As a society we seethe with irritation: What can we do about it?

Japan Today

4 days ago

By Michael Hoffman
Come, let's be frank with one another: what irritates you? This person, that thing, this situation, that sound – oh, that sound, that grating sound! 'We're losing control of our emotions,' writes psychiatrist Hideki Wada in a booklet, published by President Books, titled 'How to Cultivate an Unemotional Heart.' 'Emotional' is a literal but somewhat misleading rendering of kanjoteki, whose meaning here seems to be 'prone to' or 'vulnerable to irritation' – which emotion, together with its kissing cousin, anger, are corrosive, physiologically (they weaken the immune system ) and psychologically (they make us miserable). Who wouldn't be free of them, if they would but free us?
They won't. 'Anger is the emotion that surges most readily in us,' writes Wada – 'more than happiness, more than sadness. Moreover, anger is the emotion that translates most readily into action' – to our ultimate chagrin if not ruin, for actions performed and words uttered in anger are seldom well chosen and often blow up in our faces.
It so happens that as I write this my neighbor across the lane is attacking his lawn (and me) with one of those unmuffled naked-motor grass-cutting blades that raise the most head-splitting, soul-crushing racket – disturbing him, it seems, not at all, which is odd, given what it's doing to me. There he is, calm personified in the eye of the storm, the very picture of leisured serenity, you'd almost think he was in Zen meditation, so unhurried are his movements, and as for progress, that hardly seems to be the goal at all, so little is he making. Curious enlightenment.
Advise me, Dr Wada! (You are right: anger surges very readily indeed.) What should I do: Go out and give him a dose of my rage? Oh, the pleasure it would give me to jolt him rudely out of his trance! The more rudely the better. But it's hardly neighborly, maybe not even civilized; pleasure would give way to regret, regret to pain, and who's the loser in the end? – he, armored in tranquility and laughing at me for 'losing control of my emotions,' or me out of control and all too keenly aware of making a fool of myself?
Better perhaps to go for a walk and come back later, after he's done. But isn't that being a little too easy to get along with? Or – a third possibility – approach him with rage suppressed and sweet reason foremost, appealing to his humanity, his understanding, his sense of community, in short all the higher faculties said to characterize our species, suggesting maybe some grass-cutting alternative, a manual lawn mower or even a newer quieter model of motorized blade. That's probably best – but those of us prone to irritation wouldn't be if that came easily to us, would we? No, rage begets enraged speech or no speech at all. (Or how about this: say, with scarcely concealed sarcasm, 'I'll even pay for it myself!' – if that doesn't shame him, nothing will. But what if nothing does?)
What does the doctor say?
'My first defense against irritability,' he says, 'is' – if possible – 'to avoid irritating situations.' Take a walk, in short. It's in fact what I do, coming back to quiet restored. Good. And yet not. Something's missing; the challenge issued (unconsciously but still) remains unanswered, irritation persists, less edgy but not much less irritating. And what of all the other provocations out there? We'd be walking all day 'avoiding' them, avoiding one only to blunder into another no doubt, drawing the only conclusion possible: irritation is unavoidable.
As a society we seethe with irritation. Wada cites road rage, an increasing hazard. Today's rager might be tomorrow's victim and vice versa. Whose character is proof against it, in a mass society that has no time for nuances of individual character? Everyday life plants us cheek by jowl with masses of people who mean absolutely nothing to us and to whom we mean nothing. How can perfect strangers' little ways fail to irritate us – he jammed against you in the train with his face that, for no good reason but no less for that, rubs you the wrong way; she at the supermarket checkout extracting coins one yen at a time while you grind your teeth waiting your turn behind her; the boss, subordinate or colleague at work who in all innocence (or perhaps not) says just the wrong thing at just the wrong moment in just the wrong tone with just the wrong expression on his or her face, and so on and so on, instances multiply faster than the typing fingers can type them or the tongue give them utterance.
If one could only be alone! But isolation is no defense. The three years of the COVID epidemic proved that. 'The government response to it,' Wada writes, 'was shaped by epidemiologists who advised isolation on epidemiological grounds – not,' he adds, 'by psychiatrists who know the psychological price to be paid.' Soaring alcoholism and suicide figures bear him out.
Stress, strain – it's everywhere. Whoever gets to the end of the day in a state of tranquil contentment has won the prize of prizes and deserves heartiest congratulations, but the facts conspire against it. Fact of facts: This world was not made to my specifications, or yours; it doesn't suit us, nor we it – in short, we have no control, or at most very little, over our environment beyond the four walls of our houses or rooms, retreat into which, as noted above, has its perils. We're barraged by sounds that make us cringe, sights that revolt us, words that offend us though not (most of the time) meant to.
There's the parked car with the engine running, driver asleep oblivious; the motorbike hotrodders roaring by just as you're dropping off to sleep (or any other time!) – those irritations at least are justifiable on environmental and social grounds. Others are not: dogs if you don't like dogs, katakana English such as that which litters Wada's booklet (shichiuashon, furasutorashon, kurozuappu for close-up, mesodo for method, etc), ubiquitous background music filling shops, streets and heads whether your head likes it or not – what's more irritating than music you can't turn off? The very garbage trucks emit beeping nursery-rhyme melodies as they make their rounds.
Stupid, foolish – why make mountains of a molehills? It's nothing. Surely a mature adult can learn to cope with – and all to too often must cope with – much worse than even the worst of these minor irritations? Surely you can reason down your feelings by recalling how very much more serious the real problems of life are? And surely there are enough of those to make inventing new ones out of nothing idiotic? True, true. But feelings are peculiar creatures. They refuse to be reasoned out of existence. They mock reason. They say, 'You're right, reason's right, I'm wrong – and I don't care, I win anyway!' And so they do.
Wada's advice boils down to this: Take a deep breath, take a step back, take a walk here, have a talk there, look receptively outward rather than obsessively inward. The first of these, the deep breath, is physiological: The cerebral cortex, reason's seat within the brain, is fed, he explains, by oxygen; the symptoms of anger (the surging emotions, the loss of self-control, the loss for words, the reckless disregard for consequences) are 'the brain's warning that it needs oxygen.' Feed it.
Is it that simple? Really? Maybe, maybe not. If it were, Wada and his fellow psychiatrists – they number an estimated 17,000 nationwide – would be out of business, wouldn't they?
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