Definition, Causes, & Coping Skills​

or the data analyses that just aren’t giving me the results I expected, things pop up all the time that make me irritable. And what am I supposed to do with that?

Thankfully, there are ways to reduce irritation when we feel it. Learning how to do this, however, starts with understanding how and why we get irritated. So let’s see what psychology research has to say about the nature of irritability.

The trait of irritability is the tendency to become frustrated or angry when things happen that we perceive to be unpleasant or undesired (Stringaris & Taylor, 2015). Irritability is an interesting psychological phenomenon in that it is present in both externalizing and internalizing mental health disorders. In other words, people who externalize their struggles (through the actions they take towards others) and internalize their struggles (by turning their negative feelings toward themselves) are both likely to feel irritation. 

Many, if not most, psychological symptoms are more characteristic of either externalizing disorders (such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] or antisocial personality disorder) or internalizing disorders (such as social anxiety or depression), but not both. This suggests that being predisposed to irritation might put people at risk of many different kinds of mental health problems, and indeed, some psychologists have recognized irritability as just this kind of general risk factor (Beauchaine & Tackett, 2020).
 
Psychologists typically think of irritability as having both an emotional aspect and a behavioral aspect (Caprara et al., 1985). What they mean by this is that people don’t just feel irritated – they show their irritation, too. If I see traffic getting backed up in front of me and I simply acknowledge the internal feeling of frustration, I am not exactly irritated. But if I see that traffic jam coming and I curse out loud and smack my hand on the dashboard, then I’m definitely irritated. We can all have moments of irritation, but some people are dispositionally more likely to experience irritation – the world just seems to provoke them more than it does other people.
 
Some scientists give irritability an even more precise definition, describing it as how we express our frustration with not experiencing a reward we expected to get or an achievement we expected to reach (Insel et al., 2010). Looking at irritability this way is advantageous in that scientists can expect to see it happening across many different species, not just humans. For example, a dog whose favorite tennis ball has rolled out of reach under the couch could very well be experiencing a moment of irritation as it whines and fruitlessly tries to reach its toy.

So why do we get irritated, and why are some people more irritable by nature than others? It is natural to get irritated when things do not go our way; we were expecting one outcome and got a different one, and some degree of letdown is inevitable. Anybody could reasonably be expected to get irritated, for example, if they had looked forward all day to eating at their favorite restaurant that night only to find out that for some unforeseen reason, the restaurant is closed that day.
 
How likely we are to experience irritation, and how much of it we experience – that is something psychologists have put plenty of thought and time into trying to predict. It is clear that, as with most other traits, our individual levels of irritability – what we might call trait irritability – are the result of a combination of genetic and environmental factors (Vidal-Ribas & Stringaris, 2021). For example, our temperament when we were children impacts our irritability as adults – the more easily upset we were then, the more irritable we will be now. Going back even earlier, the genes we inherit from our parents determine a fair amount of our propensity to become irritated (Vidal-Ribas et al., 2016). As we age, these factors in our biology that predispose us to become irritable actually make our brains more vulnerable to irritation over time. In other words, people who are vulnerable to irritability experience more of it over time, until for some people it becomes a very stable personality trait (Vidal-Ribas et al., 2016).

​​Irritability & Parenting

How we were raised makes a big difference, too – if we saw people regularly getting irritated by the world, we likely learned that the world was an irritating place. I know that the things that irritated me, until I became consciously aware of this pattern and worked on changing it, were the same things that clearly irritated my dad when I was a child.
 
What is happening in the brain of a naturally irritable person? 

They have come to experience an irrationally strong negative response to not getting what they want, or even to the threat of not getting what they want (Vidal-Ribas & Stringaris, 2021). Their brains are literally wired to experience these situations as especially upsetting. Perhaps there is someone in your life whom you believe reacts to the world this way – you might notice that people around them do their best to avoid tripping that person’s alarm system for frustration and anger. By minimizing their chances of experiencing frustration, the people around this person may actually deprive that person of opportunities to learn to deal with their irritation.
 
Child psychologists work hard with irritable children to help them change these patterns, typically by helping them experience and overcome irritating situations. This is an essential corrective step to take because children who are chronically and intensely irritable are at risk for many mental health disorders in adulthood (Leibenluft & Stoddard, 2013). As these children have overly strong reactions to their environment, they are liable to lash out at people and things in the environment, ultimately making their own situations worse.​

For a small subset of people, irritability is a chronic and pretty impairing aspect of their personalities (Caprara et al., 2007), a character trait that is associated with high rates of physical and verbal aggression. This puts them at higher risk of getting into legal trouble and suffering severe consequences from their irritability, which makes it crucial for people high in irritability to get effective treatment and support, ideally when they are still children.
 
With children, one of the most effective treatments for irritability is called parent management training, or PMT for short (Barkley, 2013). As the name might suggest, PMT has the goal of teaching parents to more effectively manage their children’s behavior. For example, if a child has outbursts every time they do not get a candy bar at the grocery store checkout line, a therapist using PMT would help the parent develop a plan to disincentivize the outburst and reward the child for being compliant.
 
With other children and adults, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has also been shown to be helpful for irritability (Barkley, 2013). CBT therapists will help people high in irritability to develop coping strategies for their strong emotions and more effective ways to interpret situations they find irritating.​

As I noted above, some of the primary coping skills for irritability focus on identifying triggers and powerful emotions, problem-solving in irritating situations, and learning to de-escalate one’s emotions (Sukhodolsky et al., 2016). These skills can be learned and practiced in group therapy, individual therapy, or on one’s own.
 
For example, imagine a father who becomes enraged when his children misbehave in public. He might decrease his irritability in this situation by recognizing a trigger (e.g., he thinks his children are specifically trying to disrespect him), coming up with better strategies to handle the situation (e.g., he plans ahead of time for what to do if his child is not compliant during this errand), and learning emotion regulation skills (e.g., he practices deep breathing techniques and walks away from the family briefly to use them when he gets irritated).

Irritability is one of the symptoms of depression in children, and individuals who are more irritable in adolescence are at increased risk of becoming depressed as adults (Stringaris et al., 2009). Where children with depression may express their irritation in many situations, adults with depression tend to show irritation primarily when they are feeling sad or disinterested in life (Fava et al., 2010). Unfortunately, depressed individuals often blame themselves for their irritability and end up feeling even worse about themselves.

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