If you have a bit of patience and want to work on your tendency to get upset about things, practice describing the events that upset you in objective language, without any emotive rhetoric. Think of the small amount of additional time and effort this takes as a way of engaging different regions and systems of your brain.

For example, instead of saying “Joe Bloggs is an idiot”, take the time to write down “I heard Joe Bloggs say something yesterday that seemed to me to be incorrect.” Get a bit more specific.

You can go a few steps further by specifying the time and place and distinguishing between your observations and the inferences and evaluations you added. For example, “Yesterday, at 2pm, in the office, I heard Joe Bloggs say something that seemed to me to be incorrect and I added the inference that he doesn’t understand the subject and the evaluation that he is a ‘total idiot’”. Often you’ll find that your emotional response to this is different than to “Joe Bloggs is an idiot!”, and that the more precise and objective way of describing things naturally lends itself to problem-solving, as if you’re inviting your brain to respond by considering what to do next instead of throwing your arms up in frustration.

You find similar ideas in cognitive therapy, Stoicism, and, of course, Korzybski’s General Semantics. Korzybski thought it was helpful to place certain labels and inferences in quotation marks to remind ourselves we’re adding something to the observable facts. He would also add the words “etc.” to descriptions of events as a reminder that they’re always incomplete. I tend to add “… but that’s not the whole story.”

It can also be useful to remind yourself that this is how things appeared to you, from your perspective, at a certain time, and in a certain context. Other people may have seen things differently, or evaluated things differently. You yourself might view the same event differently if it happened at another point in time, or in a different context, or, e.g., if you were in a different mood when observing it. Bearing in mind that your perspective is incomplete and relative, and that other perspectives are conceivable, can often reduce the intensity of your emotional response, and allow for more flexibility in your coping.