The inside out approach to dealing with circumstances outside our control. Three ways to deal with any frustrating situation. And how acceptance can make us see what’s right in front of us. There’s always a good solution the moment we open ourselves up to it.

Hello, welcome to The Feel Good Factor. I’m Susmitha Veganosaurus, and I’m so glad you’re here today!

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I don’t know if you can hear the noise in the background but there’s loud music being played. If you can’t hear it, great! That means I’m doing a good job of trying to keep things quiet here. Do you know how I do that? I don’t have any special studio to record the podcast. I sit on my bed, put three layers of blankets over my head and then I record the episodes. LOL

Generally, our area is pretty quiet in the daytime.

Most of the time you won’t hear any background noise. The recording comes out really well. But in the night, on weekends, there’s a club at the back and they play really loud music that can be quite annoying!

The only reason I’m recording at night today is because I wanted to make it in time and not miss an episode this week. I’ve had quite a busy week. I’ve been working on doing up an about page for my website and I’m very excited about it.

And today, all day, I was at the vegan market here called Namu Recommends. I’ve told you about this before. It’s a really good, fun event and we like to go there and spend a whole day, from around 12:30-1 o’clock in the afternoon till the night.

They close at eight o’clock and we’re there till the very end, sometimes even after some of the vendors have left. It’s a lot of fun!

Anyway, I finished the market, came back, wound down, and got into bed now. Then suddenly I was like, “oh my God, I didn’t do my podcast episode for this week!” So I immediately got up! I was so tired, but I suddenly got the energy to sit up and start recording this.

And then, you know, there’s this noise in the background. I’m like, “oh damn!” I usually pick the quietest time of the day to record, but today I can’t do that. I just have to record with whatever opportunity I have.

You know me, I don’t like to be too much of a perfectionist.

So I figured I’ll do the recording anyway. These people at the back, this loud music, there’s almost nothing we can do about it from the outside. There’s no place to complain to. Nobody really takes much of an effort to get that music turned off. It’s a big mess anyway. Nothing we can do to change it.

When we’re in a situation where things are frustrating and we’re really irritated, there are only three ways you can handle it. This is what Susie Moore says.

Either you change it…if you can change it first of all, if it’s in your power to change things, then change it. The second option is to walk away from that situation like, “okay, I don’t want any part of this. I can’t change it so I’m out of here”. And if you can’t do either of that, then the third way is…

Simply accept it. This is the way things are going to be.

Sometimes just say, “It’s all right. There’s nothing I can do about it. What else is there? I can’t go down the slope of getting angry or upset about it, right? So I just have to accept the situation.”

I started out with cursing. In the loop of frustration, anger. Always talking about how every weekend the music would play. And then the rest of the week, the next Monday, Tuesday, and all, whoever I spoke to I’d go on to them about it.

“Oh, these people play loud music. It’s so irritating. They don’t care about the rest of the people, these clubs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”, go down this whole complaining spiral.

And really, doesn’t complaining only makes it worse because you’re living through that whole thing again and again and again?

I used to go into this mode of getting really angry. As I lay in bed I’d imagine all kinds of bad things happening to the DJ, like, somebody breaking the DJ’s finger bones one by one. *laughs* I’d have all these dark thoughts because I’m like, “this person’s torturing us so much, so this should happen to them”.

Thinking like that helped because I’d laugh it off. I found it funny to have all these ridiculous thoughts. And because I’d laugh, it would calm me down. But yeah, there’s a limit. You can’t go down that spiral either.

So then, I accepted it. I can’t walk away from it because, you know, my house is here and the music is near my house. It’s not like I can go somewhere else every weekend. I couldn’t change it. I couldn’t walk away from it. So I had to accept it. There was no other option.

When I did accept it however, a solution presented itself.

Gabby Bernstein says, “There is always a solution of the highest good”. Well, you don’t get to see that solution if you allow yourself to dwell on what’s wrong. On the frustration, the anger, and going down that spiral again and again and again. You don’t see the solution that could be right in front of you.

But the moment I accepted it, I thought, “Okay, you know what? This is the way things are. Now, what’s the solution for this? I can’t change it from the outside. I can’t walk away from this. So what do I do?”

And out of the blue I remembered I had a white noise app on my phone!

I’d installed it years ago and I’d totally forgotten about it. So I thought, “let me try playing white noise tonight”.

I found this really nice campfire sound. Well, rain sound, ocean sound, and all those are the default choices. And those are very nice to listen to normally. But trust me, don’t listen to rain sound while you’re trying to fall asleep. You’ll have to get up and pee several times! *laughs*

I wanted something that was just soothing, comforting, and basically like a white noise. And I don’t like the normal white noise either. It’s very disturbing. So I found this really nice campfire sound.

I started playing the campfire sound before going to bed on the weekends.

The app is very nice. It has a timer. You can set it to turn off automatically. You can even set it to fade out slowly so the sound doesn’t suddenly stop. So I set the timer, like, “now it’s eleven o’clock, the music is done by one o’clock”. So at the most, to be safe 1:15, I set the app to fade out for ten minutes and slowly go off.

It was so helpful to start doing this! Oh my God, it really made a difference!!!

It’s not that I don’t hear the music. Sometimes the beats are so loud, you can feel the vibration more than even listening to the music. But this white noise kind of buried that. So it started sounding like the music was coming from a much farther away place than it was. It sounded soft because this campfire white noise thing overpowered it.

And over time, I realised that all I had to do was set it, forget it, and I’ve fallen asleep. I don’t even realise half the time when that music has stopped, when the white noise app has gone off. I’ve just fallen asleep.

The times when I used to get frustrated and angry and upset, I noticed that if the music went off at one o’clock, I would still be upset about it and it would take a long time for me to wind down, get out of feeling that way, and then fall asleep. So I’d fall asleep only by 2:00 or 2:30. But now this white noise solved that issue.

So I realised, instead of going out and changing everything in the world, what is the inside out approach I could take?

There’s a solution. I just play this app and that’s it. And yes, it’s not fair that I have to do this while something really bad is happening outside. I mean, there are so many houses around our house. And so many elderly people, so many babies, God knows how many people are getting disturbed because of that music.

So it’s not fair. But then, I can’t do anything about anybody else. What I can do is change things for myself and make it better. So I play the white noise and fall asleep.

In so many situations in our life, we try to go outwards and change everything.

When something seems wrong, unfair, irritating, annoying, whatever, we try to change things from the outside. Or we go on this victim loop of just complaining about it constantly. We give it a bigger part in our lives than it deserves.

Instead, the more we go inwards to see, “Okay, how can I make this better for myself? How do I change this for myself? That’s it. That’s all I can do. I can only take the inside out approach. I can only learn how to accept this in the best way possible for me”, solutions present themselves so beautifully. It’s kind of amazing.

So yeah, if there’s any situation in your life that’s frustrating, which you can’t do anything about, you really can’t change things, then think about how you can take the inside out approach and make things better for yourself in the best way possible. Accept the situation and let it go.

If you like this episode of The Feel Good Factor, then you’re going to like my newsletter, The Feel Good Tribe. Go here and sign up.

All right, thank you for listening. I look forward to talking to you again next week. Take care. Bye!

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Susmitha Veganosaurus

“I read voraciously, find humour in most things, and I’m most in my element when I’m teaching, writing, and playing with clay. I believe authenticity and kindness are the keys to world peace. Sign up for myfree newsletterwhere I share conversational emails with stories about Life and Business Tips, Vegan Hacks, Holistic Guidance, and more.“

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