Something like this has probably happened to you recently, maybe even today:

• You spilled your coffee while rushing out the door.
• You struggled to change a setting on your phone, only to give up in frustration.
• You got a bug bite, or sunburn, or stubbed your toe.
• You had to stand in a long line or wait in traffic.
• Someone spoke (or chewed gum, or slammed a door) too loudly.
• Someone interrupted or ignored you.

These are not the kind of events that disrupt the course of your life. But they are all annoying, and sometimes bothersome enough that they could set the tone for the rest of your day. Annoying experiences like these have also been dubbed ‘micro-stresses’ or ‘daily hassles’. They usually come your way unexpectedly, cause you some stress, and interrupt your flow. Though they are minor compared with, say, a personal attack, an injury or a significant loss, I’ve seen in my work as a psychologist how often people struggle to tolerate annoying things or underestimate their impact.

It’s quite likely that you’ve been told ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ and ‘focus on the bigger picture’. Despite our best efforts, though, many of us sometimes find it hard to shrug off the lingering emotional effect of an annoying experience. Making it worse, you might judge yourself for not being able to just let it go. Even if a particular stressor seems insignificant on its own, annoying experiences can have a cumulative effect. Like drops filling a bucket, they can eventually spill over until you’re suddenly snapping at someone, or tearing up.

Research suggests that accumulated stressors might take a toll in other ways too. For example, a study in the 1980s found that people who experience more daily hassles report greater fatigue, headaches, and gastrointestinal symptoms. More recently, researchers have shown that increased stress and hassles significantly predicted the consumption of high-fat and high-sugar snack foods, with implications for physical health. And clinical researchers found that people who reported high levels of daily hassles were significantly more likely to develop generalised anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder or panic disorder over a follow-up period of several years.

Annoying experiences are a normal, inevitable part of life. So, whether you’re concerned about their cumulative impact on your wellbeing or just want to reduce the frustration you feel in the moment, there is value in learning to handle annoying things better. This is where evidence-based psychological skills are handy.

In acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), there’s an important distinction between unavoidable pain and avoidable pain. Micro-stressors such as running late, spilling something on your shirt or receiving a curt text message represent the unavoidable pain that comes with being human. Daily hassles happen. But how you choose to respond to those moments determines whether you add to the stress. Skills grounded in ACT – which I’ll draw from in the rest of this Guide – can help you reduce the avoidable pain that often comes with aversive experiences, including common annoyances.

Studies have shown that ACT can be effective in managing various forms of psychological distress, including those stemming from daily hassles. I’ve seen this happen in my own therapy practice. One client, for example, used to become agitated by his neighbour’s dog barking at random hours of the day and night. Despite his attempt to address the problem by talking to his neighbour, the dog wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was his frustration. Over time and with practice, though, he began to approach the barking with a kind of detachment. The dog didn’t stop barking, but what changed was his ability to pause, notice his frustration, and apply coping skills of the sort I’ll be describing here. That made all the difference. With practice, you too can learn to relate to annoyances in a more skilful way, whatever your next ‘barking dog’ might be.

Embrace ‘radical acceptance’

It’s natural to want to fix or undo the annoyances you encounter. But insisting that a frustrating experience shouldn’t have happened doesn’t change that it did happen. What it does do is deepen your stress. It’s like tugging on a locked door: tiring and ineffective. That’s why you need radical acceptance.

Life’s little stressors can feel like a series of tiny battles. If you get lost in knee-jerk responses such as wishful thinking (I wish this weren’t happening), rumination (Why did that happen?), self-blame (Why am I so careless?), or blaming others (They ruined my day), it keeps you stuck in your head, takes you away from the present, and prolongs your unpleasant emotions. Instead of just feeling irritated about a lost key or a rude comment, you end up dealing with extra mental fatigue, shame or resentment.

Radical acceptance means recognising the reality of what has occurred without resisting it. It doesn’t mean you approve of what’s happened. It simply means you’re no longer fighting something that can’t be changed. It is about laying down your weapons and saying to yourself: This is happening. How can I work with it without getting lost in it? You’re choosing to no longer let it set the tone for your day.

Here are a few prompts you can use as gentle reminders to practise radical acceptance:

• This is how things have unfolded right now.
• I can’t go back and change what’s happened.
• Fighting what happened only fuels my pain.
• When I resist the past, I lose the present.
• Right now is the only moment I can shape.

This is how radical acceptance looks in action: you lose your keys. Instead of spiralling into thoughts like Why does this always happen? or This is just what I need right now, you pause and tell yourself something like: This is not ideal. But I don’t want to get stuck on this right now. I’m going to take a breath and calmly retrace my steps.

When you stop resisting reality, you give yourself room to move on with your day, not by denying the frustration, but by refusing to add to it.

Make room for your emotions

Emotions are like waves that rise, crest and gently fade away, often within minutes, especially when you give them the space to do so. Each emotion naturally urges you to respond. When you act based on these feelings, it’s called emotion-driven behaviour.

Sometimes, small hassles can trigger big emotional reactions, leading you to quickly engage in emotion-driven behaviours. Have you ever watched someone cut in line at a store? Maybe you experienced a sudden rush of irritation and found yourself glaring at the person, mumbling your disapproval, or speaking curtly to a store employee who wasn’t even aware of the cutting. As natural as it is, automatically doing what a momentary emotion pushes you to do can sometimes take you further away from being the kind of person you want to be.

Here’s what you can do instead:

Notice your feelings: emotions live in our bodies first. If you misplace something important, you might feel a knot in your stomach, or your heart racing. When that happens, ask yourself: what am I feeling and sensing right now? Simply noticing your feelings and sensations might seem like a passive response, but it is critical for minimising your entanglement with unpleasant mental content, and it can help you respond to stressors more thoughtfully.

Name your feelings: take your noticing one step further. You don’t need a poet’s vocabulary to name your feelings; a short and sweet label works. I’m feeling frustrated. Or: This is anxiety. You can even imagine that you’re introducing a friend to your feelings: Meet my annoyance. It’s here because the line at the café is moving slower than a sloth.

Check the workability of your response: within the ACT model, ‘workable’ actions are the ones that are aligned with your personal values and goals. Basically, the idea is that every behaviour takes you closer to or further away from the life you want to build for yourself. So, you must ask yourself whether doing what an emotion pushes you to do in the moment would get you closer to that or further from it. You might ask yourself, for example: If I yell at this barista for getting my order wrong, does that help me live the way I want to live? Or: If I fixate on this person’s annoying hiccups, will it serve me later on?

Workability is less about what works in a conventional or problem-solving sense, and more about what works for you in relation to your values. It is a question of inner alignment and direction. An impulsive response to feeling annoyed – such as cursing at someone, slamming a door, or texting a snarky message – might bring you temporary comfort, but it isn’t workable if it pulls you away from your values. (As I will describe below, you can also use your values, rather than just your momentary emotions, to guide more workable responses.)

Here is one more example to demonstrate all these ways of making room for emotions without letting them dictate your behaviour. Let’s say you’re stuck in traffic, and you feel the frustration building. You can first notice what you are feeling in your body. Then you can name the emotion(s) you are feeling (I’m feeling annoyed, and also powerless). Finally, you can ask yourself about the workability of what you feel the urge to do: Will honking randomly at other drivers help me be the person I want to be? You can make space for what you are feeling and still make a choice about what to do next.

Centre yourself

Sometimes, even if you have applied the preceding skills, you might find yourself tense, restless or stirred up. Centring practices offer you a simple and powerful way to return to a place of steadiness.

The 60-second reset is a versatile skill to help you pause and ground yourself. It has multiple variations. I suggest you try out each of the suggestions below, practising one of them for 60 seconds when an annoying experience leaves you agitated.

• Feel your feet. Bring your attention to the soles of your feet. Imagine roots anchoring you to the earth beneath you.
• Belly breathing. Place a hand on your stomach, inhale deeply for a count of 4, hold for 2, and exhale slowly for a count of 6. Repeat.
• Ground through touch. Press your palms together firmly, or grip the edge of a table or chair.
• Sigh it out. Take a long, audible exhale, like a balloon slowly deflating. Let your body soften with the breath. Breathe in and repeat.
• Quietly hum.
• Tense and release. Clench your fists for 7 seconds, then let go for 14 seconds. Repeat a few times to release pent-up tension.

It’s important to note that these centring activities aren’t just quick, temporary fixes. Each one helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system – the branch responsible for rest, relaxation and restoring calm. With regular practice, these exercises can help you gradually build your capacity to handle daily stress.

Commit to acting based on your values

Values, in ACT, are freely chosen qualities of being that reflect how you truly want to live and behave. Your values are your compass. You can think of them as verbs, as ongoing patterns of action. For example, you might recognise ‘being caring’ as one of your most important values. In day-to-day life, you could turn this into specific, values-based actions such as a weekly check-in with your neighbour or a phone call with your friend to see how they are doing. There are concrete steps you can take to put your value into practice; to actively live out your value, rather than just thinking about it.

Your values matter when you have annoying experiences because they give you a direction to move in. If you’re feeling irritated by an itchy bug bite after a hike that already wasn’t going the way you planned, you might call to mind your core values and remember that being patient with yourself is one of them. If you’re struggling with setting a ‘smart’ thermostat at home, you might remind yourself that you value being curious, and then decide to search for some pointers online (rather than giving up or slamming the wall in frustration). If you’re annoyed that someone isn’t listening to what you’re saying, you might recall that you value being compassionate, and then ask, respectfully, if they can give you their full attention. These would all be examples of ‘workable’ responses that help you be the kind of person you want to be.

Think for a moment of Elena. She’s working out of her office at home, midway through an important work assignment, when suddenly, outside her window, a parked delivery truck starts beeping loudly and won’t stop. She notices her heart beating faster and a rush of heat flushing her body. She acknowledges the stress to herself (This is causing me stress right now). Although she has the urge to pound her fist on the desk and even shout at the delivery driver, she pauses instead and asks whether that would serve her. She realises she’s actually faced a few frustrations today, and she takes a minute to centre herself, using the ‘sigh it out’ exercise.

She also asks herself, what really matters right now? And, as she answers that question, Elena taps into her values of being compassionate and being flexible. Knowing the driver is just doing their job and will probably depart soon, she fetches her earbuds to help block out the distracting noise until it passes. She resumes her work, feeling like she’s already started to release the stress she was feeling.

Using the practices I’ve shared, I hope you’ll find that, as disruptive as little annoyances like these can be, they also present everyday opportunities to live in a way that’s more closely aligned with your values.

When are you extra-sensitive to annoyance?

Although hassles can arise at any time, you might find that certain contexts leave you feeling especially vulnerable to irritation. Perhaps it’s during your morning routine, or when there is an unexpected change of plans, or while you are preparing meals. Some physiological states, such as fatigue, overstimulation or a lack of sleep, can also be precipitants of annoyance.

Becoming aware of your own ‘tender times’ or vulnerability factors can help you anticipate them so that you can respond more gently to annoying things when they pop up. This is why I often invite my therapy clients to get curious about these patterns as they happen. One client, for instance, realised that the middle of the day, when his energy was running low, tended to be his most reactive time. Another client noticed that his tender time was when he arrived home from work, emotionally exhausted after a long day of talking to people in distress.

See if you can recognise the contexts that seem most conducive to frustration for you. This is not about getting rid of frustration or irritability altogether during these times, or trying to control your daily hassles. It’s about entering these situations with an awareness of what makes them challenging – and remembering to practise the skills you’ve learned.

Meeting annoyance with self-compassion

If you want to be less easily rattled by annoyances going forward, practising self-compassion can also help. Self-compassion is treating yourself with kindness in difficult moments, staying present with what you’re feeling, and remembering that struggling is part of being human. It’s like talking to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend who’s having a rough day. People who practise self-compassion tend to be more emotionally steady, bounce back faster, and worry less. The psychologist Mark Leary and his team found that self-compassion acts like a shield, helping people handle little irritations without getting overwhelmed by them.

There are different ways to practise self-compassion, and you can choose the forms that feel right for you. There are longer, more formal exercises like loving-kindness meditations or journaling, for example. There are also brief and practical ways to bring self-compassion into your day; in my podcast, I refer to these practices as self-compassion on-the-go. To practise self-compassion anytime, anywhere – including when you’re dealing with everyday hassles – all you need to do is acknowledge how you feel and check what you need.

Picture this: you’re stuck in a slow-moving line, or you’re cooking dinner and your partner says something that rubs you the wrong way. After you first name what you feel, as I recommended earlier (eg, This is frustrating or That comment really bugs me), you then ask yourself: How can I respond to myself with kindness? You might also ask yourself what you need to hear at that moment, or what a kind friend would say to you. All it takes is a little willingness to be gentle with yourself, even if just for a moment.

If you’re a doer, a striver, or a person who deeply cares about doing things the right way, check out my book Acceptance and Commitment Skills for Perfectionism and High-Achieving Behaviors (2021). It will help you to compassionately and skilfully manage the frustration that arrives when things don’t go as planned, when people behave in ways they shouldn’t, or when you make mistakes despite your best efforts.

Are you someone who feels things intensely, and who sometimes acts too quickly? For you, annoyances might easily escalate into emotional storms. My book Escaping the Emotional Roller Coaster: ACT for the Emotionally Sensitive (2018) teaches evidence-based skills, drawn from acceptance and commitment therapy, to help you deal with overwhelming emotions without getting swept away by them.

To learn more about acceptance and commitment skills, particularly as they apply to anxiety-based struggles, you can read my newsletter, Playing-it-safe.

Reading Paul Gilbert’s book The Compassionate Mind (2009) will help you develop self-compassionate practices, improve your emotional wellbeing, and deepen your understanding of why compassion is essential for self-regulation and resilience in daily life.

If you live in an urban environment and you’d like practical tools to convert daily stress into opportunities for calm, fulfilment and mindful presence, I invite you to read the book Urban Mindfulness: Cultivating Peace, Presence, and Purpose in the Middle of It All (2010) by Jonathan Kaplan.

Finally, if managing annoyances leads you to self-criticism, I encourage you to check out Laura Silberstein-Tirch’s book How to Be Nice to Yourself (2019) for a series of exercises from mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches.