**If you are accurate that the goal of their words is to “piss you off” then the way you deal, is to stop caring about anything they say, whether or not it pisses you off.**

Spend your precious mental and emotional energies on people who offer something to your life, not people who drain you by using you up to think of how to deal with them.

I know, I really do know, that the idea of just saying,  “let it go” seems near to useless, because if you could decide what to let go, and when, you wouldn’t be asking the question.

Still, you might be trying to let go of thinking about how to respond to them, and that won’t really work. I’m saying: Decide to not care about what they say before they even speak.

We do this all the time. You see clouds in the sky, but you do not feel compelled to count them, because you know the number of clouds is irrelevant. You notice when you’ve gotten junk mail in the mailbox, but you don’t waste your time reading it word-for-word, you just drop it in recycling, because you know it is irrelevant. You see weeds in the flower beds, and you know you prefer them to not be there, and sometimes you pluck them out, but you don’t let their existence distract you from your exams in school.

![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmf6tJStiB5PABmHL5rxax2aziqteEhGs8M56VukDDtSJq/image.png)

The crap people say for the purpose of being a distraction, even if it is meant as a personal offense, are irrelevant. What they say is literally nonsense. You do not need to respond. If you can decide before they even speak to you next, that the words a particular person says are irrelevant nonsense, then when they begin to speak you can walk away, you can stay there and mentally notice how ridiculous their words are, you can imagine that they are a robot that has been improperly programmed and all you are doing is noticing how bad the programming is. By deciding in advance that their words are not important AT ALL, you can avoid even beginning to try to respond to them.

Responding in a useful way to irrelevant nonsense is impossible.

**Once you find yourself in the repetitious cycle of trying to respond to nonsense, the complete impossibility of finding a useful answer will drive you to distraction. If you hear yourself mentally wasting time on impossible nonsense, remind yourself that it IS nonsense, and you DON’T need to respond to it, and there IS NO ANSWER that turns nonsense into anything useful.**

Because there is NO ANSWER, you can stop looking for one.

You don’t need to get angry at the clouds, they are there or they are not, and anger toward them changes nothing. Same with this.

When you find yourself losing your focus, tap on the real thing you are supposed to be focusing on. This works. Are you trying to read, but your mind is lost in distraction? Tap on the page or screen you want to read. Are you taking an exam, tap on the exam, on the question you want to focus on. The combination of physical feeling, visual reminder, auditory reminder, and mental reminder, combine to help a person orient their mind to the task at hand.

It is very hard to stop thinking about something, it is not so hard to think about something else. If you are absolutely positive you don’t need to waste your time thinking of a response to irrelevant nonsense, then you will be happier to tap and remind yourself to attend to what is actually important.

None of this works if you persist in telling yourself that responding to them is important.

**So, FIRST, decide that it isn’t.**

**The rest will follow.**