A pattern of bitterness doesn’t have to be a permanent mental state.

By Seth Meyers Psy.D.

The progression to becoming emotionally bitter is much like the progression of the physical growth of a child. While the parent of a young child, for example, doesn’t notice how much their child grows in height each day, there comes a time when the parent suddenly recognizes how much the child has grown over time. The progression to becoming bitter happens in a similar way—slowly but following an escalating pattern until a difference is clearly recognizable later.

What does “bitter” mean?

Feeling emotionally bitter refers to feelings of sadness and anger, especially accumulated anger over time. Because feeling bitter involves a mix of emotions, it can often be difficult to identify and express in simple terms.

Read on for multiple signs of bitterness to conduct a quick self-inventory to determine whether you may have become bitter.

You find yourself getting irritated frequently, triggered by little things that probably shouldn’t bother you.

When a person becomes bitter, the most obvious effect is on their mood. Specifically, the bitter person’s baseline mood is often angry, disappointed, or irritable. The feelings are difficult to let go of and often don’t seem to have a clear precipitant.

A simple way to measure your own mood is to think about the past several days and ask yourself, on a 1-10 scale, how content and positive you felt, on average, each day. If you’re being honest with yourself, and your average numbers are low, that’s a clear sign. An additional way to measure your mood is less obvious. Think about the past several days and ask yourself if you did any of the following:

• Sent an angry or frustrated email or left a similar voicemail
• Got into a verbal conflict of any kind with anyone in your personal or professional life
• Had a negative emotional reaction to a stranger you encountered while driving, at work, or running errands
• Snapped at anyone in response to something they said or asked

If you engaged in any of these behaviors in the past few days and also have a habit of doing any of these things on a regular basis, you may have gotten into a bitter spiral that requires your attention.

When taking inventory of your closest relationships, you feel that others don’t fully understand you or appreciate all that you do.

As a rule, the quality of personal and professional relationships suffers when a person has become bitter. While relationships are intended to be sources of support, encouragement, and openness, the bitter person comes to feel that relationships are frustrating and unsatisfying. Bitter individuals have lost faith and trust in others close to them, telling themselves that relationships are not worth the hassle because no one ultimately cares enough about them anyhow. A simple measure to assess whether you have grown bitter in your relationships is to ask yourself the following questions based, again, on a 1-10 scale: