Eckhart Tolle explains that irritation comes from the story your mind tells about a situation, not the situation itself. When you remove the mental narrative and stay present, the irritation vanishes. The frustration you feel is always about a threatened future outcome, not what's actually happening now.
You become irritated in this realm of doing because doing has always an aim. It's in the future. You're doing something in order to achieve this or that, but obstacles arise. So when you get irritated, angry, upset, you ask yourself, how would I experience this moment if I did not add any thought to it? It's still the same, but that which created the irritation isn't there anymore because the thing that created the unhappiness wasn't ultimately the situation. It was the narrative about the situation in your mind.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
