Keeping your mind calm is an important working life skill that helps you build a safe working atmosphere and prevent unnecessary conflicts. Susanna Paarlahti, Service Manager of Occupational Psychology, instructs how to ground your reactions in a conflict and calm the situation.
Reaction to threatening situations – your mind turns to past experiences
Only five years have passed since the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic. We had barely had time to address the anxiety caused by the sense of isolation and fear when the war of aggression broke out and we had to face yet another security threat. Frightened people started to behave worse, and this phenomenon also reached Finnish workplaces.
The human mind works similar to predictive text input: it fills in the missing details and transforms information that does not suit the prediction into something else altogether. This mechanism can make you feel like a target of workplace bullying when, in reality, the other person is only a frightened and vulnerable member of the same species. They can appear upset but not because they see you as inferior but because they think you are threatening their sense of security.
This misunderstanding sparks a conflict between you and your co-worker.
To fill in your predicative text input, you google workplace bullying and start to interpret non-verbal messages empathetically: you are being bullied.
Other members of the work community also start to believe your interpretation of the situation.
Calming your mind – an important working life skill
Peacekeeping can initially sound like idealism from the Cold War era, but I claim that it can also contribute to the promotion of mental health today. Here are my arguments.
If you learn to calm your mind, your autonomic nervous system can restore your body, including your brain, to its normal state, in which it can utilise the information and skills it has last learned.
If you do not learn to calm your mind, it will continue in the survival mode with prehistoric responses: fight or flee – otherwise you will die.
Going through your day in this mode makes you blind to the possibility that your co-worker could offer you shelter from whatever is upsetting you. Thus, you can accidentally aggravate the vicious circle your workplace has been trapped in.
Safe work atmosphere through repetition
Situations in which a supervisor must intervene in poor conduct, investigate claims of bullying, or make work arrangements to settle conflicts cannot be avoided completely.
I, however, claim that there are many situations where we can calm things down and prevent the escalation of emotions by softening our gaze and tone, exhaling slowly, and using friendly words.
When these non-verbal and verbal messages are repeated, we can hope that our co-worker meets us halfway, allowing us to build a future full of opportunities together.
Do you want to improve the social interactions in your work community and prevent conflicts? The services of Pihlajalinna Occupational Health reinforce the psychological safety of your work community. Please contact your occupational health team for more information.
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