i missed where you said practicing awareness or meditation or cbt is “a lot of work” earlier; i was still responding to the original topic and your comments above.

i said “…avoiding attachment, which does sound like a lot of work, but I don’t think it is.”

and you said you differed because it isn’t easy to avoid having natural emotional reactions, which is a different topic than acting on manufactured attachment.

Although having natural emotional reactions is common and healthy, it is different from acting out on manufactured emotions driven from expectations.

as you say, practices like cbt “are remarkably simple”.

simple things are not always easy(lifting weights), but the original topic of avoiding acting on manufactured attachment and its derivative “avoiding attachments based on expectation” are frank, momentary acknowledgments that are simple and easy, but may be unfamiliar.

chopping down a tree by hand is simple and “a lot of work” each time. Avoiding acting on manufactured attachment is simple and easy.

being aware of your emotions doesn’t mean not having emotions at all, which is where you seem caught up, it means paying attention to where your reactions are coming from.

are your emotions the result of external input that personally affects you, or from expectations of what you’ve internally decided the external world should be like?

if you are unsure, you can safely err on the side of avoiding an outburst.

also, if not lashing out seems like it should be “a lot of work” and thinking about not lashing out as a hard-won achievement helps one to not lash out, that’s fine too, although I’d be wary of the feedback loop of imagining not doing something being a lot of work.

Use your expectations to your advantage.