Here recently it seems like everything just gets under my skin so quickly and easily. It’s not that I get mad and take it out on others, it’s just the fact that I’m constantly annoyed and stressed. Something as simple as the dogs tracking some mud through the house will just ruin my mood. I know some people who would just laugh it off and clean it up. Meanwhile I’ll get pissed that I didn’t wipe their feet and be mad the entire time I’m cleaning it up. This has nothing to do with the dogs, it just an example. Any number of seemingly insignificant things can trigger me like that. Like forgetting something at the store and having to go back. I would love to be able to go, “well that sucks” and just get over it.
Drink more water! Whenever I find myself grumpy, the culprit is usually dehydration… It makes everything harder IMO. Ymmv etc etc anecdata
Here recently it seems like everything just gets under my skin so quickly and easily. It’s not that I get mad and take it out on others, it’s just the fact that I’m constantly annoyed and stressed.
Are you annoyed and stressed because everything gets under your skin, or does everything get under your skin because you are constantly annoyed and stressed?
Happened to me too. Best thing is going to therapy.
This might be caused by bigger problems with your family or work. Or it might just be accumulated stress unrelated to anything in particular.
Therapy helps either way
I’ve been in therapy for years and it is very much accumulated stress. At this point I don’t know what other stress I can cut out, so I figured of maybe I could lessen the impact across the board it might help. Like if I could compress my stress so it takes up less resources.
I’ve also been through therapy for years, although not currently. IDK whether it’s true or not but for me personally I feel as though therapy can deteriorate from a short, sharp, beneficial “intervention” (which is very helpful) into a malaise of relating ones problems to a friendly ear (which is unproductive) … but I digress.
This sounds to me like one of those problems which is a symptom potentially caused by a myriad of different issues, and as such has no specific “cure”. As you’ve said it’s “accumulated stress”, which is another way of saying the same thing. I feel like I run into this type of problem a lot: the solution is really easy, I just need to do better at life!
My one suggestion would be to look at therapies for anxiety, since anger and anxiety are commonly symptoms of the same problem. There’s two common therapies for this.
Firstly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) - figuring out why your thoughts follow the patterns they do and as a result, learning how to change those patterns. This is hard work. It’s a bit like going to a gym. You need to set aside time for several sessions a week of examining the parts of yourself you’ve been trying not to think about your entire life. The gold standard for DIY CBT is “When Panic Attacks” by David Burns, alternatively “feeling great” by the same author. He has a podcast also. I know the dirty dog feet was just an off hand example, but to continue that example you might discover that you have a deeply held belief that people who have dirty houses end up sad lonely and unloved, a potential solution might be to tell someone who you feel is happy and well loved how difficult it is to keep a clean house - inevitably they will agree with you and tell you how hard they find keeping up with their chores.
Secondly Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) - accepting that stressors will always be present, understand that they’re harmless, fleeting thoughts, and committing to a course of action that is more meaningful than simply “avoiding stress”. Author Steven Hayes is the gold standard here but personally I find his stuff too heavy. I quite like “DARE” by Barry McDonagh, basically ACT but more easily digested. This one is more readily applied “in the moment”. It takes practice but there’s no sitting and pondering one’s soul so-to-speak. This is very difficult to explain in a sentence but you might acknowledge, in the moment, that dirty dog feet are infuriating, you feel that feeling, allow it to come. What you’ll find (with anxiety at least) is that if you don’t resist it but regard it with a welcoming curiosity, it will dissipate fairly quickly and leave you with a kind of energised readiness. “Well that was a thing!”. If feeling frustrated is a natural response, and you fight with yourself not to feel that, it creates an incredible tension - you push the feelings away and they just push back harder. You kind of learn to let the frustration come feel the feelings in a healthy way.
ACT sounds very interesting. There are stressors I’ll never get rid of. But that sounds like it could help having them control my life. Thanks!
I would like to add EMDR to the list of therapies. Ive been through CBT and ACT and learned some coping skills there. EMDR is considered a bit ‘advanced’ in that a person needs CBT-like skills and self-awareness for it to really work.
I’ll admit it seems like woo-woo to my overly logical brain. But I cannot deny the real permanent breakthroughs in learning to more efficiently recognize and process distressing emotions.
Get checked for vitamin deficits?
Do these feelings of anger linger for long? Personally I’m like you in the sense that tiny inconveniences piss me off but I also drop those feelings pretty quickly and go on with my day, it’s like a very short spike of anger and then back to normal, I just kinda remind myself it’s not a huge deal and go on with my life. I think it’s healthy to feel the anger just don’t dwell on it for long.
I pretend I’m in a zoo observing people, which I guess is called disassociation.
That sounds fun. Look at those apes hitting each other with stones. And nuclear bombs. How playful!
I never thought about dissociating this way :O I’ll give it a try next time I feel the meltdown coming
When my depression and adhd where really bad it used to be like that. Do you have any other problems?
I work in ecology. The amount of times that weather or nature has plans counter to my own has been too great to count. Just gotta go with the flow and deal with the cards you have in a given moment. It doesn’t mean you can’t be upset about something, but at some point you realize that it’s not useful.
Being mad sucks. If something bad happens it sucks. If I’m mad about the bad thing that happened then I already got two things that suck. I like to minimize the suck.
I simply project my reality onto my surroundings
I knew a guy like this but it seemed his life could not get worst so nothing at worked bothered him.
While reading Epectitus definitely helped (externals - out of your control; reactions - your choice, things don’t bother you, you bother yourself), and telling myself that I gain nothing out of anger (mostly lose from it), I ran out of fucks to give. Someone’s blocking the way? Just wait until I can pass them. My delivery is running late? Whatever, it’ll get there. I left the window open during heavy rain and everything is wet? Close the window and mop it.
In a world where nothing really matters, giving your undying attention to stupid things like these is just absurd. Who’s watching your reactions so that you have to put on a show?
But as someone said, it takes practice. Being mindful, present, realizing that you’re getting angry, and then consciously thinking “ah whatever” and accepting it. Difficult at first, but as with any skill, the more you do it, the easier it gets.
I’m on antidepressants and I smoke a shit ton of weed
I’ve always had a personality that everyone thinks I smoke weed but I don’t.
I trained myself over years after realizing stress was killing me, I was unpredictable to be around, and struggled to eat with any regularity which led to really bad eating habits.
What ended up working is when something would happen that upset me I would close my eyes, take a deep breath, go to a room by myself and just sit down with my eyes closed and do box breathing until my nerves settled. Then when I opened my eyes I would say to myself, ok let’s go get this mud cleaned up.
Admittedly it doesn’t work in a car, crowded location, or even work necessarily. Over years my impulse control and roll with the punches attitude really developed. Maybe too much, when my ex wife said she wanted a divorce it was kind of just an “ok, do you want me to move out or did you plan to? I’ll see what paperwork we need to fill out “.
I enjoy life so much more though. My dog peed in the laundry room shortly after coming inside and I remember a time when I would have been incredulous about it. My response was to chuckle and say “oh buddy you know not to pee inside”, grap a swiffer and throw the pad in the load of wash I was starting.
Maybe I just got older, life experience and all that. I do think the separation from what happened and box breathing exercise really helped me in being able to put things into context and just let life be life though.
My solution, which I honestly believe leads to a much more happy life consist of two things:
Have a conscious relationship to what you can do something about. “Dog peed in laundry” is a great example. It’s already happened, there’s nothing I can do to change that, so I’ll just fix the problem. No point in getting irritated. The point is: Don’t get mad about stuff you can’t change/influence.
Always give everyone the benefit of doubt. If someone says something hurtful, like "your mother is a fat asshole™ ", I’ll try to think “maybe they have legitimate concerns about my mothers health, and legitimate concerns about how she’s treating others that I should bring up with her”, rather than immediately thinking they’re just trying to hurt me. That me be disproven in later conversation, but I believe it helps me treat others in a better way, and helps me be a more balanced person.
I’m often seen as calm even though I have my frustrated outbursts. The one thing I make sure to do is not direct that frustration towards other living things.
As you mentioned in the dog analogy, I’ll outwardly vocalize what I could have done to avoid the situation and own the blame. I have a couple dogs as well. If I’m upset enough that I notice a change in their behavior I’ll play with them to show its okay. Now that I think about it, they started bringing me toys when I’m upset which has a calming effect on its own.
I want other people witnessing my tantrum to understand I’m frustrated with myself. There is always something I could have done to improve/avoid the situation. On the rare occasion I’m unable to self regulate I’ll remove myself and take time to reflect. Sometimes it takes a night of sleep.
I’ve lived with a number of narcissistic and borderline personality types throughout my life. Seeing and experiencing the damage one can do with anger, I’ve made it a core principal to never project my own shortcomings onto another living thing.
For situations where one could not have done anything, I’ll resort to assertiveness principals if I’m not okay with another’s behavior or accept the the situation and go into “fix it” mode to mitigate what’s in my control.
Key point I suppose is to remove anger, shaming, eluded ignorance, and other forms of manipulative behaviors as a means to control others and to see every frustration as a test of my principals.
To maybe build on this a little, as someone who grew up in a household with a parent with anger issues who would take their own frustrations out on the family, it definitely helps as something to avoid, but I’ve found that my inward reactions have gotten better as well once I realized that anger being my immediate reaction was due to growing up in an environment where that was normalized. Even if at the time it could be frightening and I knew even then that it was bad, the human brain is funny and children are impressionable.
I was in my 30s before I came to terms with the fact that my anger issues, however well controlled the outbursts were and no matter how much I avoided letting other people know it was happening, they were still there and I was still following in the steps of my father emotionally. And recognizing that it’s not how everyone feels and it’s not just “how my brain works,” but conditioning, and conditioning that can be broken. Similarly, I would remove myself and reflect, but I’d start to focus less on me and my reactions and force more empathy by thinking about the person or thing or situation and what led to me being upset. Eventually it got to the point where now my immediate reaction is to rationalize the situation before I emotionally respond. If I think through it and I feel I should actually still be upset, then I can confront it, but in calmer and more rational state, confident that I’m probably justified.
It still happens sometimes. Mostly it’s the normal irritability that everyone feels when they’re stressed or tired. And sometimes that old habit comes back and I react a little more hotly than I should for no reason. I have cats that, like your dogs, even if the anger is not directed anywhere near them, they get scared. Seeing that pulls me out real quick and I’ll calm down if only just to calm them, then give then scritches and pats to let them know it’s okay and they’re safe. So I’d probably say that even just having them around has given me a little accountability to help as well and made it easier to avoid. Say I’m having one of those days where I’m just clumsy and uncoordinated and keep dropping or breaking things. I get real close, but my reaction will immediately be to think about making sure they don’t get upset. I think it helps over-wright that anger conditioning with conditioning myself to focus on something else.
So the conclusion I’ve come to, literally just now while typing all this since I haven’t given it a ton of active thought before, is that the conditioning to that reaction has to be broken, and that’s usually easier by replacing it so you don’t even go to anger, but to something else every time. As every therapist I’ve ever been to says, you also can’t feel shame or upset with yourself for the anger. It’s a thing that you want to work on and the bet way to fix it is to dispassionately view it and work on it. Beating yourself up will only make it worse.
