165. The psychology of anger

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you back for another episode. Today, we're going to be talking about anger, one of our most primal human emotions that I think it's neglected a lot in our conversations around mental health and kind of the spectrum of feelings that we have every day. Anger is such, I think, a hidden private experience for a lot of us, something to be kind of concealed behind politeness and cities, something to be suppressed. You know. We're told that it's a very ugly emotion, something that needs to be controlled, and then it holds us back, and I think, yes, maybe that is true. But anger is also a really important emotional cue, and it also shows up in a lot of our daily interactions. We are angry at a friend for letting us down, at a coworker for messing something up, or a partner for a past mistake that we just can't let go of. There is a lot of invisible anger inside. I think a lot of us anger that lives below the surface and probably has done for a long time. And like I said, we're really good at accepting our kind of pretty and romanticized emotions like happiness or even grief, even melancholy, But rage and fury they seem to be left out. And I think I spent quite a lot of time, quite a few years in my early twenties kind of ruled by anger in ways that I didn't realize. I was angry at the world. I was angry at people who had overlooked me, or hurt me, or who had been cruel to me, because really it was easier to feel anger than admit how insecure those experiences had made me. And I think I thought that being angry almost made me tough. And I let that feeling really make a lot of decisions for me. I let it be projected onto people who didn't deserve that. I let it turn to misery. And I wish that I had known what I know now. So let's share everything to do with the psychology behind anger and what psychology has to say about this misguided and misjudged feeling. I feel like we don't need a definition of anger. Every human, even every animal, knows the feeling, the hot feeling, the pressure in the chest, the twitching hands, that kind of building urge to react and to scream. Anger is one of our most primal, rudimentary emotions. It is an emotion that mobilizes the body for action. It mobilizes our fight or flight response, and that is what means that it allows us to survive in response to a perceived threat or a perceived injustice. These kinds of primal emotions always really fascinate me because we have evolved so much from being these creatures who are only ruled and driven by survival and instinct. We're no longer out hunting in the wilderness or fighting, you know, neighboring tribes. Maybe we are in some senses, but our society has really evolved to make sure we are all kind of prim and proper, and we are suppressing these really raw emotions, and yet they're still there. They haven't dissolved or disappeared with increased sophistication. Society is just asking us to hide it. So the main theory is that anger comes from primarily feeling threatened, feeling powerless, or that there is some part of who you are what you stand for that has been trespart. So this article published in twenty seventeen, called anger is a basic emotion and its role and personality. It describes it really well. Our anger serves as an internal sign that there is an obstacle or aversive situation that has crossed an emotional or physical boundary that we need to respond to. And our anger is one of the only emotions that is strong enough to get us to that point of acting. And this kind of relates to another dimension of anger, which is that it can and is often a secondary emotion. Let me explain that a little bit further. Our anger often masks a much more vulnerable feeling that we are not quite ready to confront yet. It masks our fear, It masks our hurt, It masks our disappointment, how powerless we feel. If you've ever been so angry that you've cried, you'll know that, really well, that is the true emotion, the sadness, the disappointment bubbling up, and sometimes anger is less complicated than the emotion that we really want to express. It's less complicated in the situation we're in, and so we hide behind our rage. Our anger is what makes us act when fear or sadness or disappointment can't. And as it wears off, it reveals what is truly at the root of that wrath, that we are actually just really fragile, gentle creatures who have been hurt. Maybe you are not angry as a person, Maybe you just have a really delicate soul that's been crossed a few too many times and you've reverted to what feels easier. And when we see anger in any form, regardless of its origin, psychologists can kind of broadly categorize it into three different types. Firstly, we have hasty and sudden anger, and this is really connected to like the impulse for self preservation. So it occurs when we feel really trapped in a situation all life. Something has just pushed us to the point of explosion. It's very episodic in nature. It comes from these brief, uncontrollable bursts, but it doesn't mean that it hasn't been building up for a while. Maybe this anger has been simmering, just waiting for the final catalyst, the straw that breaks the Camel's back. Then we have settled and deliberate anger, and this is a reaction to a deliberate harm from someone else, something that is perhaps long term. It's anger that simmers, that settles, anger that creates actions that are less impulsive like hasty anger, and more calculated. And then finally we have disposition or anger. I think we all know people that are just angrier than others. They have that like fiery gene, and this dispositional anger is related more to an innate character trait than to instincts or cognitions. This also brings me to a really important point. Like I said, there are some people who are just angrier than others, and there is actually a disorder for this called intermittent explosive disorder, and this is really related to our ability to control our impulses. When we are unable to do that, the behavior that we might exhibit is these repeated angry outbursts our failure to control our aggressive impulses. And normally it's not something that we want to do. It just feels like this explosion that has come out of nowhere, and normally the reaction is also very much out of proportion to the event. That sparked that rage. This is obviously an extreme you know, it is like a diagnosable disorder, but I think it does go to show how anger is in one way an emotion. For others it can become a personality trait, and then for others it can be a disordered part of who they are and how the world sees them, how they see the world. So when we feel any of these types of anger, though, something really unique happens in our brain. There are entire regions devoted to processing this feeling. And the reason that anger feels so fiery is because firstly, it's almost entirely automatic and out of our control. And secondly, it activates this part of our brain known as the amygdala, one of the oldest parts of our brain, perhaps the most primal. It's nestled deep in there, right in the middle of our limbic system, and it is what is responsible for some of our most instinctual feelings, the ones that are going to ensure that you survive, and those big ones are fear and anger. Fear and anger, our ability to detect danger and respond are intrinsically linked, sometimes hard to distinguish. It almost feels like anger is fear in a more of like a hidden form. Instead of wanting to show that we're scared, we show that we are like dangerous, or we show that we are angry. I think what's definitely true is that when this part of the brain takes over, the unconscious rational part of us tends to switch off. Anger, as has been shown in a lot of research, causes a reduction in our cognitive abilities and basically our ability to accurately process external stimuli. We don't tend to think straight anymore. We face a bunch of distortions to our reasoning abilities. For example, like we might see something and overreact, or we might see something and attribute blame to someone else when in fact it is not their fault. And I think this can create a feedback loop where as our cognitions become more distorted, we're less able to see clearly. The more blame we place on others, the more angry that we feel. And I think it's at that point when we sometimes see people do things that they normally really wouldn't do that is not within their normal personality traits. It doesn't mean that they didn't do it. They are still accountable, but a lot of the time, they are acting from a point of blind rage, and I think that brings me to my main point. We don't know what to do with our anger. We don't know how to process it, whether we should forgive, how to forgive, whether we should lash out, who we should tell, how to get rid of this feeling, And so we suppress the emotion, we let it show up in less than ideal ways. It may also be because of how you have come to see anger in the past, you've come to see it as an emotion that we should avoid. This often can be attributed to maybe being raised by really angry parents or seeing anger from a previous partner. We can see in those moments how ugly it can be, especially when it has total control over someone. It may also be that as a child, you are not given permission to express emotions like anger or rage in a safe space. You were punished for being frustrated or rightfully angry angry in response to your boundaries being crossed. You are not given access to your full emotional bandwidth. So anytime you feel anger now as an adult, you associate it with the shame and the punishment you received as a child, or we vow not to be like the person who has let anger control them in our past. We know how much it hurts, We know how much it harms those around us, we are told, and we know that anger is bad and therefore to feel it would make us bad, and so we push it down. We begin to believe that to feel anger makes us purely an angry person and nothing more. When we fear any kind of emotional reaction, it naturally leads to avoidance, and that is what causes us to suppress a feeling, treat it like it's somewhat diseased. However, our body can really only hold on to an emotion for so long, you know. Eventually we run out of like cognitive resources and cognitive strength to hold it down, so we end up exploding. And the reason we end up exploding is often totally unrelated to the origin of our anger. This is what Freud called displacement, and displacement is part of our unconscious defense mechanisms, in which we project and find a new object for our anger rather than the original cause. It is why you may be really angry at your roommates or really angry at your younger sibling, but then you end up snapping at someone on the internet, or you end up like picking a fight with your partner. This is just your body trying to find a way to let out your anger in an environment that it seems, you know, it seizes more appropriate. And really what it comes from is originally like shame. It comes from shame at your anger. It comes from conflict version, it comes from not being able to put it in a place where it's going to do good. And I think at that point it's really useful to remember that, like any emotion, anger is really just here to tell you something. It is just the messenger. It is trying to communicate with you that there is something in your life, an important emotional issue, a sense of dissatisfaction, something that is bothering you, a sense of injustice that is going against your values, that is going against your desires, your ambitions. It has been promised. And if we were to ignore anger or kind of like try and opt out of it, what we would actually be ignoring is a lot of important information, and it would mean that we would never be able to stand up for ourselves if our boundary were to be crossed, because we could never allow ourselves to feel wronged otherwise that would be allowing ourselves to feel angry. Hopefully that kind of makes sense, right. I think about this a lot in terms of people who are in situationships, or if you're in a really fraught relationship and you just don't let yourself bring up the things that have bothered you, and you suppress it because to feel angry might compromise that relationship. You don't want to be angry in front of this person. Here's the thing, though, Eventually that is going to boil over. It is going to give to get to the point where you cannot tolerate that for much longer. And that is why anger is so crucial, because it is a really valuable motivator for change. If we channel that initial impulse for violence and rage correctly, we can actually really unlock a lot of movement in our life. We can unlock a lot of creativity. I know this really really well. You can displace it, that's your first option. You can let it take over your entire life and you can let it make you violent and rageful. Or you can treat it like energy. Why do you want to divert that energy in? What parts of your life? Might it be useful? To have access to that level of passion. Don't you want to kind of almost really tap into its power rather than wasting it on like a momentary explosion. You know. I think the best analogy I've heard about this topic is from this Ted talk called Anger is Your Ally, and the speaker explains that anger is very much like a child. You shouldn't let it drive the car. That is going to be a terrible problem. But you also shouldn't stuff it in the trunk either. You need to treat anger like it's it's a passenger in the vehicle. You know, you know it's there. It's just cruising along with you. You're not trying to hide from it, but it's also not on the front seat. I think this acceptance of our anger is not to justify holding onto it by no means. I think we often make the mistake in believing that raging and seething in silence is somehow going to hurt the person we're actually furious at, or that it's productive, when actually when we really like hold on to this rage, and we hold on to this like aggressive instinct in this hurt, we are the person that it does the most damage to, but is the answer to that that we should forgive. Do we always have to be the bigger person to let go of our anger? I, personally, I don't think so. I think forgiveness is a privilege, and you can, you know, you can still understand the ways in which someone has hurt you, the way certain actions have gone against your values, and not need to subsequently hurt that person as well. To find release. You can find peace with your anger. And sometimes I think we really celebrate forgiveness. It's this like really pure and good thing. You know, there's a lot of religious undertones to that, and that it's going to make us so much lighter and such better people. But I also don't think that it's gonna help us release our rage. I don't think that forgiveness is something that we should rush. I think that anger actually needs an outlet, and it needs to be processed, and it needs to be worked through. It needs to be treated with respect before we get to the point that we can be stoics about it. So in that moment, you kind of have three options. You can channel your anger through sublimation, you can create something with it. You can use it as motivation, find it, like find a positive way to process that feeling. You can adopt the stoic approach, which is I'm just gonna let this emotion wash over me without needing to reach out and touch it. Or you can listen to the impulse and you can explode. You can inevitably say things you don't mean. You can lash out, you can burn the fucking world down, and that might feel great in the moment, but then you're kind of just left with the remains there. You're left with a lot of burnt bridges, and there's not much more to make of it. So I think option one and two are our best bet, but sometimes it's hard to get there, especially when anger has really ruled you unconsciously for so long. So what I want to talk about next is how we can honor the emotion whilst also letting it serve us. So all of that and more after this shortbreak. So the two ways we've mentioned for dealing with anger so far as by processing and channeling rather than letting it rule you, and I want to talk through some specific tips for doing so. Firstly, once again I want to clarify anger is not an emotion to be avoided by any means. It is good that you feel angry sometimes it shows that you have boundaries, It shows that you have a sense of injustice, It shows that you are protective of yourself, and I actually think that's really really important. I also think when we ignore anger, when we suppress it, obviously we can explode YadA, YadA, yadda. But it also maybe indicates that somewhere along the way you were taught that to experience and show all your emotions was shameful. And I think that the shame around emotions is one of those kind of generational patterns and things that we are taught by our parents that we need to unlearn. So here's how we're going to go about it instead. Firstly, when you are feeling this rage for any reason, avoid what we like to call the catharsis myth. So asis is this thing that provides release. It is this like huge explosion of energy that makes us feel a lot better. When we talk about anger, a lot of people talk about venting, talk about ranting as a way to kind of like release their anger effectively. They think about it as like turning the tap on and just like letting out some of the pressure. But a psychologist that I was reading into about this put it very well. When you vent your anger or blow off steam, when you are screaming, when you're like really mad, when you're just having this huge vent to your friend, it actually keeps our arousal levels really high. Have you ever like had a moment where someone has done something that has made you so angry and you've walked away from it, you've kind of thought about it, and then a few days later your friend's like, hey, remember when that per and did that thing, and it just makes you feel angry afterwards, when you talk about it with them, you think that it's going to make you feel better. I actually don't think it really does. It's like using gasoline to put out a fire. It just doesn't work. And I know that that advice feels counterintuitive because we feel like when we're venting, when we're ranting, that we're doing something about this feeling, and therefore that we're processing it. However, I think there are more sustainable ways of going about it that don't keep us in such a state of active anger. Like there's ways that we can exhaust the feeling. Is probably a better way of putting it rather than continuing to exacerbate it or accelerating it. So exercise is great, particularly something cardiofocused, but I've also found boxing incredibly useful. I think that although it can still increase arousal in the moment, it also exhausts me afterwards. And you know, therapy is great and all, but something really does have to be said about just hitting a bag for an hour and leaving being like super sweaty and just feeling like this, all of this like emotion and feeling that was buzzing in your body has has a place to land. There's also this technique I have for processing rage and actually a bunch of emotions, and I call it crazy dance. And I've talked about this before on the show, and it's what it sounds like. I want you to just put on your headphones and just go absolutely wild, let loose. I don't want it to look good. I don't want it to be a cool dance. I want it to be the most energetic crazy dance you can think of. Legs moving, arms moving, body twisting. This acts as a form of somatic therapy where we are able to release damaging, pent up emotions using our bodies, and that is the place where they're often stored. Right. So I want you before and after to notice how your body feels, and then where you've been holding stress. No, maybe you have like muscle tension or pain. And afterwards I want you to notice whether those parts have experienced a sense of relief, whether there has been some kind of release in those muscles, in those parts of your body. I think it works in so many situations. Another way to go about it is make sure that before you address your anger, you calm your body by giving it enough oxygen. If you think about it, when we're really really frustrated and upset, our breathing gets a lot deeper, a lot faster, sorry, a lot faster, and when it's really fast, like like this, you're not taking in that much oxygen. When our brain is low on oxygen, our thinking becomes a little bit more like disturbed. It becomes a lot slower, And breathing exercises are a way to firstly help us calm down, but also get that oxygen back into our brain to make a smart, informed decision. I know we hear a lot about breathing exercises in therapy and in psychology, and if you go to therapy you might it's like one of those staples in a therapist toolkit. That and like meditation and mindfulness. And sometimes when we hear about those things too much, we discredit it. We think it doesn't work, But it does. The science says that it does, and it really helps in these situations. So deliberately practicing like a relaxed breathing pattern, so breathing in for eight, holding for four, breathing out for eight, it brings a lot of our involuntary functions like our breathing under control. And it shows us that other things we think are out of our control, like anger, are actually something that we have a say over, that we can almost operate and move and have some decision making over. So control breathing really can cause quite profound physiological changes. It lowers our blood pressure, lowers our heart rate, it reduces stress levels and levels of stress hormones in the blood, so all of which I think is a really good start to processing anger in whatever form you choose to. My favorite form though, is through creative channeling. So creative channeling is where you take your anger and you make something with it. It helps us place our anger, express our anger, and make it tangible. It takes us, you know, it takes that emotion out of our mind and onto the page, like if we're making a piece of art or a sculpture or anything of a sort. It really allows us to see this emotion as something that isn't just held up in our brain, but has a place in the world, a recognizable place outside of our body. Additionally, I think when we're like partaking in something creative, it helps us enter into a flow state. A flow state is this kind of state of mind where we aren't so much focused on what's bothering us, just the task at hand. We feel really fulfilled by it, we feel really excited by it, challenged by it, but also just extremely focused. And it actually is amazing because whilst you're in a flow state, it's really hard to think about more than one thing. And so you come back from practicing this creative exercise, from making something with not only a fresh set of eyes, but with kind of like a renewed sense of peace and a renewed sense of calm. This mainly focuses on how you can manage your anger on an individual level, but obviously someone has given us a reason to feel angry, and I'm not just not saying that in a way like that we should be endorsing blame. But anger is often environmental, something has triggered it, and so our reaction is also probably going to be environmental or external or interpersonal as well. Here are some tips for managing that, because we know anger does a lot of damage when we don't have control over it. It causes us to just do so many things that we wouldn't normally do, often the expense of the people that are closest to us. They are the closest to the epicenter, They get the most kind of heat from this feeling. So when you are processing your anger, when you feel rage, avoid projecting, avoid displacing. As frou would say, I think you need to acknowledge when you have allowed someone else to be the target of your anger when they are not the source. For example, you've come home like a really rough day at work where people have just been super rude, and you just snap at your partner and it's not fair because and it's probably not fair to snap at anyone really, but it's definitely not fair to snap at this person who probably doesn't know what's going on and is just wanting to make you happy and just wanting to see you happy as well. And I think it's easy to project onto those people because we know that we kind of know that they're going to take it in a way the way that we can't snap at a stranger. But once again, they're not just having and it will do harm to your relationships. So in those moments, recognize Itologize to that person and explain why, talk about why it is that you came into an argue, that you came into a situation or a room or an interaction feeling that rage, and make sure they know what part of it may have been because of them, or what part of it really wasn't to do with them, so that they're not sitting there waiting for you to just blow up, that they're not having an anxious reaction to your feelings of rage. There's a strategy used in anger management called the thirty thirty intervention that I think is a really good and useful strategy for those moments when you do displace your anger onto someone who doesn't deserve it, or when you've just had a really rough day and you know that this passion and this feeling is really building up, So take thirty seconds to remove yourself from a situation that maybe frustrating you. Thirty seconds to do something else, particularly something with your hands, because it shows our brain that we're doing something about this problem, this problem emotion that we're having, or something physical to release that bodily tension, and then thirty seconds to create a coping strategy. Maybe that coping strategy will be all right. I need a few more minutes to on a walk, or I'm going to write down exactly why I'm upset. I'm going to journal about this, and then I'm going to come back to this person and we can talk about it. I also say all the time, let people make mistakes. Don't let other people always be the source of your anger because they don't meet your expectations and because you are lowering your threshold for their behavior. I'm going to explain that a little bit more. But sometimes I think we become angry because we have false expectations about other people, and when they don't meet them, we blame them rather than blaming ourselves for not being honest about what we can expect from someone. The same way that you're allowed to make mistakes and be your own person, these people are allowed that as well. And I think that our angest comes from a sense of like reality, the reality we want not matching up with kind of what is actually going to happen. And sometimes that's fair to be angry about, right, Like the reality is you've expect everyone around you to be really, really nice and kind and someone isn't. That makes you angry. But if the reality is, oh, I expect my partner to have done like every single chore in the household, even though he also works full time, and you come back and he's just gotten home before you and he hasn't done that, and reality doesn't meet you know, blah blah blah. They don't think it's fair in those times to be angry. Let other people make mistakes. And also when you're really frustrated about something, when you really feel like something is so hard to like go of, you're so filled with rage that it's not going anywhere, don't say you're over it when you're not. Don't pretend that you are fine. That is just another form of suppression, and it is going to come up later. I think a lot of the time we really want to be forgiving, and we want to pretend that the emotion just isn't there because it is so uncomfortable to feel, and we hear it all the time. Someone is really upset by something and they go, it's fine, I'm fine, Like, let's move on, I don't want to talk about it. No, No, I'm over, I'm over. I forgive you. It's very easy to say those words as well if you're a people pleaser and if you feel like your anger is not justified. But this is your reminder that really take that closing of the feeling, that closing of the trigger, that closing or whatever is caused your anger. Make sure you take the closing of that chapter seriously. Don't close it too soon, don't close it prematurely, because it will bubble and it will fester and it will come up at the worst time. Finally, if there is a particular person you are upsetter, practice both assertive communication but also practice calm communication. Have you ever had those moments where you know that a friend is mad at you, or you know that you've done something to upset someone and you go into the conversation and you're just immediately defensive and you're immediately really upset and you're immediately angry, or they're immediately angry. It is so hard to ever resolve something when we come to the table with this primal emotion at the forefront, rather than like we said in the passenger seat. So think through your initial reaction, the first thing you want to do, and then sleep on it. It will always feel better in the morning, and maybe you will have thought again about burning the whole world down. Take a step back from what you from the first thing that you want to do in response to your anger, and make sure you are expressing what you need in an assertive, yet calm way. I often find this difficult when people are like, oh my gosh, you're so angry, like you're overreacting, Like women especially, you're so emotional. You're allowed to have this feeling, right. I'm not saying that you need to be like calm about it for them. I'm saying you need to be calm about it for you, calm about it for you, because you're able to go in with a really clear way of addressing what you need, a really clear way of trying at least to show them why you feel this way, why you feel like a boundary has been crossed, why you feel angry. I hate when people have their reality kind of discredited because they are emotional. When that is like literally the thing that we've been talking about this entire episode. This emotion is not shameful, it is not bad, but it is bad when you let it do things that hurt others deliberately, that hurt others without a second thought to it, or that make it so you can't actually get what you need out of a situation. So I think it's really important here to have a healthy relationship with anger and how it is expressed to other people so that it can I think, be a tool rather than an obstacle, and that in other situations it can really help motivate change. It can help motivate progress towards a better understanding between you and someone else or a better outcome. So some final reminders, it is totally okay to feel angry. It's telling you something. It is just a sign of something you don't always need to forgive. You don't always need to have an answer to your anger. But you can't suppress it. You have to find a way to either process it through communication, through talking it out, through the thirty thirty intervention, or channeling it. Finding how you can find a medium or an outlet for this anger instead of letting it sit in the body. I think you are not an angry person just because someone has crossed your boundaries or repeatedly crossed your boundaries. You're not an angry person because society and your parents, and your family and everyone around you has told you to hold onto that anger and not let it go, has told you to be polite and suppressive. There are a lot of positive ways that this emotion can help us. It can help us in our relationships, in our careers, in our lives in general. So I hope this episode has helped you, especially if you have a long term relationship with anger. I hope that it's at least taught you something new, that you've learned something about yourself or about the psychology. I found it really fascinating because I think about anger a lot, and I think about anger in my life and anger in my family's life, and you know, sometimes it's like very easy to just hide from it, and it's very easy to go off and rant. But I've found that that doesn't always leave me actually feeling better. So hopefully you've taken that with you as well as always, if you've been joy this episode. Please feel free to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now. Make sure you give us a follow on Instagram at that Psychology podcast, especially if you have an episode suggestion or something that you want to say about this episode. I would love to hear from you. We're always taking ideas and feedback and make sure you're just having a good time. I don't know where else going with that, but make sure you're happy. Here's like a little reminder to just take a second right now, ask yourself, Am I happy? What could I do about it if I'm not? That's a beautiful way to end the episode. Hopefully we will see you back here next week with another one.