In over a decade of its existence—since 2012, to be exact—the ‘Mildly Annoying’ community has covered nearly every and any annoying situation there is. They might seem like minor inconveniences to some, but they can get on people’s nerves nevertheless. Moreover, what doesn't seem the slightest bit frustrating to some might make others’ blood boil.

“There are many individual differences in what presses our buttons enough to annoy us,” a neuroscientist and senior lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Alicia Walf, told Bored Panda in a recent interview. “In general, annoyances are unpleasant stimuli that are unpredictable and uncontrollable and persist for some time. There is context-dependency on what annoys us as well, making annoyance a volatile and hard to anticipate emotion.

“Unlike anger, in which the same things or situations are likely to produce it time and again, the same thing can be simply unpleasant one day, but then be extremely annoying the next.”

“It is perplexing when seemingly insignificant things produce annoyance in us,” Dr. Walf pointed out. “As a general rule, we focus on the bad. Given the limited attention we have to process everything going on inside us and in our complex and dynamic environments, our brain’s default is to focus on what might be harmful or even out of place, a mistake that we frustratingly cannot fix.

“When we are stressed, our attention is quickly refocused on what is causing the stress because it may be something that can seriously harm us. It might be a similar process for annoyance. We can’t help but notice that thing that is unpleasant so we focus our attention on it. Annoyance can come from this because we cannot change the situation and we do not see an end in sight.”

Prof. Walf emphasized that it’s difficult to predict what annoys most people and why, but there are ideas of potential reasons for these individual differences. “Some of it may be due to personality—some people are more prone to react with negative emotions like anger and annoyance. Some of it may be due to present emotional states; for example, individuals feeling irritable (maybe because of lack of sleep) are more prone to annoyance.”

“Another major contributor is stress,” the neuroscientist continued. “Stress refocuses our attention on our environment, which may include something annoying. With stress, the modulation of the limbic and threat regions by the frontal cortex breaks down and our reactions are more driven by the threat and limbic systems than by the higher-level cognitive processing of the frontal cortex.

“Given that there is a relationship between stress and annoyance, feeling annoyed at even minor things might be due to greater activation in these threat and limbic regions without this oversight from the frontal cortex that is typical. Just as much as stress can amplify annoyances, studies have shown that exposure to annoyances also causes stress.”