There is a good saying that is probably familiar to everyone who has ever spent more than fifteen minutes in therapy: living through your emotions won’t kill you. Even the most intense, unpleasant, dramatic, Oscar-worthy feelings won’t kill you. However, if you suppress your emotions systematically — and systematically is the key word here — it might eventually lead to rather serious consequences, both cognitive and physical. Very annoying, especially if your original plan was simply to ignore everything and remain elegant.

And although I sometimes think it would be much easier to live in a world without emotions, somewhere deep down I know that feeling them is the only way to be truly alive. Also, apparently, it gives us a chance to live happily. Rude, but promising.

Dealing with emotions is a sort of samurai path. The destination matters less than the process, and you have to keep going every day. You can’t just crack yourself open once, understand everything, and then live peacefully forever like a wise ceramic frog. You learn along the way.

Someday I might tell you about anxiety, but today what concerns me most is irritation: a small, sometimes hard-to-recognise feeling that brings a surprising amount of discomfort and suddenly turns you into a grumpy old man instead of the nice, pleasant person you surely are.

Personally, when I realise I am irritated, I become annoyed with the irritation itself. An elegant little circle of hell. It feels like something unpleasant inside the body, like a shoe rubbing your foot, and the first response is denial. Surely this isn't irritation. Surely I am just surrounded by fools.

But what is irritation, really?

Irritation is an emotional alarm bell. Psychologically, it often signals a gap between your expectations and reality. It can be triggered by unmet needs, violated boundaries, stress, tiredness, or the sudden discovery that other people continue to exist and behave independently.

In other words, irritation isn't the enemy. It is a notification from your internal system. Unfortunately, unlike your phone, you can't simply put it on silent mode and pretend to be well-adjusted.

There are three common reasons why irritation appears:

So yes, irritation, like pain, is a signal that something is wrong. And the first step is to understand where exactly everything went off the rails.

For example, I am not a morning person. I wake up grumpy, I prefer to sleep late, and this is simply who I am. A delicate creature of darkness and delayed consciousness. If someone interacts with me within an hour after I wake up, there is a decent chance it will put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

I will feel irritated because my expectations of the morning didn't match reality. I expected silence, softness, and the right to slowly become human. Reality brought questions.

And of course, unmet needs matter too. Wake me up at 7 am after a late night and it will be a catastrophe. Approach me at 10 am, when I have slept enough and remembered my name, and the consequences will be very different.

So now you know that irritation isn't an enemy. It is just an alarm you don't like very much. But how do you deal with it if you can’t simply snooze your emotions and continue your life as an emotionally unavailable houseplant?

We are all quite disconnected from ourselves in the modern world. Don’t tell me you have never worked so hard that you forgot to eat. Or scrolled at midnight even though you clearly wanted to sleep. Or kept working under pressure because “it is just temporary”, which is adult language for “I have decided to ignore my limits and see what happens”.

We can’t always hear ourselves. The body gives signals — often in the form of irritation, yes — but defining the source is a separate task. If you are taking “connecting to yourself 101”, use the following algorithm. I return to it regularly.

1. Check the basics

When did you last eat? When did you last drink a glass of water? How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Did you go outside today, or have you been living like a Victorian child in an attic?

I know better than anyone that the world seems much more dramatic when I am hungry. Problems that look unsolvable in the evening often become suspiciously manageable in the morning. Not because I became wiser overnight, but because I slept.

Sometimes you have to push yourself a little. For example, you haven’t eaten anything in eight hours, but you still don't feel like eating. Be an adult. Take a snack. After one or two bites, you might suddenly remember that you are, in fact, hungry.

This is why routine and regime actually work, despite being terribly unromantic.

2. Scan what happened before you first felt irritated

Our emotional responses often arrive later than the actual trigger. So there is a good chance you aren't really irritated by your colleague right now — especially if you weren't before — but by a conversation with your mother two days ago, an awkward message, a cancelled plan, or your ex’s Instagram post that you “just briefly skimmed”.

Unfortunately, the psyche isn't always dramatic in obvious ways. Sometimes we are disturbed by something tiny. One sentence. One look. One notification. One photo of someone living their best life while you are eating cereal from a mug.

You can write down everything that happened before the irritation appeared, read it out loud, and listen to the response in your body. The body often knows before the brain admits anything.

3. Unpack the real emotion behind the irritation

And here comes the best part, probably quite unexpected: irritation itself isn't a complete feeling. It is more like a symptom, like a cough. A cough can mean a cold, allergies, stress, or that you inhaled a crumb. Irritation works similarly.

Behind irritation there might be anger, pain, fear, disgust, tiredness, despair, loneliness, disappointment, shame, envy, or the simple wish to be left alone for five sacred minutes.

The task is to distinguish between them.

Let’s return to the example with the ex, because apparently personal development requires humiliating case studies. I see a post where my ex is living his happy life with a wife and a child. I feel irritation. Naturally, my first conclusion is that the post is annoying, he is annoying, the internet is annoying, and perhaps civilisation was a mistake.

But then I start asking myself how I really feel about the situation. And eventually I discover something surprising: I am not in pain. I don't miss the man. I don't even feel lonely. I am angry because he violated my boundaries and then ghosted me forever.

See? Very different story. Same irritation. Different source.

4. Feel

This is the hardest part of it all.

You can’t just name the emotion and expect it to disappear like a polite guest. You have to feel it. Become angry, frightened, sad, weak, disappointed, jealous, tired, or whatever else is actually there.

Turn off the voice in your head that starts spiralling with: “This is nothing to worry about”, “Everything is fine”, “You are being too dramatic”, “Other people have it worse”, and all the other greatest hits of emotional suppression.

Your feelings matter. This isn't about becoming sentimental and overreacting to every minor inconvenience. It is about letting go of things that should have been released a long time ago.

Surprise, surprise: if you allow yourself to feel bad things, you are also training yourself to feel good things. Joy becomes brighter when you give space to sadness. Calm becomes more real when you stop pretending anger isn't there.

As if we didn't all already know this from Inside Out.

You don't have to be alone in this process. A therapist is, of course, the best option, but you can also reach out to a friend and say:

“You know what? Today I am a grumpy gnome. I hate everything and everything irritates me. Please don't take it personally. Just support me a bit.”

My friends have often given me this kind of support. Sometimes they even asked the right question that helped me unpack the real emotion behind the irritation.

Is it a miracle? Some advanced psychological kung fu?

No. Just a bit of focus, honesty, and empathy.

Which is annoying, of course, because it means the solution wasn't to become cold and untouchable, but to become more human.