Wouldn't it be nice to have a choice?

Feelings, like anger, are something that happen because of how you choose to react to whatever is going on around you.

What are you angry about?

Maybe you are angry with yourself for not living up to your expectations and you blame everyone else.

Or have you made this your automatic response to whatever you decide is annoying?

In either case whatever goes through your mind is your responsibility. It is your mind after all and no one else controls it. If you are not in control of your mind then who is?

What annoys you may actually be funny to someone else.

You think something happened to annoy you; but you actually choose in your mind to let it annoy you.

For example, if someone looks at me, I can think to myself "Why did he look at me that way" and decide that maybe he is angry at me.

If I catch myself thinking this, then I just laugh, because I really can't read the other persons mind.

So I devised a little rule. If I think I am reading someone's mind I make up three reasons why the person might have looked at me. He was just curious or he just happened to look in this direction or maybe he is too shy to ask me a question.

Now I don't have anything to get angry about. Or to feel paranoid about either for that matter.

As another example, I am driving to work and someone cuts me off.

I cannot assume that I can read his mind to find out the real reason. Besides I want to get to work too and get there safely. So I need to rethink the other persons motives.

Did he really deliberately cut me off? Maybe he had to swing into my lane to avoid hitting someone. Maybe he is on an emergency. Maybe he is late for work and is not being too careful.

So it is how you choose to think about what happened. It is what you say to yourself in your head that is causing you to be angry.

You could just make a joke of it. Then you would be laughing. Not angry.

It's your choice.