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Bite-sized chunks of wisdom about self-leadership for you to chew on.
How to Not Make Things Worse When People Are Irritable
Episode 20
Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.
Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk a little bit about irritability and how to be with someone, whether it's you or someone else who's irritable in a way that doesn't make things worse. So right now, I keep hearing from my clients and my friends about how irritable so many people seem to be right now. There's a shortness of temper and a grumpiness and crankiness people are on edge and frustrated, and all of this makes sense.
Six months ago, people had a sense of how their world functioned and they were grumpy about some things and happy about some things. And there were systemic oppressions and global conflicts and problems with politics and family feuds. And they all sort of made sense because our fundamental understandings and assumptions about how the world works had been pretty stable for a while, for most of us. And then this new coronavirus hit the world and it became clear that it was deadly, and dangerous, and highly transmissible, and actually quite complicated and not very easily understood.
And understandably, communities, and governments, and countries, and towns, and families protected themselves because that's what we do when we're faced with a threat. Human beings are incredibly good at responding to threats. Our brains are wired to pick up on threats and we're adaptable learning creatures. So, we've all done a really good job of protecting ourselves. And now we're looking around and trying to figure out what's going on right now? What's new? How is this going to impact us going forward? And it's making a lot of us grumpy.
A lot of us don't like the circumstances we find ourselves in. We miss things about the way things used to be, tremendously. We dislike the lack of control we're feeling, we dislike the lack of autonomy. We're not happy with this change, and it looks like it's going to be here for a while. And this makes us sad, and we're grieving the loss of the way things used to be. And most of us don't really have time to process our grief.
We're busy trying to provide for our families and provide for ourselves. We've had to compartmentalize most of our grief, and this is normal and healthy, and it will serve us in the long run if we do eventually make time to process our grief. But right now, that unprocessed grief and frustration is coming out in our irritable behavior. Little things are setting people off. We have hair-trigger responsiveness, over the top sensitivity. We're just not as calm in general as we used to be. So how do we make the best of this?
The first is to know that we don't have to fix it. We don't have to just stop being irritable or tell other people to not be irritable, or even help them stop being irritable. We don't actually need to attack the irritability directly. Whether it's ourselves being irritable or other people being irritable, attacking irritability directly almost always backfires. Almost always makes things worse.
When was the last time you were grumpy and cranky and somebody said, "Hey you, snap out of it," and you did? We'll see when we're grumpy and cranky and irritable, if somebody points it out to us, we respond back with a short, nasty something. When we're cranky, we're responding from our sensitivities. We're responding from our sense of threat and hurt. We're responding with our quick and easy responses.
Now, our quick and easy responses are either instinctive or they're learned, but in either case, they're self-protective. If they're learned, they're a response to things that happened in the past that put us out of control. With this virus in the world uncontained, with no vaccine and no drugs that help, and not a good understanding of what medical treatment is best, security feels threatened for almost everybody. Some of us also have learned fear-based responses and conditioning from past events that are being triggered by this experience.
If you have trauma in your past, or a history of not being autonomous, or not feeling like you belonged, or feeling like you didn't have control or agency in your life, this pandemic has almost certainly resurfaced those old patterns. We're acting from self-protection and our irritability is a way of protecting ourselves from threats, perceived or real.
This is of course exacerbated by any lack of sleep, or low blood sugar that we might have. For some people, caffeine and alcohol are also irritability triggers. If we've got anxiety and aren't sleeping well and then have to get up for work and drink a lot of coffee, or are trying to soothe anxiety with alcohol, we can get into vicious cycles that keep us irritable. So, what can we do when we or the people around us are irritable? When other people say grumpy, cranky, nasty things to us. When they're snapping or blaming or critical or defensive, what can we do?
What can we do that won't make things worse?
So often if one of us responds with an irritated response and the next person responds to their words or to their tone of voice, we can escalate from a minor irritation to a major fight, quite rapidly. So, the first thing is to not take the words or tone of voice personally. To recognize that their irritability, which is the driving force behind their choice of words and their tone of voice, is a statement of their lack of capacity to handle whatever's going on right now. It's a statement, an indication of their lack of capacity to act out of anything other than fear.
We need to find ways of not taking the words and tone of voice personally and taking them as a signal. When we take what other people say or do personally, it's actually a form of selfishness.
It's a way of trapping ourselves in our own personal importance, centralizing our experience in the world.
When we take personally the things that other people do, we are trying to make ourselves the center of their world, which is actually absurd. Right? Because they have to be the center of the world.
There's an exercise I went through a few years ago where the group of us was gathered in a circle with our hands held out in front of us into the circle, and the two people who were leading the exercise walked around the circle and each of them put a little glass stone into our hands. The first stone was blue, and when that was placed into our hand, the leader who placed the stone into our hands said, you are the center of the universe. And then right after that, the second leader put a clear glass stone in our other hand and said, you are a speck of dust in the universe.
We were asked to hold this dual reality because we are the center of our own universes. And also, the cosmic universe is so much bigger than us and no one of us is anywhere near the center of it. And we were asked to hold this paradox. And to hold this paradox knowing that everybody else in the circle with us, and in fact everybody else in the world with us, is a speck of dust in the universe and simultaneously the center of their own universe, which makes for a very complicated reality.
When we get irritated by somebody else, there's something in what they say that rings true for us. If we're not irritated by them, we just get a sense of, no, that's not right. There's a sense of cleanness to the boundary. We get irritated when they touch on something that bugs us about ourselves.
When I get irritated by you, it's because I have a hurt in me that you reminded me of, and I am lashing out at you because it's easier than feeling my own hurt. Feeling my own hurt, of course, requires me to experience pain. And when there's so much pain, and so much grief, and so much loss like there is now, it's terrifying to imagine dipping into experiencing that. So, we're being irritable with each other.
We will cease to be irritable with each other as we find ways of exerting some control over our lives. Finding some peace with our new routines. Finding a sense of normalcy in this physically distanced kind of living. Then we'll find ways to become open and to start really grieving. But until then, there are going to be irritable people walking among us. So, what can you do to help yourself not take people's words or tone of voice personally?
I'm going to offer you a phrase that has provided much comfort and growth and learning, for me. It's an affirmation. I am enough. I do enough. Whatever anyone thinks of me is none of my business. Again. I am enough. I do enough. Whatever anyone thinks of me is none of my business. Whatever anyone thinks of me is not my business, it's their business.
My business is what I think of me. And even that is dangerous because I don't want to take my own words or tone of voice too seriously because when I act from that overwhelm and I'm irritable, it's a sign of my lack of capacity. So, I want, even in myself, to hear those words and that tone of voice and to notice with compassion that I am tapped out.
We need to see the suffering behind the grumpy, cranky nastiness because all of us in every moment are doing the best that we can at that moment.
It behooves us all to be aware: I am enough, I do enough, and whatever anyone else thinks of me is none of my business. And if we can find in ourselves the generosity to think of others, that they are enough, that they do enough, and that what I think of them is none of their business.
Now, it's really important that we don't weaponize this idea, that we don't turn around and tell other people to not take things personally. That never goes well.
If we find ourselves doing that, we are not being compassionate. If we judge that other people are being wrong, taking things personally that they shouldn't take personally, we're taking a position of power over them. We're saying we know better than they are and we are taking a position of superiority. And that does not make things go better when other people are feeling sensitive.
That just creates more drama in the relationship.
Some people get concerned that thinking that what other people think of you is their business and not your business, gives you permission to be uncaring. And it does give you permission to be uncaring, but it doesn't require you to be uncaring.
What it does is gives you space between what they think and what you do in response so you can actually be yourself, act from what matters to you, do the best that you can do without being reactive to what they say. When we have that space, it becomes easier to act out of love or compassion, even when other people are irritable. And it's that space that allows us to not make things worse.
So, to sum up, when we are irritable, it's a demonstration of our sense of overwhelm, our sense of instability and lack of control, whether we are the ones who are irritable or we're with others who are irritable.
If we can remember that irritability is a sign of how the person who is behaving irritably is coping with the situation they're in, rather than a statement about the person that they are irritated towards. Then we can tap into our compassion and our humanity, and we can create some ease around, even if the words in the tone of voice feel like an attack. What's really going on is the person who's speaking is feeling threatened and is being self-protective.
Right now, with the world as it is, we are all under attack from this virus. And so, there's an opportunity to forgive when other people lash out at us. When we choose not to take other people's words and tone of voice personally, it just gives us a little more ease around the situation. A little more time, a little more space. We can use that space to choose to respond out of love and not out of our sense of being threatened. It might not actually make things better, but it certainly goes a long way to not making things worse. And in this stressful time when things feel awful in so many ways to so many people, not making things worse than they have to be is powerful stuff.
I'm wishing you ease in this time. As much ease as you can have, and compassion for yourself when you don't feel okay. I wish you peace.
End Theme and Credits:
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To take this work deeper and learn how I can support you personally as your coach, email me at kate@signalfirecoaching.com to schedule a free consultation.
Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.