The short fuse is a symptom

Someone asked you a normal question and you heard a demand in it. The dishwasher was loaded wrong and you felt it in your jaw. A car took one second too long at the light and you were furious out of all proportion, alone, at a stranger. You are snapping at people who did nothing, and then, twenty minutes later, sitting with the particular sick feeling of having been unfair to someone you love. It has happened three times this week. You are starting to think there is something wrong with you.

There is nothing wrong with you. The short fuse is a symptom, and it has a clock on it. Irritability belongs to the first weeks off nicotine the way a cough belongs to a cold. What has changed is not your character, it is your threshold: noise arrives louder, delay is unbearable, ordinary friction lands like an insult. This is withdrawal wearing the face of your personality. The threshold comes back up week by week, whether or not you can feel it moving, and the temper goes with it.

Knowing that does not stop the spark, so put something between the spark and your mouth. Two seconds, every time. One breath in, one breath out, then speak. That is the entire technique, and it is not a small one, because the fuse is fast and stupid and two seconds is longer than it can hold a charge. You are not trying to be calm. You are trying to be slow. Calm is not on offer this month. Slow is, and slow is enough to keep the sentence in your mouth.

And when you miss, and you will, apologize the same day. Short and specific: that was me, not you, I am sorry. No speech about what you are going through, no ledger, no long face at dinner about it. Say it and let it be finished. Shame stacked on top of irritability makes both of them worse, and you cannot afford the extra weight this month. Ask God for patience in the small rooms, where nobody is watching and where most of a life actually happens. Then start the two seconds again.