Why are some people irritable all the time? And what can you do?

Irritability is defined as a mood or state in which one has a heightened propensity to respond to frustrations, even small ones, with anger that is excessive given what might be expected in the situation.

• Irritation impacts us psychologically in a number of ways
• It makes us more sensitive to small frustrations so we have a harder time shrugging them off or moving past them
• This can make us distracted since our attention ends up being constantly redirected towards trivial incidents and remarks and away from important tasks or relationships

Irritability can be a hard mood to break out of because it often creates a negative feedback loop that is self-reinforcing in ways that can deepen its hold on our state of mind.

It reinforces our negative mood such that we're much more likely to fixate on anything even mildly upsetting or annoying (we might even do so unconsciously as a way to validate our bad mood).

Focusing on all these annoyances then fuels our irritability further, which in turn, focuses us even more intently on validating our irritable mood by continuing to scan our environment for external frustrations.