If you ever fear you’re losing perspective on what matters most, I recommend searching a favourite social network for phrases such as‚ “Whole Foods has run out of…” and “Whole Foods doesn’t have…” There, you’ll find angry customers of the upmarket US grocery chain, or its nine British outposts, who have really lost perspective. “Disappointing that my local Whole Foods doesn’t have purple carrots or blue potatoes,” reads one tweet in a recent BuzzFeed list, 23 Very Real First World Problems People Had At Whole Foods. Yet I mock knowing that I’m similarly guilty – too easily provoked whenever my life, so comically privileged by most yardsticks, doesn’t measure up. But perhaps we shouldn’t feel so bad about feeling bad: thanks to an oddity of the mind, there’s a good reason minor setbacks can cause more long-term distress than bigger ones.

This anomaly is known as the “region-beta paradox” (I could explain why, but your time, like the supply of purple carrots, is limited) and was first described 10 years ago, in a paper entitled The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad, by the psychologist Dan Gilbert and colleagues. When truly bad things happen, they cross a threshold, triggering mechanisms that help us to recover. To use one of Gilbert’s examples: if a woman discovers her husband has been having an affair, she may draw on all her powers of rationalisation, convincing herself it was something he had to get out of his system, or that it’s a crisis from which they’ll emerge stronger. By contrast, if his only fault is leaving dirty dishes in the sink, her cognitive defences won’t kick in. So her anger at the lesser failing may bubble longer.

This isn’t how we think suffering works: we assume that the bigger the trauma, the more enduring the distress. But the Gilbert study shows that assumption is often false: participants recovered faster from an insult directed at themselves (a relatively major event) than from witnessing one directed at someone else. People severely affected by terror attacks, some experts argue, can suffer less long-term trauma than those less affected. The pattern recurs in many corners of life. A severe pain propels you to the doctor’s where a dull pain might not. People are less likely to chicken out of medical procedures they expect to be very painful, compared with less painful ones, precisely because they’re worried they’ll chicken out. Gilbert et al even wonder if, after driving to a party, you might be safer getting trollied on martinis than sipping two glasses of wine. In the latter case, it’s still risky to drive home, but your friends are less likely to insist you don’t.

So while it’s silly to let trivialities infuriate us, the region-beta paradox reminds us that distress doesn’t obey simple rules; there’s no purely objective standard from which it’s possible to judge anyone’s reaction, to anything, as being over the top. All pain hurts. Or, as it’s wisely been put: “The worst thing that’s ever happened to you is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.” Besides, the region-beta paradox suggests, it might not even be the worst thing that ends up hurting longest.

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oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com