Irritability is the tendency to become irritable.
From the Latin irritabilitas , irritability is the propensity to become irritated (feeling anger or morbid excitement in an organ or part of the body). It can be defined as the ability of a living organism to react or respond in a non-linear manner to a stimulus .
Irritability, therefore, allows an organism to identify a negative change in the environment and react to said alteration. This response can have pathological or physiological effects .
What is irritability
Irritability is considered a homeostatic capacity of living beings to respond to stimuli that damage their well-being or their natural state. Thanks to this ability, living beings manage to adapt to changes and guarantee their survival.
It should be noted that homeostasis is the set of self-regulatory phenomena that make it possible to maintain constancy in the properties and composition of the internal environment of an organism.
Stimuli that provoke it
It is possible to distinguish between two types of stimuli that arouse irritability: internal ones (which occur within the body) and external ones (come from the environment). Temperature, the chemical composition of the soil, water or air, light and pressure are stimuli that motivate the organism's reaction.
While in a unicellular organism the entire individual responds to the stimulus, in multicellular organisms the reaction depends on certain cells , depending on each particular case.
Various stimuli can trigger irritability.
Psychology and irritability
Irritability can be motivated by psychological issues and be expressed through exaggerated or disproportionate reactions, generally unexpected by the person's environment. It is very common that emotional instability is frowned upon and that people do not stop to think that it cannot be caused intentionally, but rather that it originates from a series of events in the past, which in most cases take place during early childhood.
It should be noted that each person sees the world in a unique way, and analyzes it based on their own experiences, so that no pair of human beings perceives a given situation in the same way, no matter how similar their assessments may be. Incidentally, this is closely related to the diversity of tastes, something that many of us keep in mind and accept, at least in the field of entertainment and academic training; A surgeon is not disgusted by seeing an open body , just as a mathematician is not intimidated by numbers, and being an expert in one field does not exclude being unskilled in another.
In this way, different reactions can arise before an image, ranging from admiration to indifference, including joy and horror. For example, if a photograph of a child a few months old is shown to a group of people, it is expected that they will praise its beauty, tirelessly point out the tenderness it inspires, and feel a desire to hold it in their arms. Why might the figure of a baby arouse negative feelings in someone? The answer is far from personality disorders such as psychopathy: the cause may be, among many others, the recent loss of a child.
Causes of violence
Having explained how different the perception that each person has of their environment can be, it is easier to understand the concept of irritability and accept that no violent reaction occurs by chance, but rather comes as a result of facing one or several unresolved situations in the deepest part of our brain.
This symptom is very commonly found in borderline personality disorder , also known as Borderline . Those who suffer from this disease suffer very sudden mood swings that are impossible to control, going from depression to outbreaks of anger in a matter of seconds.