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If your Monday blues also entail worry over having to deal with onerous people outside of your nicely curated social bubble, then consider this a safe place.

There are certain kinds of people that evoke burdensome situations – think of that person who goes on about themselves without ever asking about you, or the boss giving you frustrating tasks outside of your paid workload – which can force us into lamentable reactions unless we find a way to zen out and focus on what we can control.

Which is always you. That is all you have control over; you and your reaction. Some of us have learnt that the hard way.

The safe place, to elaborate, is self-reflection – a topic that VICE has delved into to help us contemplate and cope with these various shades of moron.

Self-awareness can be defined as “the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don’t align with your internal standards”. In the case of difficult people or difficult situations, it can help you achieve the “ultimate enlightenment of being unbothered”.

It is easy enough to go through life thinking that everyone else is a problem and you’re just a victim of their silliness, but self-awareness requires you to dig deep and figure out where the problem truly lies.

Self-awareness makes you aware of your and the other person’s position in the situation, helping you figure out how best to move forward.

Here are a few top tips from experts for harnessing self-awareness:

Manage your expectations:

“If you try to understand why you’re hard on people, the more you will understand that you have unmet expectations of how people should treat you and what they should say to you. But if you really dig deep, you will understand that those expectations all come from yourself,” said Miguel Bermundo, a life coach from Manila.

“Accept that people won’t always treat you the way you want or expect,” he said. “Choose who you’re going to count on for certain things.”

Check yourself before you wreck yourself:

“The moment you acknowledge and identify what you’re feeling, it suddenly loses its power over you because you’re not blind to it; you see it clearly,” said Anna Manalastas, a yoga teacher, also based in Manila.

“What self-awareness does is that it brings the attention back to you, and it gives you back the power mainly because you are the only one you can really control or take a hold of. You can’t demand from another person to be nice,” Manalastas said, adding that sometimes, their intention may not even be bad in the first place.

Take a deep breath:

When we experience fear or agitation, our breathing patterns change, according to Emmanuel Hernani, a gestalt therapist based in the Philippines, who also says that breathing is the best regulator of our emotions:

“In order to [emotionally] regulate, stabilize your breathing patterns. You would have to, of course, put some pattern to it. You can count it by threes, sixes, or nines—depends on you,” Hernani said. “The problem nowadays is that we forget how to breathe and react to our situations. We easily get panicky, restless, and irritated because we don’t know how to deal with our situations.”

Shake it off:

The way we feel manifests in the body, so self-awareness is as much a practice of the body as it is of the mind:

“You should recognize that you are irritated and at the same time be aware of the other embodiments of your irritation,” Hernani said. “[Maybe] your feet are getting restless, hands are getting fidgety.”

…“The physical practice (exercise of some kind) reminds us that there’s a very deep and undeniable connection between your body and your mind,” Manalastas said. “If you try to calm your body, you’re creating space physically [and mentally].”

With great self-awareness comes great self-reflection:

Bermundo references two layers of self-reflection: primary (just thinking about a situation) and secondary (one layer deeper, thinking about the way you perceive a situation):

“Not a lot of people try to understand the way they think. Why do they react a certain way? Why are they upset? Those are questions that help with secondary reflection,” Bermundo said.

As mentioned before, it is easy to think of yourself as a victim, and self-reflection requires the hard yards of stepping out of self-denial and into self-awareness.

As Bermundo said, “one way to break through is to understand what your current mindset is costing you”.

If this feels like opening a can of worms, getting the help of a professional is nothing to be ashamed of.

[source:vice]