The Small Stuff You Overreact To Is Really The Big Stuff You Haven’t Dealt With Yet
By: Brianna Wiest
Tags: Personal Development, Philosophy, Psychology, Self Improvement, Life Lessons

If you’re someone who sweats the small stuff in life — the traffic, the parking ticket, the snide comment, and all those other inevitable but maddening things — you are not alone.

We are told all the time to remember the big picture. We probably won’t think about the traffic and parking ticket and snide comment on our death beds, and we probably won’t even remember them once we’ve finally arrived at our destination and paid the fee and found something else to occupy our attention.

But the obvious fact that you shouldn’t let your days be overrun by an overreaction to what is objectively not really a big deal only compounds the feeling of frustration.

If you are someone who sweats the small stuff, you don’t do it because you’re petty. You don’t do it because you’re not intelligent enough to know what does or doesn’t matter. You don’t do it because you are lacking values, or perspectives, or principles.

You react the way you do because the small stuff is really the big stuff that we don’t know how to reconcile.

The traffic compounds the feeling of already being so out of control with your schedule and as though the world is both constantly demanding something from you and likewise putting obstacle after obstacle in your way. Those lost 20 minutes are not just 20 minutes, they’re a representation of feeling like you’re constantly falling behind.

And the parking ticket isn’t just a parking ticket, it’s yet another unnecessary expense to add to the list, to wane from the account because yet again you weren’t mindful about some small detail and you let yet another thing slip through the cracks and yet another unnecessary and meaningless bill must be paid. You’re not upset about the $20, you’re upset about feeling your finances slowly turn out of your control, despite your absolute best intentions.

And the snide comment isn’t just a snide comment, it’s a representation of the fact that no matter what you do or how hard you work or how far you get there will always be detractors seemingly intent on seeing you in the worst way possible, offering no grace, pointing out what you cannot fix or cannot handle or really do not want to be. The comment itself isn’t what makes for the emotional reaction, it’s the reminder that this is an unsavory reality of living in the world and an inevitable reality of putting anything of meaning or significance or interest into it.

Maybe this one inconvenience is what pushes your internal temperature one more degree upwards and now it’s finally boiling.

You probably don’t have to psychoanalyze every minor but adverse emotional experience you have in your life.

But if you’re someone who has to constantly remind themselves to not “sweat the small stuff,” it’s probably because you are constantly sweating the small stuff, and before you spend any more of your life worrying about what’s uncontrollable and ultimately unimportant, you should consider the well of emotion just beneath the micro-trigger, and the ways in which it might be trying to tell you how to take care of yourself a little better.

When we have a disproportionate reaction to something on the surface, it’s often because there’s something deeper just beneath.

These experiences in our lives often function in metaphors, or the way dreams do — it’s not about what literally happened but the emotion it provoked, and the assumption we then made about ourselves and our lives and what might happen in the future.

You might not actually be a monster lacking self-control.

You might just have some deeper feelings that you don’t understand.

But the silver lining is that our emotions don’t exist to punish or hurt us, they are directive. They are trying to show us the way back to peace.

Do you remember a time when you were younger when you feared something like your mother leaving you for preschool because you thought she’d never come back? Or you would absolutely cringe at the idea of sitting alone at the lunch table? Or the concept of not being invited to the party was palpitation-inducing?

Do you know why you don’t worry about those things anymore?

You learned she would come back. You realized that even if you did have to sit alone sometimes, it doesn’t make you a social recluse, and even if it does, you’re still going to be okay. You found enough dignity to realize that you don’t want to attend a party that you’re not wanted at anyway, and you’re better off for not having peaked too soon.

These were all small things that became big things because of a lack of understanding.

In that sense, we all still have some growing up to do.

After you calm down, and once the heat of the moment has passed, give yourself a moment to consider where that rage and fear and pain is really coming from. If it truly is just the traffic and parking ticket and snide comment, then great, because it will pass.

And if it is something deeper, that’s fine, because it will too.

If you enjoyed this piece, check out my new book on self-sabotage, or book a 1:1 mentoring session with me.