How to tolerate annoying things

Probably it's learned behavior from the parents. When your parents had good intentions but really panicked or scolded you like the world was going to end when you did something wrong... that can have a subconscious impact in your life that every wrong move and every thing that happened could be a matter of survival.

I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with money, or even the stress of the environment inherently, I think it's all about how people choose to deal with their problems.

You could be raised in a poor home and grow up to a work in a "high stress" environment with ease because at some point you chose not to be too bothered by it.

I think you might want to examine your assumption that there are people who "sail through life." It may seem that way from the outside, and you may even observe people handling everyday stressors well. But I promise you, everyone is struggling. Everyone suffers. (btw, that's actually the first Noble Truth of Buddhism).

But you can learn ways to separate the stress you can't control from the stress you can control (your reaction/behavior), which is the foundation of CBT & ACT (and is the third Noble Truth).

I personally don't think upbringing has a big impact on our natural ability to do this; I think it's mostly genetic. But it doesn't really matter.

The good news is, the brain is plastic, and you absolutely can change your mind and behaviors pretty radically over time. This is the science behind psychological flexibility / ACT—and yes, it does replicate.

When I find myself thinking "some people just have it easier," I try to ask myself "is that a workable worldview? If I follow that train of thought, is that moving me in the right direction? Or is it causing me to give up or give in to resentment and frustration? Could I just let it pass?" You don't have to argue with the thought; you can just notice it and let it float on by.

I don’t think those people you’re thinking about sail through life and never get bothered by anything at all. You probably only see them deal with things that are below their level of worry or frustration. They’re not going to be unbothered by the death of a loved one or major financial catastrophe.

However people who have good emotional control can appear to be emotionally invincible relative to people who are turn every minor annoyance into a catastrophe and are completely devastated by anything with minor significance.

> I've noticed it more in people who had a comfortable upringing and no money worries. Oh dear, dinner is burnt? No worries just order takeout! Lost your passport a few days before a holiday - no sweat, just pay the fast track processing fee. Car broken down? Just jump in a taxi. Coffee ruined your top? Just buy another one.

You’re only seeing one very narrow version of problems in their life that are easily solved by money.

I grew up around some kids who were very wealthy. Some had net worths in excess of $10 million in their 20s because their parents were tax optimizing their inheritance over decades.

While they were unbothered by simple things that could be solved with a credit card (burnt dinner, spilled coffee) they were, in general, much less prepared to handle the stresses of life than their peers. In fact, I can think of many examples where they fell apart and some who spiraled immediately into drug addiction the first time they encountered life problems that weren’t easily solved by money: Being broken up with by a love interest, denied promotions because they weren’t performing as well as their peers, doing poorly at their expensive colleges.

So I wouldn’t agree at all that wealthy people are inherently more resilient to stress. You’re only looking at a narrow set of financial problems which are already solved for them. Having those problems solved for them can actually lead to lower levels of stress resilience when the real problems come along.

It's not money. It's attachment to expectations.

No amount of poverty or wealth will reduce your road rage. How you react to people not following the rules of the road as you expect them is on you.

If a toddler spills juice on your dress on your wedding day, rich or poor you're just going to have a stained dress and whether you scream or laugh about it really doesn't have anything to do with money.

Money is an adaptation but certainly not the only one to unexpected difficulty. It is easy to fantasize that everything would be better just if you had x, but that's a scapegoat that lets you be the way that you are because you're powerless to do something about it... it's wrong. How you react to the world is in your power and it's free. And very often it's exactly the reverse, poverty isn't giving you a bad attitude, having a bad attitude is making and keeping you poor.

I think the opposite is true, too.

With some friends we make a couple of "stressful" escapades every year and since I started doing it I feel that most things don't worry.

Nothing I do regularly in my daily life equals being lost in the mountains not being sure if we are gonna make it. It gives you some perspective.

I think the artcle might be missing one core premise of ACT - that it is not meant to help you to deal with negative emotions it the moment all that much.

The book on ACT I'm reading (happiness trap - from the founder of the technique) goes to great length to say that trying to "deal with negative emotions" (anxiety, sadness, etc) using affirmations, rationalization, etc is a dead end - it's not helping in the long run most of the time and is actively distracting and takes a lot of effort that could be put elsewhere.

The suggested path (that i am finding somewhat helpful) is to learn to act in accordance with your values regardless of how you feel and the story you tell in your head. It will still suck balls day to day, but on top of that, in the long run, you will feel more at peace and in control and respect yourself for following your chosen path.

The core realization is that while it may seem like your feelings (anxiety) and the story that plays in your head* is what makes up YOU, you may treat these as biological and early developmental "warnings" that your brain has learned to warn you of danger, and you most likely will feel this way for the rest of your life and won't have control over that, but you are actually FREE to choose how to act in response to these situations.

It may seem like these feelings and thoughts are making you act in a certain way, but they are not!

In your example, the feeling of financial anxiety could be accompanied by a thought like - "shit, how am i going to pay for that, why does it always happen to me, how do i fix it, why do i have to ruin it for myself and people i care about by being so sloppy, why does the universe makes it so hard for me and so much easier for others.." - and there's nothing you can do to change that feeling or that thought pattern in your head.

But what you can do is to use one of the techniques to (very temporarily) tune out of this thought train, check in with your values (eg taking care of loved ones), and choose a course of action that fits these as much as possible given the circumstances (eg find a way to spend quality time with them on a tighther budget) and DESPITE all that noise in your head.

A large chunk of the book is focused on consciously discovering your core values.

Is it easier to act with integrity (eg not snap at loved ones) moment to moment if you are not under financial stress or if that stress was not a part of your upbringing? Sure as hell! And given these unfair and idiotic and unnecessary circumstances that caused your internal machinery to work the way it does right now (stay alert at all times), it is your decision to commit to a further course of action - either numb your pain short-term (by ruminating, or alcohol, etc) or act in accordance with your values. Your (highly uncooperative ancient meat lizard) brain will still pull you towards a short term fix - because it is its primitive reward-seeking job, and you will inevitably loose control and let it win sometimes (esp under stress), but there is a part of you that can choose to patiently course correct your behavior towards your higher level values every time that happens. Or maybe you know that at this very moment you do not have resources to course correct much - and that's okay, as long as you are being honest with yourself and act accordingly (eg "i need to find a way to take better care of myself atm - to free up resources to take better care of others, it would be against my values to overwork myself to the bone and be so exhausted that i struggle to catch myself when I'm being mean to them").

One additional realization that i found helpful is that, in the face of such challenges, your brain is quite good at making you think that it knows how everything works - so you feel more in control, and so that the path of least resistance (doing nothing or numb your pain now) seems like the most rational one that agrees with your values. An antidote to that I found helpful is to remind yourself that you know very little about who you are (beyond the silly story playing in your head on repeat), and how you will react to things, and who other people are, and what's going on for them. So you can choose to plan your behavior to align with your values under the assumption that you know infinitely little about both yourself and others.

tldr is that pain is inevitable, but you may reduce (but not eliminate) suffering if you learn to act with integrity in the face of it

The fallacy of thinking others magically don’t suffer - CBT addresses this

We all have problems- you are just seeing the planes with bullet holes coming back

The creator/founder of ACT struggled with tinnitus—you might be interested to read his account. [0]

[0]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/get-out-of-your-mind...

Your friend is remarkably prescient. I [1] can mostly "tune out and ignore" those "irritating" sounds that so many others complain, gripe, and stress about, and I have noticed the identical aspect your friend noticed, although I don't think I considered it a "control" aspect until now. Those that are "bothered" by some sound they ought to ignore always seem bothered by sounds where they believe they should have some ability to "control" their world (even, if, they really don't have any control over the truck in the alley beeping because it is reversing out). I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked by someone I'm with "aren't you bothered by ???" to which my answer almost always is some form of: "I hear it, but I don't let it bother me." Which almost always evokes an amazing surprise on the part of the individual who asked the question, often with a response along the lines of "I don't understand how you can do that."

[1] for the record, not deaf, so I cannot fully relate to nor understand your world.

This article is about ACT which borrows these techniques from the ancient stoics, but there is a lot of similarities between stoicism and buddhism, zen especially.

I certainly agree with your take on Buddhism, but I often find that sage advice is buried amongst spiritual waffle in Buddhist books.

Thank you, I'll pick it up based on your recommendation alone.

In the long run, it is unavoidable. No matter how prepared you are, there will be something that will cause you to run late. It's just a matter of how frequently this happens.

In practice? Yes it’s unavoidable. Unless you build in enough buffer to account for _every_ possible scenario out of your control, the probability of running late is non-zero.

I think 15% of people have a true mental block on timing

Not the best example they could have used because the root cause is ambiguous.

I try to be prepared and on-time, but being late some times is unavoidable if there’s a car accident on the freeway that leaves me locked in a traffic, I get a flat tire, my flight is delayed, or any number of other unpredictable things outside of my control happen. I think that’s what the article is trying to talk about.

> Is running late really unavoidable?

Given the full breadth of "unavoidable", yes. As there can always be something completely out of your control that will make you late, despite your best efforts to be prepared.

But, for the majority of the habitually late, it is merely a direct result of their own actions, and so is indeed "avoidable" from that extent.

In your case it may help to read it as: Micro-stressors such as others running late [...] represent the unavoidable pain that comes with being human.

And he's merely rephrasing Freud: "The purpose of psychoanalysis is to replace neurotic misery to ordinary unhappiness." (paraphrase)

But as the founder of CBT, he did build a huge amount on the previous work. It's one of the few formal psychoanalysis methodologies with considerable quantitative evidence documenting its successes.

I think you’re missing some of the point. What will you do when you find yourself stuck in traffic or in an airport security line that takes an hour to advance? Substitute some annoying situation that is beyond your control. If you react by upsetting yourself, then the advice is for you; otherwise, I don’t think you need it.

Sometimes, it’s your own mind too. I have at times, pretty bad OCD in the form of terrible intrusive thoughts. They can trigger such distress in me that I’ve lost years of my life to them. Learning to tolerate them is essentially the first step to reducing their frequency in the conscious mind. That and meds but if I could just stop thinking some things, trust me, I would.

I find most people can't accurately sort the two though. They perceive what others do as within their control and it drives them mad

That must be annoying

For what it’s worth, site works without problems on iPhone.

DAMNIT!!!!!

That's how they test your patience.