What annoys you points toward your direction of growth
Sometimes, when something annoys you, your mind is actually pointing toward the direction in which you need to grow, the fears you need to overcome, and the problems from the past you still need to sort out.
For example, if we simplify it as much as possible: beggars and homeless people annoy you because you fear poverty and avoid asking for help; bad grammar annoys you because you are too proud of your own literacy and “difference”; people having fun annoy you, but can you yourself let go and enjoy life that carelessly?
And it works like this with any irritation: in everything, you can find the reason inside yourself.
Sounds strange, right?
You are not your emotions, and your emotions are not you
…even though emotions insist otherwise.
With enough training, you can watch emotions fly past like cars on a highway while you sit calmly on the shoulder. It is not hard to imagine what happens if we run into the road trying to stop our anger, sadness, irritation, or envy.
When something annoys us, we jump into “irritation” at full speed, and it carries us far away from the place where we were supposed to be.
Irritation is “folded” aggression
In advanced cases, problems in one area of life get compensated through irritants in another.
To get to the root of complex “irritation,” you often have to observe your emotions for a long time, seek advice, meditate. But believe me, it is worth it.
How can you use irritation to your advantage?
Irritation can be used as fuel, as a kind of stimulus for change. Often that is exactly what happens: someone is irritated by the district they live in, and so they move away. Provided that their inner sadomasochist is not keeping them in an uncomfortable environment, which is not all that rare either.
To understand the reason for irritation, you can begin with simple questions to yourself:
- Why does this make me angry?
- What would have to change for that anger to disappear?
- How does this irritation affect me?
- What quality would help me stop being angry?
- What will happen in a week, a month, a year if I do not sort this anger out?
Simple questions, but if you really think about them, they produce very complicated answers.
Where does irritation disappear?
From my observation, besides signaling a direction for growth, the second common cause of irritation is judgment. We are annoyed by what we consider wrong, ugly, or out of place.
Sooner or later, people come to a sense of non-judgmental perception. To the understanding that there is white and there is black. Both are beautiful and ugly in their own way. What matters is that everything is balanced, and only our own judgments introduce imbalance. An imbalance that exists only in our heads because, in the end, the world does not care.
Non-judgmental perception is when a person simply perceives reality
Without labels attached, irritation has nothing to cling to.