It started with my earbuds being yanked out of my ears...

Simply enough today and that sent me down a spiral of anger and irritation. Things that don't piss me off or irritates me a little is angering me a lot lately. Usually this goes away in a couple of hours, maybe a day or two later at the most extreme, but this is just one of many periods like this has happened. Usually over something minor: tripping over the curb, bumping into something, etc. Then I just unintentionally ruminate on angry and painful experiences in the past.

One possibility is that your brain perceives that it is getting "permission" to feel anger, with things like clumsy accidents that annoy you, and then once it has permission to feel anger, it recalls other things that caused anger that were lest unresolved or perhaps suppressed.

Possibly. Never thought of it that way.

Wolfgang, often we have buried stuff for so long that it eventually comes to the surface. Those things just pop up out of nowhere and we erupt. Sounds like baggage that was buried and not dealt with. The good thing about anger is it shows us there is something wrong so we can deal with it. Anger can be turned into a motivator. People challenge us and they gear us up into high gear, at work for production or in social circles to get more involved. Talking to a therapist sound likely to be most beneficial. Hang in there, it does get better, tc

Depression sometimes has an re-enforcement feature. By going over past hurts, you are re-enforcing depression and it bad feelings.

I agree with CopperStar, I think there is something larger that you are not dealing with and the small annoyances set you off because you're already on edge. Ruminating on negative past experiences is going to do nothing but make you more upset. If you have processed those experiences and know what you can do to prevent them in the future, then there's no reason to dwell on them. Is it one particular experience or one particular person that the anger and pain is related to? This could be what you are not dealing with that stays bottled up and comes out when small things irritate you. If you work through the feelings, that should help.

Usually anger is related to situations that are unfair to us somehow. Something that has happened that should not. We have to express the anger but sometimes we can't express it to whomever has wronged us, so we have to get it out in other ways. I like physical outlets for anger - running, working out, playing a sport, etc because for me anger causes a lot of physical/body sensations like tension, shaking, the desire to throw things. Journaling might also work well, if you're not really sure what the basis for the deeper anger is.

Sometimes I can be in a normal or even happy mood, with no warning signs whatsoever, and something minor can piss me off.