Do you stop at the end of the day and realize you've been stewing over angry thoughts for hours?

You realize you've either gotten nothing done, or you didn't enjoy what you did.

We do it to ourselves all the time.

Keeping your days from turning into complete garbage takes realizing just a few things.

We get mad at people, not things.

A toaster's not going to derail your day.

People, on the other hand, we can have endless hate for.

It's never, "I guess this restaurant has a bad toaster." You always go to, "I guess the chef thinks eggs pair well with buttered sawdust."

Things can't be malicious, but people can. We like to get mad, and it's easier to get mad at someone than something.

That's what you have get control of - your attitude towards a passing idiot.

If you've been having murderous thoughts lasting for more than 4 hours, remind yourself of the 4 reasons you should let someone ruin your day.

-You're only seeing the last 60 seconds of their life.

They just walked away from an argument. Or got bad news. Maybe they thought about something upsetting in the last minute.

Our mood shifts from moment to moment, and that's what you're getting.

Pain, fear, and humiliation lashing out at whatever's near them.

Don't let your brain spin it into something it can obsess over. Most people aren't raging a-holes from the moment they wake up til the moment they slip into their evil jammies.

You're just seeing their last 60 seconds, and probably nothing more.

-They're not who you want them to be.

Some studies say we go from 0 to "Touch grass!" in 0.1 seconds.

Others say we don't form our complete, final, unbending opinions about people for a whole half-minute. Plenty of time, right?

We often pain a picture of someone based on just how they look.

Your brain's prejudice gland is gonna use that to make your reaction worse.

If an old lady or a kid said or did the same thing as the animal who slighted you, you might not have even cared.

Try to grade everyone based on the old lady curve.

-You might be reacting to nothing.

There's another fun error we make called hostile attribution bias.

That's when you hear someone giggling and you assume they must be laughing at you.

You think, "Well they probably are like, 50% of the time!"

Not really. We think other people are looking at us, or basing their actions off of us, far more than that actually happens.

You can just assume it never happens for the sake of your sanity.

-It doesn't say anything about you.

Not a thing.

If it's not anything that's changing how you think of yourself, then it can't do any harm unless you let it ruin your day.

Here's the important part: this isn't for them, it's for you.

The moral isn't to be forgiving.

It's to quit letting yourself get swept up in bullshit that ruins your day.

This isn't about giving them the benefit of the doubt. It's about the fact that giving them that benefit costs you nothing, but prevents them from ruining your day.

Who cares about them (maybe they are a-holes). Use this to let things go for your own sake.