How Do I Stop Being Irritable

You’ve heard it before: it’s not so much what happens to you that hurts you but how you react to it. Trouble is, most of us don’t know how not to over-react.

New! Read my latest  November 2012 article about why Anger is Bad for You - and it is most likely someone near to you to whom you are reacting and becoming irritable angry)

Basically we react, we get upset, and we experience stress symptoms. And once we start over-reacting, we don’t know how to stop over-reacting.

The more we react, the more sensitive we become until we start reacting over every little thing. Either that, or we become insensitive and shut down.

Remember how you used to be? Once upon a time, you were able to take things reasonably and in stride. Although things happened that you didn’t like, and people were sometimes mean or confusing, you could cope. You had hope for the future, dreams of things you wanted to accomplish, and were confident that you could deal with what life threw your way.

But as the years went by, you began to lose your joie de vivre, your verve and your optimism. Someone upset you. And from that point on it was trying to play catch up.

Life, for many of us, started to become a drag. Many of us began to dread going to work or facing our child’s school teacher. We dreaded another round of treatments, another mailbox full of bills, or another argument with our spouse.

We might have started to become irritable, snapping at our kids and loved ones. At work or out in the world, we encountered unfairness, meanness or arrogance. We became upset and said nothing. But then we came home and took it out on our family—the very ones we should have been kindest to. Instead of protecting them from the craziness out there, it started to get to us and we brought the craziness home and inflicted it and our pain on our loved ones. The very ones who were the most innocent.

If any of this describes you, then you must realize that your sensitivity, negativity, and loss of control have to do with over-reacting. By over-reacting you make things into a stress. And when it becomes a stress, a predicable series of bodily changes occur as your body reacts to the stress (you created).

In order to recover your poise and positive state of mind, you must re-find your own calm center of dignity from which you can flow.
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