Figure 7.1 a model for analyzing irritability and anger

Uma has exactly the same problem with her moods, and she constructed a similar table (Table 7.2).

It’s clear from these few examples that anybody who is in a remotely similar situation to either Tim or Uma will be having a great deal of trouble making sense of their life. One day they’re up, the next day they’re down. One day they’re laughing and joking with people; another day they’re snapping their heads off. Worse than that, it can vary from one half-hour to another. So what kind of things do we have to watch out for to keep our mood steady? Some of the main factors are:

Illness: mental illnesses (such as depression) or physical illnesses (such as viral infections) can both disrupt your mood.

Routine: it is very important to maintain a fairly consistent routine in terms of times of eating and sleeping, to maintain a steady ‘circadian rhythm’. Otherwise you find yourself in a permanent state of ‘jetlag’, which is very disruptive.

Exercise: humans are built for activity, and during phases when we don’t get this we are liable to be that much more irritable.

Diet: some people eat lots of sugar-rich food which sends their blood sugar level sky-high and then correspondingly low. Other people feed themselves so poorly that they are effectively suffering from malnutrition.

Drugs: routinely consumed drugs such as caffeine, alcohol and nicotine are vastly underestimated in their effect. Recreational drugs can also devastate one’s mood.

Sleep: getting insufficient sleep on a regular basis is bad news indeed.

Stress: having too much to do, too many pressures on you, tasks you find difficult to achieve, and other life stresses take a severe toll on your moods.

Social factors: arguments with friends, relatives and workmates; bereavement, separation and divorce; simply feeling lonely – these are just some of the social factors that can affect our mood.

If you know that you sometimes get irritable, the chances are that there are several items on that list which look familiar to you. The good news is that we can work on them, and later on in Part Two of this book, we will see exactly what to do.

There are tremendous pay-offs here. Most people much prefer someone who is ‘the same every day’ to someone who is ‘downright moody’.

Case study: Georgina

Georgina went through a period of three years in her late teens when, she said, she would ‘snap anybody’s head off who looked at me in the wrong way’. It turns out this wasn’t quite true; there were just some days when she acted this way. Other days she was a thoroughly agreeable young person with lots of friends, a nice family life and occasional boyfriends. It turned out that the reason she was sometimes so irritable is that she was prone to get quite depressed, mainly on account of her boyfriends being only ‘occasional’. When she did feel depressed, however, she was snappy in the extreme, and even people’s attempts to cheer her up provoked an abrasive reaction. Unsurprisingly, some of her friends drifted away, while even the ones that remained tended to treat her with some caution.

The solution to Georgina’s problems was twofold.

First, she gradually worked on her depression until she settled in a fairly consistently happy mood. This was difficult, because she had set up a vicious circle whereby her depression caused her irritability, which caused some of her friends to desert her, which in turn exacerbated her depression. Nevertheless, she implemented three significant measures which helped her to be happier.

Second, and while she was working on her depression, she also worked on the ‘Response’ box in our model. In other words, she trained herself to ‘button my lip and count to ten’ whenever she felt like snapping.

The net result is that both she and her friends feel that life is now more predictable and, partly as a result, more rewarding.

SUMMARY

Sometimes you may be more irritable than at other times. One day you may be in a good mood, the next in a bad mood. The key concept here is ‘mood’.

There are lots of factors that influence our mood, notably illness, routine, exercise, diet, drugs, sleep patterns, life stresses and social factors.

We can work on these (as we shall see in Part Two) so that, if we want, we can be not only difficult to anger, but reliable and consistent: ‘the same every day’!

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