No passive aggressive notes required.

To help you get through the days until you can afford your own place (DREAMY SIGH), BuzzFeed talked to clinical psychologist Andrea Bonior, Ph.D., author of The Friendship Fix, and Harlan Cohen, author of The Naked Roommate. Here are their best tips for staying sane.

If you have an issue with something your roommate does, talk about it ASAP.

Like, preferably within 24 hours. "If everyone can agree to that rule, it becomes so much easier," says Cohen. "A lot of the time, we keep problems to ourselves, and that turns into resentment, and resentment turns into either passive aggressive or outright aggressive behavior." So handle issues as they come up, not only after it becomes unbearable and you snap.

But don't bring up stuff when you're actually irate.

Reacting when you're annoyed or angry might lead you to say or do something that causes more problems (passive aggressive notes, anyone?) or to take a stand on something that you later realize wasn't a huge deal, says Bonior. She suggests taking some time to talk about it with someone else or to take a walk — then come back to the situation and decide how to go about it.

Paramount Pictures / Via quickmeme.com

The magic conversation starter for when your roommate is doing crazy or annoying shit: Apologize for not setting clearer expectations.

Even if your roommate is doing stuff that is awful by anyone's reasonable standards, you can't really get mad until you've had an actual conversation about it. And you'll get a much better outcome if you start that conversation saying something like, "Hey, I'm sorry, I never actually told you about this thing that makes me uncomfortable."

Then you can discuss how you'd prefer it if they didn't eat your food / have sex in the communal shower / communicate entirely through Post-it notes / hover in your doorway talking for an hour when you're just trying to catch up on Netflix / WHATEVER.

"Framing it as it, 'Let's set expectations now' rather than 'You need to stop doing this' is less blaming, more collaborative, and much less likely to make them defensive," says Bonior.

Eric Jonathan Martin / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: emart

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