That’s Men: Sweating the small stuff could drive you around the bend

I was driving along at the speed limit the other day when the rear-view mirror showed the driver behind me giving me the two fingers.

It looked like he wanted me to go faster but I have an aversion to collecting penalty points for the sake of impatient strangers on the road.

In any case, traffic was fairly heavy and we were coming up to a junction. There was nothing to be gained from putting the boot down.

But that’s not how he saw it. When we got to the red lights he swung around me to take the space in front, as I was now first in line.

While he carried out this tricky manoeuvre, he actually found the time to turn his head and glare at me.

I wished him well in his dash to the grave and assumed that was the end of that.

Revved up and reversed I was observing

the rosary beads swinging from side to side from his rear-view mirror because of his ridiculous driving, when he revved up his engine and reversed towards me. He stopped before he hit me.

Then he drove forward a little and did the same thing again. Before he could repeat his stupid behaviour, the lights turned green and he sped off down another road.

I wasn’t really rattled by any of this: it had never seemed like anything more than an exercise in throwing the toys out of the pram.

But I thought it a good example of a fascinating quirk of human psychology. This is our tendency to exaggerate our emotions especially in situations with which we are not happy.

My impatient driver was certainly not happy with the situation. To him I must have seemed unreasonable, or an idiot, or even his enemy.

Really, at best I was no more than a law-abiding obstacle to his progress; and not a very important obstacle either, given the heavy traffic around us.

But he instantly worked himself up into a storm of anger and then he acted on it. If you keep an eye on yourself, you’ll spot this kind of thing happening all the time, because we all do it.

High dudgeon

Let’s say, for example, you telephone an institution and you are given six options. You take a chance on option four and then you get another six options. By the time you get through the whole thing you are in a state of what used to be called “high dudgeon”.

Not only do these people not care about you as a customer, they have actually deliberately set out to frustrate you.

Their behaviour is absolutely appalling.

In fact what is happening is not appalling, let alone “absolutely” appalling. It’s a pain in the neck. It’s an irritation you could do without in your day. But that’s all it is until your mind transforms it into “outrageous”; “appalling”; “utterly unacceptable”.

In doing so you have multiplied your stress levels and maybe even used up a few minutes of your life for no purpose whatsoever.

Evolutionary history I cannot figure out why we would behave like this. Maybe at some point in evolutionary history it was safer to get upset about things than to be complacent.

But most of our upset these days is about things that don’t really matter all that much.

And sometimes it’s as though we feel at some level that we have an obligation to ourselves to get outraged at things that don’t really matter.

We are like tyrants who lash out at the smallest obstacle.

Recognising this tendency to exaggerate our emotions is a key aspect of reducing the amount of unnecessary upset we inflict on ourselves.

It is explained in a very short book by Will Ross called A Guide to Shameless Happiness (A Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy Booklet ). It costs a few dollars to get online but they're a few dollars worth spending.

My man with the rosary beads could especially do with reading it: I’m sure I’m not the only outrageous, appalling, blithering idiot he meets on the road. He may even be one himself.

Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email. pomorain@yahoo.com