What Does irritability Mean
From the Latin irritabilitas , irritability is the propensity to get irritated (feel anger or a 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 way to a stimulus .
Irritability, therefore, allows an organism to identify a negative change in the environment and react to that alteration. This response can have pathological or physiological effects .
Irritability is considered as 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 known as the set of self-regulation phenomena that allow the maintenance of constancy in the properties and composition of the internal environment of an organism.
It is possible to distinguish between two types of stimuli that arouse irritability: internal ones (which are produced within the body) and external ones (which come from the environment). Temperature, the chemical composition of the soil, water or air, light and pressure are stimuli that motivate the body's reaction.
While in a unicellular organism the entire individual responds to the stimulus, in multicellular organisms the reaction depends on certain cells , according to each particular case.
Irritability can be motivated by psychological issues and 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 originates from a series of past events, 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 appraisals are. Incidentally, this is closely related to the diversity of tastes, something that many of us have 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 preclude being unskilled in another.
In this way, different reactions can arise in front of an image, ranging from admiration to indifference, passing through joy and horror. For example, if a photograph of a child a few months old is shown to a group of people, they are expected to flatter his beauty, relentlessly point out the tenderness he inspires, and feel like holding him in their arms. Why could 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.
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 for its own sake, 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 and impossible to control mood swings, going from depression to outbursts of anger in a matter of seconds.