What Is It About?
Napkin Version
We all like to be able to get on with our life, enjoy ourselves, and make good progress on the things we want to achieve. We can start to feel annoyed when something gets in the way of our progress or upsets the peace and flow of things.
Aside from showing us what conditions help us to perform better, Annoyance also shows us what makes for general peace, harmony, and enjoyment in a situation, especially if it involves other people. Whatever the cause of our annoyance, the quality of our experience is usually impacted in some way.
The intensity of Annoyance is often greater if we were having a particularly enjoyable or rewarding experience beforehand, or if we were already enduring a difficult time.
So the gap between what we know is possible and what we are experiencing, appears to be a key factor.
Through our experience of Annoyance we learn what is important to us, and how to work in with nature and others better, all of which impact our experience of life, and what we can achieve with it.
Handling Annoyance
In The Moment
Training our brain to use a relevant process helps us to focus more effectively and move on more easily. Using it often will also help our brain to catch Annoyance sooner, making it easier to manage.
Annoyances can be more bothersome when there is something else we’d rather be doing. So Annoyance gives us the opportunity to check our priorities, consider how important a situation is to us, and how big a deal the annoyance is in the big picture of things.
Once we consciously decide how we will deal with the cause of the Annoyance, the intensity of it typically drops.
Taking a respectful approach, and using humour if appropriate, can help to keep the atmosphere light and peaceful while we resolve it.
Self-Reflection
If the emotion feels quite troubling, it’s usually worth checking if something else is going on first.
By resolving things in ourselves and clearing any other residual emotions, we can reduce the intensity of the emotion - now and when we encounter it again in future.
Doing so also makes us less likely to ‘attract’ other difficulties that leave us feeling the same way.
See the Processing and Clearing an Emotion page for a generic process to resolve and clear an emotion.
Working Through Annoyance
The actions we choose to take in response to an emotion can make a significant difference to how well we adjust and move on from it.
The more we take genuine actions that are uplifting and ‘right’ i.e., are good for ourselves and everyone else (including the environment and other living beings) - for now, and over the long-term, the better our experience of life becomes.
If the situation is important to us, the following may help us to cope with it better:
Acknowledging we have a choice in how we will respond to it.
Getting to the root cause of why it exists.
If someone else is the cause, putting ourselves in their shoes, and considering things from all angles.
Checking our expectations are realistic for the situation.
Appreciating and respecting that everyone has a right to be themselves, if it doesn’t cause any real harm to anyone else.
Choosing the best option for handling it, such as:
Making adjustments to something to improve the dynamics of the situation e.g. turning a fan on to create an opposing airflow for annoying insects.
Holding those responsible for it, to account, and respectfully addressing it with them.
Removing it, shielding it, or distancing ourselves from it.
Reducing it or reducing the impact of it.
Distracting our focus away from it, so we don’t notice it as much, and our brain has more time to adapt and filter it out.
Focusing on the positives in the situation to help offset the impact of the negatives.
If appropriate, using respectful light-hearted humour to minimise the impact, or bring about change in a more enjoyable way.
Putting up with it to keep the peace, and using it as an opportunity to increase patience and tolerance.
Learning what can be learnt from it, then letting it go.
Adding more enjoyment into the situation, so the annoyance has less of an impact.
Clearing Residual Annoyance
Emotional energy can stick with us, even after we have worked through and resolved whatever caused it.
There are a number of ways we can clear the energy, including doing something physical in nature, imagining the emotion leaving our body, or for more intense emotions, there is a variety of different therapies and alternative forms of energy healing that can also help.
This short video has been created to help the imagination process:
Imagine holding a ball of energy in your hands, and ‘charging’ it with the feeling of love, and anything else that would help to offset it (especially any feelings that were missing in the situation)
Imagine any residual Annoyance energy flowing out of your body, into the ball, and being transformed into the positive equivalent.
Once all the residual energy has left, imagine the ball shooting far out into the atmosphere and dissolving into pure white light energy.
