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I once almost got my ass kicked in the middle of the street. Years ago, I was driving with my wife (girlfriend at the time) and we got into an argument. I don’t remember what it was about, but I was enraged – yelling and heart-pounding mad. We pulled up behind a car waiting at a red light ready to make a right turn. The light turned green. About a second passed by and the car didn’t move, so I pushed my horn long and hard.
The guy looked in his rear-view mirror then stuck his arm out with his middle finger raised. As a counter, I raised not one but two middle fingers back at him. You know, to up the ante. I’ve never done anything like this before in my life, but when you get angry, anything can happen.
He didn’t like that. I saw him bounce up and down in his seat, get out of his car, and start walking towards me. Based on his disposition, it looked like he was well-versed in fighting. I’ve never been in one, so my heart was ready to jump out of my chest. My wife, in one of the sternest tones I’ve ever heard from her, told me to not do anything. I was wishing I had a weapon. I looked calm on the outside, but I felt like I was about to have a heart attack. I thought to myself, “What did I just do?”
The guy put his face up to my window. I felt paralyzed as I didn’t move and just stared at him. He then said, “That’s what I thought. I will f*** you up”, and walked back to his car. I think if my wife wasn’t there, he would’ve told me to get out and dance.
Anger has put us all in similar and regrettable situations – ones we would never fathom to find ourselves in. Under the spell of intense emotions, it can make us do stupid things like flipping off crazy people at stoplights.
But what is it about anger that has such a stranglehold on us? We’ll be looking at what anger is, what it does to our brains, and methods for controlling it.
What is anger?
Anger is often a response to an injustice committed against you. Or when you feel that you’ve been threatened or harmed by someone else. It’s like fear, but it’s also a form of desire. When we get angry, we typically want to hurt the person who has hurt us. We have strong convictions that they’ve done wrong and deserve to be punished. This isn’t uncommon knowledge. We know what anger looks like on the surface, but what’s happening inside us during these periods of rage?
Your brain when you get angry
In the book Your Brain at Work, David Rock talks about how many strong emotions, like anger, originate from the part of the brain called the limbic system. The limbic system tracks your emotional relationship to thoughts, objects, people, and events. It drives your behavior and determines how you feel about the world. It does this moment to moment throughout your life and often unconsciously.
Due to the nature of the limbic system, it’s constantly making “toward” or “away” decisions. Toward decisions are generally positive emotions such as curiosity and happiness. Away decisions are generally negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, and sadness.
Unfortunately, it’s harder to build on toward emotions because they’re more subtle and elusive. Away emotions are more dominant in your psyche because they’re necessary to keep you alive. This is also the reason why upward spirals, where positive (or toward) emotions produce more positive emotions, are rarer than downward spirals, where negative (or away) emotions produce more negative emotions. According to Rock, “human beings walk toward, but run away.”
That’s why it’s so much easier for your brain to get mad. But when we let our anger dominate our minds, what is an over-aroused limbic system costing us?
The downside of anger
Mark Twain said that “anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” What implications does anger have on us—specifically our brain?
When you get angry, your limbic system can be aroused for long periods of time. In result, your levels of adrenaline and cortisol in your bloodstream become chronically high. You are in a permanent state of threat, and you have a low tolerance for additional threats. Studies show that running with chronically high adrenaline and cortisol levels can kill existing neurons in your brain. The ones crucial for forming memories.
In addition, operating with an overly aroused limbic system takes up a ton of energy and resources in your prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain needed for understanding, reasoning, making decisions, and memorizing.
Much like a computer, if you don’t have enough resources for conscious thinking, the brain defaults to a “lower-performance” setting. This means that it starts drawing only on emotions, ideas, and beliefs embedded deep in your memory, or a recent event. Your brain resorts to these easy-to-reach resources because they need less energy for your brain to use.
But in this state, your brain is suboptimal because it’s not really thinking anymore. It’s being reactive, and not rationalizing anything. Your mind disconnects from reality as it wanders through past and present memories, looking for anything to save you from danger. Being in a survival state, your mind becomes more likely to continue responding negatively to situations.
A last result of your brain being in defense mode is that it’s superconscious of the dangerous side of life. Since it’s in a state of threat, it becomes overly conservative and takes fewer risks. This stifles the necessary characteristics for someone to grow and overcome obstacles in life.
What if I suppress my anger?
James Gross, an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, found that people who tried to suppress negative emotions like anger often failed. Their limbic system was just as overactive as without attempting suppression. In some cases, this caused even more arousal.
Gross and his colleagues found that suppressing emotions takes a lot of mental energy and leaves fewer resources for your brain to stay focused on the moment. In result, people who try to suppress the expression of an emotion experience memory impairment—they can’t remember how events transpired.
With the knowledge of the devastating effects of anger, or an over-aroused limbic system, we need to find ways to control it without using suppression.
My favorite methods for controlling anger
When you get angry, what matters isn’t what you feel, but how you respond to those feelings. After all, most of the damage that anger does is not the injustice that’s been committed against you but on your psyche. Here are my favorite coping methods for times when I get angry.
1. Postponement
Daniel Tiger, one of the characters from Mr. Roger’s neighborhood, has a saying in the modern cartoon version of this children’s classic:
“When you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath and count to four”.
Over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson said something similar:
“If you lose your temper, count up to ten before you do or say anything. If you haven’t calmed down, then count to a hundred; and if you have not calmed down after this, count up to a thousand.”
This tactic isn’t anything new, but its efficacy is what makes it perennial. What you count up to doesn’t matter; it’s the delay in response before you do something stupid. Since negative emotions beget more negative emotions, cutting this vicious cycle is usually all you need. This is by far one of the most effective strategies for controlling anger.
2. Contemplate your own faults
As a Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius had to deal with a lot of BS from people. As much as he would have liked to lash out, he wrote something in his journal that would quench the fire of even the most blood-raged person. He wrote, “Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: what fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”
We’re all hypocrites in some way, and it’s very likely that we’ve done the exact same thing that we’re mad about someone else doing. If you’ve haven’t lost your wits to anger yet, ask yourself this question and answer it honestly. It works almost every time.
3. Label emotions
In your brain, the limbic system and prefrontal cortex work like a see saw. As your limbic system becomes more active and aroused when you’re emotional, your ability to use reason (or your prefrontal cortex) decreases. The opposite happens if we activate our prefrontal cortex, dampening the arousal of the limbic system. So how do we make this shift?
Studies show that one simple way of doing this is by trying to find the right word, metaphor, or metric to label an emotional feeling. So when you get angry, you can say to yourself something like “anger”, “fire”, or “through the roof”. That’s it.
Contrary to common perception, voicing your emotions like this won’t make them worse. Opening up a dialogue about your emotions will. The key is to keep it brief and subtle. This simple exercise has successfully shown in studies that it shifts your brain from a reactive mode into a thinking mode, allowing you to be in a state of high limbic system arousal and still remain calm.
4. Use humor
In Seneca’s essay On Anger, he tells the story of how Socrates once received a blow to the head by another man. In response, Socrates said that “it was a pity a man could not tell when he ought to wear his helmet out walking.” There’s another story of Cato, the ancient Roman statesman and practicing Stoic. He once got into an argument with Lentulus, another politician known for being violent. Lentulus gathered as much saliva as he could and spit it on Cato’s forehead. Cato wiped off his face and said, “I’ll assure everyone, Lentulus, that they’re wrong when they say that you’re not worth spit.”
Humor, especially if it’s self-deprecating, is a powerful response to anger because it disarms the opponent. But more importantly, it lightens the mood and stops the runaway snowball of building emotion. The next time someone aggravates you, try focusing on how you can make light of the situation. Ask yourself what’s funny or ironic about it. It’s even better if you make fun of yourself.
5. Write it off
In 1863, shortly after the battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln wrote an angry letter to his Union general, George Meade. In the letter, despite the victory, he criticized Meade for his inability to pursue and finish off Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army, the inefficient use of his men, and condemned him for pushing out the war and contributing to further loss of lives. But Lincoln never sent the letter.
If he did send the letter to Meade, would this have made his general perform better? Lincoln didn’t think so, but this is something he always did. Writing unsent letters was one of his favorite coping mechanisms for anger and frustration. It can work for you, too. Putting your negative thoughts on paper creates separation from what you’re feeling and thinking. It’s an act of spitting out the poison that’s gestating in your mind. It also makes the ambiguous, undefined thoughts, feelings, and ideas into something concrete and defined.
That’s one of the greatest benefits of having a journal. It’s your personal venting session where you can say anything you likely don’t mean. No one hears you, nobody gets hurt, and there’s no damage control needed. In my own experience, the mere act of writing out what I’m feeling and thinking has saved me from some nasty confrontations and regrets by taking out my fury on my journal instead of someone else.
6. Avoid suspicion and surmise
How many times have you felt so certain about something, and then learned after that you were completely wrong? When we’re angry or emotional, it’s human instinct to assume the worst. An unfavorable tone of voice, a half-hearted greeting, a friend’s last-minute cancellation to something you’ve been planning forever can be all it takes to make you the center of an attack.
On this matter, Seneca wrote, “Grounds for suspicion will never be lacking. But we need to be straightforward and see things in their best light. We should believe only what is thrust under our eyes and becomes unmistakable.”
This is where we need to practice objectivity—the ability to see things as they are and not as what we think they are. If we’re not completely certain about someone’s actions or an event, would it hurt us to give the benefit of the doubt? Or to consider what information we may be lacking?
This thought experiment works well after you’ve cooled off. But it would benefit you more if you consider this early at the slightest sign of your temper sizzling. After all, if you’re wrong about someone’s intentions, the only thing to blame is your own credulity. That’s why you must be slow to believe.
All of these strategies do one thing: they delay emotional reactivity. Because if we follow our anger, it can take us down a path that’s hard to trace back.
Isn’t anger necessary to stand up against injustice?
Aristotle once said, “Anybody can become angry—that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everyone’s power.”
Justice without anger can seem like a cop out. Many people think passion and rage are necessary ingredients for seeking justice and employing empathy, and their absence would prevent the attainment of fairness to the fullest degree. This mode of thinking can be seen in mass movements and hot political and social climates.
Toni Morrison, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and advocate for racial equality, was well aware of the ugliness of discrimination in America. Despite being the subject of racial attacks since she was two years old and having written books about slavery and racism, she refused to let anger rule her life. In a 1983 radio interview before gaining worldwide recognition, she said, “People sort of think [anger is] an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling—I don’t think it’s any of that—it’s helpless… it’s absence of control—and I need all of my skills, and of the control, all of my powers… and anger doesn’t provide any of that—I have no use for it whatsoever.”
How different would her influence in the world be if she succumbed to anger? She had every reason to be mad with the world, but she recognized that this emotion is an agent of self-destruction and would hurt her message.
Take an emergency room doctor as another example. The best ones would fight hard for the lives of any of their patients. But these same doctors tend not to get emotional or angry about an individual failure, and quickly move on to the next patient. They have to. But not because they’re heartless. Like Morrison, they understand that surrendering to their emotions is surrendering their ability to focus and perform.
When you get angry and want justice, there must be a balance between commitment and detachment if you want to effectively change something.
Anger is easy, and endless. The dean of the University of Texas School of Law, Ward Farnsworth, said, “Life overflows with grounds for annoyance… If you are ever going to get upset about X, you should realize that chances for X are everywhere, so you might as well be upset all the time—or be sensible and stop ever (or so often) getting upset about X at all.”
It’s an excellent point, because when you get angry, you become a kamikaze—you destroy everything around you, then yourself.
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