It starts with a small twinge but becomes a volcanic rage. Whether at work or with family, we must be able to defuse our own rising irritation.
The holidays are well underway. That means time with family; often much more time than we’re used to. Has annoyance has already crept into your consciousness?
Whether siblings, in-laws, parents or grown children, the adage “you can choose your friends but not your family” may feel painfully apt.
Family time can resurface old tensions, expose us to unedited criticism and even lead to screaming matches. The current political climate doesn’t help things.
The same thing happens in workplaces—where, often, you can’t choose your colleagues any more than you can your relations. A single annoying habit can trigger a kind of momentum. The annoyance escalates.
Several years ago, I wrote about leaders who are stuck in a cycle of fault finding with one or several team-members. When it happens, the poor employee can’t seem to catch a break. The leader has become “WRONG” waiting-to-happen. Sometimes, escalating annoyance is to blame.
I suspect you may have been on one or both ends of that dynamic.
Family Irritation
One of my family members triggers my own escalator to rage. It starts with minor irritation, and then each successive comment or action adds to its intensity. It’s as though there was a metronome inside my brain…. tick…tick…tick… gradually speeding up on its way to fury.
As that’s happening, I feel like a prisoner of my own mood. And it has lots of negative consequences. I become distant and uncommunicative. The irritation isn’t discrete. It creeps into every gesture and expression, making me much less pleasant and gracious company.
It may be my anger, but it gets on everyone.
The Source of Power
If you have your own version of this experience–maybe your boss, a teammate, your cousin or mother-in-law– how do you get yourself unhooked and back to your normal, delightful self?
To be clear, your mother-in-law (or my relative) may really be annoying. Irritating people are part of life.
But the problem is that we can’t change anything about them.
We can’t silence the guy in the next cubicle who hums under his breath, or make the manager stop interrupting everyone. I can’t force the car in front of me to edge forward to turn left—or stop my relative from bringing up childhood tiffs.
We are powerless to change others. But we have utter dominion over ourselves and how we react.
That is the message in this well-known quote from Buddhist teacher, Shantideva.
Where would there be leather enough to cover the entire world? With just the leather of my sandals, it is as if the whole world were covered.
The point is simple. If every irksome interaction is like a field of broken glass, you have a choice:
You could try to pave it. But there are innumerable hazardous pieces of land. Do you pave them all?
Or, you can wear shoes and protect your fragile soles. When you do that, you are not only safe to tread on that one field—but also, anywhere there is jagged terrain.
Just as you can’t pave the entire Earth to protect your feet, you can’t change other people to avoid being annoyed.
But we can all develop the skill to defuse our own escalating annoyance. And that skill is available in every situation.
Wherever We Go
“Wherever you go there you are”. We can only be who we are—whether at Christmas dinner or in the daily stand-up.
If you experience escalating annoyance in one place, you probably do so in most other places.
Holidays are infrequent. So even if you can’t get un-annoyed at the table, you have until next year to recover your equanimity.
But at work, it can wreak havoc.
Once we decide that a colleague’s behavior is irksome, we see everything about them in a more negative light. Over time, we will find more faults and get annoyed more often. That too isn’t a private phenomenon. It spills over onto the entire team or organization.
Loud Talking
I regularly cycle in the gym. Between hard sets, I read. Every week or so someone nearby starts talking on their phone. Loudly. Sometimes, they may have the other person on speaker.
Instantly, I go from peaceful to enraged.
From the moment I notice the person, my mind goes into overdrive. Within 2 seconds I “know” them. “So selfish and entitled”, I tell myself “I’ll bet they do that in the grocery store—maybe even in church!”
My pulse and blood pressure rise way beyond what’s necessary to cycle.
The anger isn’t caused by the loud talker.
Facts alone do not enrage us. Instead, we react to what we think they mean. And that meaning arises in a story that we tell ourselves. [Click to tweet this thought]
The story I recite internally—about what an awful person he is and how she’s so inconsiderate she would even do it church, etc….That is the source of my reaction.
It’s NOT a Fact
Because we are always reacting to stories, not facts, we tend to get the two of them confused.
Stories seem like facts. They feel true.
But they are very different. Stories have drama, they have morality and conflict. Facts do not. They are bland.
He talked on the phone. | The car waited at the intersection. | The office worker is humming.
These anodyne, declarative phrases that describe the world don’t evoke emotion. In their rawest form, facts have no meaning and no effect on us.
But humans—all of us—construct our world of meanings. So, when there is no meaning, we add some.
Every observation that becomes conscious gets a meaning—within a story. We may tell those stories to ourselves—or to everyone.
Shared stories form the fabric of our identities, our communities and our social movements.
No story? No meaning.
So, when we observe something, to make sense of it, we construct a story—imbuing it with lots of meaning. That meaning—an embodied “point of view”—is what causes our annoyance.
Here’s how it plays out:
Follow that same chain backwards, starting from the reaction, and you have the power to un-annoy yourself.
Get rid of the meaning, and the reaction disappears too. But the meaning is in the story. So, we need to separate those two things: the fact and the story.
Of course, it’s different to do this than to describe it. The whole chain of events takes place fast.
It feels instantaneous—which is why the story feels true, and the meaning feels like fact. They are temporally indistinguishable.
But you don’t have to catch yourself in real time to successfully get un-annoyed. You can do it even as your irritation has taken root and is growing.
The Intervention
At whatever point you feel gripped by the escalating irritation, stop, take a breath, and go somewhere quiet to think through. I’m not suggesting you count to ten or anything like that (although, if you’re carrying a loaded pistol, that’s probably a good idea).
Instead, parse the pieces of the chain until they are vividly distinct.
- What is the fact? i.e., What happened? JUST the facts!
- What did I tell myself about it? This may be a story, description, characterization or conclusion.
- Is the fact true? The answer here is yes (unless you imagined the actual observation).
- Is the story true? No matter what the story is, it is not true. It is imbued with your feelings, interpretation, added flourishes and nuances that give it meaning. And that’s what’s hard to see.
Whether the story is about your mom pressuring you to visit, or your cofounder refusing to see sense on the strategy, or whether Israel or the Hamas are in the wrong—it is a story.
The story creates the meaning. And the meaning causes the emotional reaction.
Separate the facts from the story and you will be free of the annoyance, irritation or rage.
One way I work with my clients on this is to invent alternative stories.
We take the exact same observations or facts and put them into new narratives.
For example, I might invent a new story for the loud phone talker at the gym. Maybe he has hearing loss and doesn’t know he is loud. Or, maybe she is anxious, and getting important news about the health of a child. Or, he could be running a psychological experiment to see how long it takes for someone to lose their temper at the gym.
These are all as good as each other because—like all our instantaneous stories—they are made up. None of these stories makes me as angry as the one in which he was an inconsiderate ass. Since I invented them, I can choose whichever produces the best result.
I chose the story in which he’s running an experiment. It made me feel wise!
Over time, we get better and better at this work of separating fact from story. I can often do it as the irritation is starting. That way I distinguish my story almost as it forms, ensuring less damage to my state-of-mind and everyone around me.
Then, the fact—whatever it is—stops mattering. I can let it be.
Yes, the loud talking is still going on. And I may have a few more twinges of irritation. But I am not in the grip of it. There is no escalation. I am back in my body, in my workout, and being who I am committed to being.
My mind is now wearing shoes—and all terrain is safe for walking.
Pre-Holiday Gift
I suspect you’ll have occasion to use this over the next two weeks. Whether it’s the perpetual Christmas music, the constant presence of children out of school, unwelcome flirting at the office holiday party or something else, there will be moments of escalating annoyance.
Being able to free ourselves from its grip is like a superpower!