How to Deal With Feeling Annoyed and Frustrated

Most days I'm even-keeled. Then I hit traffic, and whatever calm I had evaporates. I'll start with the reasonable stuff: a couple of slow breaths, a stretch of the legs, a sip of water. It doesn't last. My body knots up, my toes start drumming, my hands curl into fists, my jaw locks. By the time I finally crawl past the thing that caused the mess (a single car parked on the shoulder) I've already come apart.

I handle irritation much better when it comes with a reason. Mosquitoes whining around my ears? Fine. They're chasing carbon dioxide and moisture, so I know what they want. Somebody smacking their lips or breathing loudly through their nose while they eat is just that person feeding themselves, and I'm not going to hold a grudge against anyone for staying alive. The stuff that gets under my skin is the stuff that makes no sense, like one stalled car turning into thirty extra minutes of my life. As it turns out, there's a tidy explanation for why the inexplicable bothers us most.

Your brain is a problem-solving machine that never clocks out. It wants order. It wants things to add up. What it hates is noise and loose ends. One everyday example it can't stand: other people's phone calls. You know the feeling. On a bus, in the cereal aisle, sitting in your own living room, you catch one side of a stranger's conversation and it needles at you. Your mind wants the whole picture, even without your permission. We're wired to follow exchanges between two or more people who are both present. Hearing only half, just the rhythm and the fragments, sends the brain into a small tantrum. Try as you might to tune it out, your ears keep catching it and your brain keeps trying to assemble the missing half.

What bugs people is largely personal, but patterns show up. A nationally representative survey from Consumer Reports pulled together some of the most common gripes, and you'll notice they cluster around things that either make no sense or could have been avoided:

Hidden fees and bills nobody can decode. Not being able to reach an actual human on a customer service line. Paying the same price for a product that quietly got smaller. Tailgaters. Dog poop.

Age, gender, and how you were raised all shift the line between what grates on you and what you shrug off. Still, the mind tends to short-circuit under a few recurring conditions: when we had an expectation that reality won't satisfy; when a situation is simply uncomfortable; when we can't focus or filter the thing out; and when we know the irritation will pass but have no idea when.

Here's the part that matters. You can't edit the annoying event itself, only how you meet it. Let irritation curdle into stress and you've started a loop that feeds on itself. People who get annoyed easily or often are doing quiet damage to their bodies and minds. The symptoms stack up: a constant low hum of anxiety, a short temper, high blood pressure, heart trouble, tension headaches. Each of those opens the door to worse. And that's before you count the friends and family you've been pushing away with your reactions.

Feeling annoyed is human. Letting it run your days is what stalls you. Becoming calmer and healthier means getting a handle on your responses, because the weather, other people, and random bad luck are never going to take instruction from you. What you can build is an internal set of tools for meeting the outside noise.

Step one: check yourself before you wreck yourself. Ice Cube said it; make it your mantra. Before you fire back at whatever set you off, turn the question inward. Why does this bother me so much? Is it actually a big deal? What could I just release? More often than not you'll find the thing isn't worth the space it's taking up in your head.

Step two: shift the angle. Simple to say, hard to do. Negative thoughts breed negative feelings and negative moves. There's an old idea that what we think we eventually become, that today's thinking leaks into tomorrow. If that's true, ask whether you really want to pour this morning's bitterness into next year. Try a quick round of gratitude instead, or picture how much worse the moment could be. Mine is 'everything happens for a reason.' Reframing is where a lot of the growth actually happens.

Step three: leave. If walking away is an option, walk away.

Step four: stock the toolbox. When you can't escape, you need coping moves ready to go. Mine are belly breathing, shutting my eyes, praying, singing songs I love, and remembering the births of my two children. That last one sounds like a strange thing to find soothing, but nothing I've been through compares to those two days. Hold the scale of that up against a traffic jam and the traffic jam shrinks to nothing.

Melissa Lavery, M.S.

References: Consumer Reports magazine, January 2010. Palca, J. (2011, April 25), 'You Bug Me. Now Science Explains Why,' NPR. Roman, K. (2015, March 11), 'How To Deal With Annoying People,' mindbodygreen.