratory or to parents who have their children at home: If I expect to spend 24 hours quality time with my children now, my expectation will probably be disappointed. Children quickly get bored, sometimes even themselves. When I say to myself, “I can be bored, my children can be bored, and that’s fine,” I can relax better.
Now the reality often surpasses our conservative expectations: You expect more crowds, but then the whole parking lot is full. Or the medical on-call duty is so overloaded that you are not just waiting for one, but two hours.
One can, for example, deliberately undertake physical tension to relax: let the neck circle, exhale deeply and let the abdominal wall loose. And, very important: change your perspective and develop compassion. The situation is also new for doctors and politicians. Their mistakes just happen and there are delays. The supermarket cashier and the doctor are certainly not happy about the situation, and above all: they are just people.
