My first thought was: therapy. Find a good professional (sometimes takes a while) with whom you can try to understand and improve your life.

Neurodivergent data architect here. It is possible to be happy and to succeed, but you’re gonna have to learn a skill and practice it forever. Which is limiting how much energy you put into any one thing. You’ll have to pick your battles. Especially when it comes to group projects (which all programming for other people is going to be).

You’re going to be particular about stuff. Sometimes you’ll be right, sometimes you’ll be wrong. Either way you’ll learn a lot of stuff and probably regret most of what you’ve done a week after the project is complete.

Have some hard rules. Know what hills you want to die on. For example: I will never work with oracle, mongodb, or firebase again. There are far better tools (ex: postgres, couchbase). Learn to let other stuff slide. And know when you’re too burned out and it’s time to bounce to another job.

ETA: practicing meditation helped me a lot. Also reflecting daily on how the day went, what actions I had taken, and what changes I would like to make next time was a big deal.

Obviously we’re different people, but my silver bullet was 300mg Wellbutrin. (150mg did nothing.)

I have ADHD that doesn’t respond to stimulants, so my doc tried Wellbutrin. Didn’t touch my ADHD, unfortunately, but I haven’t had a violent outburst in years. Last night, I dropped a piece of lasagna on the kitchen floor and reacted with a “goddammit,” instead of the tantrums I’ve had in the past. So much nicer.

I was recently diagnosed with a personality disorder. High emotion is a symptom. Might want to talk to a psychologist

The first thing to bear in mind here is that to feel pain is to be human. There’s no way to disentangle the two. All you can do is learn to acknowledge that pain, and assign it a level of importance, then practice that assignation until, suddenly, at some point in the future you’ll realise that you’ve chilled right out.

All this is far easier said than done though.

In the short term, try to practice some level of mindfulness. When you catch yourself being angry, stop and ask yourself where the anger has come from. Is it because you no longer have control over a situation, or because someone has wronged you in some way? Could your anger be useful in resolving the issue, or is it clouding your judgement?

Once you begin interrogating your feelings, you’ll find them far easier to understand and control.

I can’t speak to your mental state, but I can speak to the tech. What helped me was to focus not the detail but the goal. My goal was to release a feature into production that was decently sustainable while growing personal and professionally and having some fun.

I learned to let go of the little things. An example is a code formatting. People freak out about this topic. My standpoint is I don’t care what you pick, but give me an automatic code formatter, be consistent and never talk to me about this boring topic again.

Think of the goal, don’t fixate on the details. Move forward. Save your energy for the right time. If someone makes a decision you don’t like either get behind it, support it and move forward - out quit.

It’s not worth the energy.

I think a lot of the advice here is good, but if you feel you are being set off by every little thing, you may have something else that bothers you. I’ve got both ADHD and high levels of anxiety and definitely have times where I have extreme emotional sensitivity to things, especially where it feels like someone is challenging me or where I think they are making unreasonable demands.

It’s taken a lot of work on my part to recognize that when those feelings are heightened I need to explore what are the stressors in my life and maybe what ever I’m snapping about is unrelated to what is setting me on edge. Sometimes its because I need to have a difficult conversation with one and I’m redirecting my feelings to more manageable places. Other times its huge amounts of stress and I need to take time to destress. And sometimes I just need to take a break or vacation or just find some me time to get away from people.

Finding your coping mechanisms works, but the first step, as cliche as it is, is recognizing there is a problem. I used to snap at people a lot, especially for random BS. A combination of growing older (where your emotions stop hitting you as hard as they do in your teens and early twenties) and growing more awareness of myself and how I react to stimuli helps me deal with my emotions in more healthy ways.

The long story longer is that you can absolutely deal with an anger issue, you just have to put the work into yourself to find the sources of those anger, be they actually tooling issues and learning how to pick those battles, or some other aspect of your life that is pushing on you that needs attention.