A question we get quite often when working with above and below the line and emotional health levels is “how can I use them in practice?”

While ‘catching your reactions’ is an important first step towards operating above the line more often and building your emotional health, you also need to know where to go beyond that initial point of self-realisation.

One of the most abundant sources of emotional triggers – circumstances which elicit some sort of response – is our environment. You might find yourself responding to a piece of waste paper left in a park. Or, if you have teenagers, to a bomb-site of a bedroom. Let’s have a look at both of these everyday examples.

The waste paper situation is reasonably straightforward. A typical automatic response would be to get angry or blame others for what you have found. A healthier and less stressful response would be to pause and reflect on the situation. Have a look around. Perhaps the area has become a dumping ground and the person who left this rubbish was simply following the lead of others. Or maybe there are no bins in the area: perhaps this litter is a sign of someone else’s frustration at a lack of services.

Either way, the question to ask yourself is: “What can I do?” Can you contact the local council? Can you simply lead by example and recommit to making sure you take your own waste away? Can you register the site for the Keep Australia Beautiful Campaign? Any of these responses would be more positive – more ‘above the line’ – than simply getting angry or laying blame.

The teenage bedroom situation can be more complex, and while it’s not the place of this blog to be handing out parenting advice, I have spent some time in conversation with some wonderfully wise colleagues (who are parents) to learn how they manage their responses.

They suggest that most parents, at some point or other, have found themselves cursing as they try to find a child’s floor and/or the bed under a mountain of clothes, bags and homework. They also admit that they too have experienced the “How many times…?!” shouting match as a result.

As we’ve learnt before, it’s important to initially catch your response, to recognise any feelings of anger and blame as they are happening, and to recognise the effect your response is having on you and others.

Once you can ‘capture’ your feelings, you can move on to the next step: reflection.  Reflection means giving thought to your own reactions, and also taking the time to see the situation and its consequences from other points of view.

Now, some of you are probably already thinking that’s all very well, but his/her room is a pigsty! Which it may well be. However, my colleagues point out that no matter what the state of the room there is still a choice about how to react to it and pausing to reflect will allow options for the next step – response – to become available to you.

One option they suggest is to do nothing but close the door. Perhaps, on reflection, the mess really doesn’t matter. Chances are that one day the child will develop some tidier habits. One day they may even face the same situation with their own kids. In the meantime if they can’t find that favourite shirt or skirt, well … they have choices too.

A second option is to tidy up for them, however my colleagues point out that if you’re going to do that you have to ask if you’re doing it for your child or for yourself. There’s a risk here that the teenager’s failure to appreciate the effort that is made might just escalate existing frustrations.

A third suggested option is to sit down and talk about it, and there are more choices here. You could share your feelings (“I am disappointed”), discuss the need for compromise because you all live together, or simply engage in a conversation that considers everyone’s different perspectives about the situation, make a genuine effort to listen as you do so.

The point here is not, as I said, to give parenting advice. What’s important is to recognise that pause for thought and reflection on options before choosing to respond is a more emotionally healthy approach to these sorts of challenging situations than simply reacting instinctively.

Next time we’ll look at another type of trigger: our hard-wired beliefs.

Gayle