The Toxicity Of Rudeness - Why You Can't Break The Cycle And 7 Ways To Fix It

Jun 11, 2018 by apost team

Rudeness is something that affects our health and well-being; it’s a stressor. It hurts your mood and influences your productivity. While we encounter a great deal of rudeness in communication and face-to-face encounters, we also unintentionally exhibit our own rude behaviors, often without even realizing it.

Rudeness can be like the cycle of a virus as we encounter it and then carry forth the stress of it with us to be rude to others and infect them. The good news is that we can decide to take action to break the cycle. 

apost.com

Sometimes rudeness is intentional, but it’s also often unintentional. This unintentional rudeness occurs because behaviors and words do not have a universal alignment of appropriateness and context and people do not have a universal core value system. In other words, what one person says in public, at work, or in a social setting may not align with someone else’s value and interpretation system or their concept of civility. The result is that they take offense and view the encounter as rude. 

Dr. Michael P. Leiter, PhD, Professor of Organizational Psychology at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, says that this type of unintentional rudeness comes from the person being inconsiderate, clueless, not thinking words through, and being unable to imagine anyone else being offended. 

Even such simple acts of rudeness can quickly ruin someone’s day by setting off a cycle of negative behaviors that further affect both the initial recipient’s mood, productivity, and day and those they go on to encounter. 

Christine Porath, PhD, author of “Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace” and Associate Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University calls incivility a virus that, when touched, is inadvertently passed on to others. 

Porath’s research has shown that those encountering rudeness are less motivated, cut back on task-related efforts, and are more apt to leave jobs where they encounter it regularly. Her research has shown that just witnessing rudeness can put a damper on performance scores for routine tasks and creative tasks. Employee absenteeism grew and sale performance dropped in a study exploring incivility between workers and customers. 

Porath explains such results as a negative spiral and negative culture that rude actions and responses trigger. One coworker talking over another in a meeting or a customer becoming irritate at a worker over a store policy doesn’t always lead to a huge aggressive blowup; instead, the spiral and negative results are more subtle. Those involved might perhaps become become less helpful, passive aggressive, less apt to work hard, and chose not to share pertinent information. 

In health, rudeness is an emotionally upsetting stressor. Rude interactions are often ruminated over by sharing the encounter with others and even replaying the incident over and over in our thoughts. Why such attention to it? Experts say we tend to view rude interactions as an attack on our identity and legitimacy. 

It’s a challenge to our sense of self, and we tend to bring the aftermath of it with us in our future encounters. Someone cuts you off, doesn’t hold the elevator door for you, or tramples you to get a cab on your way to work, and your frustrations make you short tempered, dismissive, and inattentive once you get to work and encounter coworkers. This begets rudeness in return that further impacts our moods and behaviors that we then carry home to infect our families. It’s indeed a highly toxic and contagious cycle. 

Yes, and here’s what the experts say will help you avoid and stop the toxic cycle of incivility: 

Keep things pleasant on your end by saying all the thank you, please, hello, and goodbyes required in an interaction. Change the tenor of interaction by setting the tone to niceties. How often people are rude to you often is predicted by your own acknowledgement and expression of appreciation toward others. 

Renegotiate situations that leave you feeling offended instead of carrying them around like baggage. If you internalize received or perceived rudeness, it festers like anger. Instead, immediately address it and express how you feel. More often than not, the interaction was a miscommunication, not a malicious attack on your identity. Use “I” statements to express how you felt about the encounter so that the other person doesn’t feel attacked. 

The neighbor that always cuts in on your cab. The critical coworker at lunch. The friend who’s always negative. You know who they are, and you can skip and limit a lot of interactions with them by arranging your schedule to limit and avoid unnecessary interaction with these serial inflictors of rudeness. 

Words and actions can infer a lot of different meanings within context, tone, reflection, and the overall dynamics of a given relationship. Think about each facet and the particular person you’re speaking to, texting, or emailing as you interact so that you can avoid inadvertent miscommunications causing conflict. 

Just as rudeness is contagious, so is niceness. Greet random rudeness with niceness. You may change someone else’s day in addition to avoiding catching the rudeness virus they’re carrying. 

Everyone has bad days. The important thing is to be self-reflective enough to realize when you’re taking it out on others. Apologize and seek forgiveness. It will stop the rudeness cycle and be an invaluable boost to your own mental health and well-being. 

If you believe everyone is uncivilized and out to stab you with rudeness, then you’re going to always be on the defensive and analyze every move and remark for hints of rudeness. You’re also more likely to be in the strike first mode with people and be rude to them.

This isn’t to say to approach the world with Pollyanna rose-colored glasses, but you do need to approach interactions with positivity and optimism if you don’t have a legitimate reason to do otherwise. It also means cutting other people the same slack we’d like for ourselves in attributing our bad behaviors to being stressed, rushed, or upset, not part of who we are as a person. 

Open body language, such as smiling, makes it much harder for someone to greet it with rudeness. It’s also a natural happy hormone release for ourselves when those smiles come from a genuine place of positivity. 

There you have exactly how rudeness begins, festers, circulates, becomes toxic to your health, and how to combat it. Are you planning on implementing these seven combatants to rudeness in your life? Be sure to tell us all about your plans and results in the comment section. 

Do you battle receiving and being rude? If so, you need to see how it’s impacting your well-being and learn these 7 steps to break the cycle.