Why do I keep losing my temper at work?

Because work is where the holding happens. You keep your face still through a hundred small things. The email that ignores what you said. The meeting that runs over. The person who takes the credit. Each one is held in, and held-in heat does not go away. It stacks.

By the time it shows, the cue is tiny. A question you already answered. A tone in a reply. The response is sized to the stack, not to the question. That is why it looks out of proportion to the room, and to you.

You are not losing your temper over the question. You are losing it over the forty things you did not say before it.

Heat first. It comes up through the chest and the neck into the face. The jaw sets. At a desk it can be quieter: typing harder, a short reply, a voice that drops and gets very precise. Cold is the same heat with the volume turned down.

The body signal is what you feel as the pattern starts. The window is the few seconds between that heat and the first word or the send button. At work the window is often in front of a screen.

Not by holding it in harder. Holding is what built the stack. Insight does not change the sequence. Repeating the different action does.

Catch is to feel the body signal and name the pattern before it becomes the behavior. Intercept is to interrupt the usual response and choose a different action before the old pattern completes. At work the different action is a short exit: a glass of water, a walk down the corridor, a draft you do not send.

Rewrite is to repeat the different action until it becomes easier to reach when the signal returns. A sharp reply you caught after sending still counts, if you name the heat when you see it.

Between moments, you can look at where this was learned, if you want to. SOURCE UNKNOWN is a complete answer. The practice does not need the history.

Because the day keeps stacking and nothing takes the stack down. Each small thing you hold in raises the level. The cue that finally sets it off is only the last one. Keep losing it means the stack is rebuilt every working day. So the work is to drop the level during the day, not only at the moment it shows.

All the time means the level never gets back down. Read the week, not the moment. How much you slept. How long since you ate. How many things you agreed to that you wanted to refuse. Each one raises the level a little. None of them feels like anger. Together they are why everything at work seems to land hard.

A job holds a lot of cues in one place: being overruled, being interrupted, being made small in front of others. Each one can match an old reading closely enough to raise the heat. That does not mean the job is fine. It may not be. It means the heat is yours, and yours is the part you can reach.

Because the holding ends at the door. All day you kept the heat in with people who do not matter to you. At home there is nobody left to hold it for. The first small thing in the kitchen meets the whole day. Sit in the car for five minutes before you go in. Let the level drop first.

Act on the heat, not on the event. Name it quietly: this is not the size of the thing. Then step away from the screen or the room for a minute. If it feels like you cannot control it at all, start smaller. Notice the heat after the fact, every time, for a week. Noticing late is still catching.

Some jobs are unfair, and this page does not decide whether yours is. If you are being singled out or treated badly, that is real, and it is not a pattern to work on.

The pattern is the heat that fires the same way at the email, the meeting and the queue at lunch. Check the other rooms. Does it come up in traffic, at home, with a friend? Then work is where it is loudest, not where it lives. The file this page comes from describes the same circuit everywhere.

This is not who you are. It is a pattern running. Those are different things, and the difference is the entire method.