My yelling triggers

For the past year or so I've been reading theorangerhino.com, a blog about yelling less and loving more. I've never gotten ambitious enough to make a goal to not yell at my kids for 365 days, like the author did, but she offers some great ideas that she figured out herself as she worked on that goal. One of the things she figured out was that there are certain things that make her more inclined to yell, so when she feels like yelling, she goes through her list of triggers to see if any of those are the real reason she wants to yell. It's been helpful to me to do this because often when I am yelling at my kids a lot it's because of something I'm dealing with, not something they are doing. So here is my list of triggers:

• I'm hungry.
• The sink is full of dirty dishes.
• There are a lot of toys all over the floor.
• It's almost dinner time and I don't know what to make.
• I've been spending too much time on the computer.
• I read a post or article about parenting (or worse, the comments under a post about parenting) and it made me upset. (Even the positive ones tend to do this.)
• I'm tired.
• I have a headache.
• I'm stressed about something. (This used to happen a lot when I had a test or a paper coming up or I didn't know how to do a problem on my homework.)
• I haven't spent time with friends for a while.
• I need to exercise and/or I've been eating too much junk food.
• I haven't been saying my prayers.
• We've been out doing errands or at the park for a long time and I need some time at home to reset and get my energy back.

For the most part the things on this list are not the kids' fault and they are things that I can control or do something about, so if I stop and think about what is really causing me to yell, I can address that problem. Usually once I've taken care of it my body relaxes (like all the hot air has been released or something) and suddenly I feel like being nice to the kids again. Sometimes I'm just grumpy or emotional for no apparent reason, and that's harder to deal with, but it's helpful to know that at least sometimes there are things I can do to fix it.