How Often Do You Lose Your Cool/Patience?

[Moonface]

I'm in a bad mood right now for some reason (I don't actually know why lol) and as a result it's also making me have little patience right now as every little thing is pissing me off, such as my hair being "in the way", random itches, and my phone giving me notifications, just to name a few.

I find lately more than not I'll get really easily agitated by really minor stuff, so I'm curious how well everyone else here manages with keeping their cool or patience with things.

[Mr EliteL]

I think I'm good at keeping my cool most of the time but have those moments of small things getting to me. Has to be multiple things I notice that's off causes me to be agitated, then other minor things that shouldn't annoy me even more.

Had a day at work some time ago in '21 where as soon as I started I kept finding things within the first half hour. It bothered me so much I had to make a list on my phone of how many there was...13 including a bad night prior to going in and also normal occurances which I didn't want to deal with. Man I was so pissed off that day

[ShiraNoMai]

My emotional maturity has gotten better with age (unsurprisingly) to the point where I can't quite pinpoint the last time I genuinely lost my cool. I have a pretty good handle on my emotions for most things, and the things that do get me emotional to some degree will sooner get me sad/tearful than pissed or angry. Anger tends to manifest in quiet irritation at little things, but I'm quicker to get a grip on that before it gets to the point that it feeds into itself.

For me, negative emotions hold way too much energy for me to just freely give away. I need that energy to take care of more important things, so I process them quickly to make sure I get to the things that matter more.

Usually, I ask myself the simple question: what does my being *insert extreme emotion here* solve? Is it helping anyone? Anything? If the answer is no, I take a good minute to stew on the lingering thoughts and feelings, and quickly move to the solution phase, because of there's a chance I can remedy it, I will snatch it first opportunity presented because positive emotions are so much more rewarding, and getting rewards is good for brain.

I do a lot of introspection so if something doesn't make sense here, I'd understand

[Mr EliteL]

Yeah that's a mature to deal with any impatience you get with anything, try to deal and get rid of the feelings immediately. In my 2021 instance because I was at work I held it all in perhaps only letting an agitated look seep through but had to focus on getting on with my job. I can usually bottle any of the anger I may get and be able to hold it off.

I now remember when I did genuinely lose my cool visibly. I don't go into anything verbal but my actions could differ and in this moment it was during bowling when I just repeatedly did so damn bad, almost every shot sucked and kept getting a worse overall score than previous. So in my turns I mostly didn't care until I bowled a bowl quite aggressively without fully intending to, it smashed into the gutter and almost went over to the next right lane (luckily no one was playing in that lane or near us). After that I realised what I did and what could've been the circumstance like being banned if I continued to do that, so I went to just focus on settling down. I already was trying to do this before as I knew my emotions were rising, I was sitting on a different seat in the other empty lane to the left of us. As there was a third game during that I bowled slower, still not caring what I got but just so the game can end smoothly. Yeah I suck at bowling. I have been back since then and haven't let my performance get to me like that.

[Kyng]

Not a lot, although it seems I have been more often lately. I don't know whether it's because I haven't had as much sleep, or because work has been more stressful, or because other people in my life have genuinely been harder to get get along with lately.

[Moonface]

With how things have gone for me the last couple of weeks, I can say without a doubt I still very easily lose my cool when something isn't going right, particularly when it's something I absolutely need to have go right, i.e. art projects.
I needed an etching to be have a dark background when printing it and no matter what I did it wouldn't come out with one, and after hours and multiple tries of trying to get the ink on my etched plate to give me a dark background but light figure with no success I started getting really agitated about it.
Or another example is when I had a photography project due and my laptop decided to slow to a crawl on the very last photo I was editing which ended up making me miss the submission deadline. That one really nuked my patience and my cool.

[Kyng]

Not that often... except at work, when bugs don't get fixed the way I want them to.

Computers are capable of enraging me in ways that a human never could .

[ShiraNoMai]

Yeah there's a certain extra bit of impatience towards computational problems than human errors. Human errors can be annoying but it's easy for me to empathize/sympathize because there's always a chance someone is dealing with some thing. With computers/technology, they only serve the one purpose that you gave them, so there's an expectation of just working first try. When that doesn't happen, well, expectations get subverted and then annoyance breeds.

[Kyng]

Yeah there's a certain extra bit of impatience towards computational problems than human errors. Human errors can be annoying but it's easy for me to empathize/sympathize because there's always a chance someone is dealing with some thing. With computers/technology, they only serve the one purpose that you gave them, so there's an expectation of just working first try. When that doesn't happen, well, expectations get subverted and then annoyance breeds.

True  . 

Admittedly, the problems aren't always their fault either (after all, they're just following the instructions from the program I've written!) - but, there's much less reason to hold back when the computer doesn't have feelings  .

[Daisy Johnson]

I am pretty even-tempered, but even I have my limits when it comes to my patience.

[Moonface]

Yeah there's a certain extra bit of impatience towards computational problems than human errors. Human errors can be annoying but it's easy for me to empathize/sympathize because there's always a chance someone is dealing with some thing. With computers/technology, they only serve the one purpose that you gave them, so there's an expectation of just working first try. When that doesn't happen, well, expectations get subverted and then annoyance breeds.

I think for me it's that with a computer, I don't always know what is wrong or I'm just unable to do anything and the why (for the thing that is happening) isn't able to have a definitive answer, i.e. Windows Updates taking either a very short amount of time or an absolute decade.

So something I think I realized (finally) from a few days ago is that my patience is basically at zero if I decide to not take my Adderall that day. I've been recently learning about and coming to terms with the fact that having ADD means I struggle a lot with getting dopamine from things or maintaining a high dopamine level, so not having that medication in my system puts that at rock bottom and as such I can't feel good about much, and instead just get really upset at stuff because it isn't giving me dopamine at all.