I recently had a profound realization that I now understand is a reflection of how far I’ve come in the past five years.
When I was younger, back before I got sober, back when I was depressed, I used to get angry a lot. I really didn’t like my life situation, and I felt powerless to change it. In response to feeling powerless, I got angry. I got angry at other people, at institutions, at physical objects, and most of all, I got angry at myself.
It took a lot of work to get my mind right, or, if not right, at least better. I got sober, I started meditating, I learned conventional anger management techniques, which, though somewhat helpful, are not those I’ll cover in this post.
An early realization that helped was that expressing anger felt like expressing power, which I simultaneously wanted and did not have. But this anger-based “power” was illusory. Anger actually made me less powerful. It made me a slave to emotional turmoil. I made me indecisive, unproductive, and ineffective. Remembering this, I’ve recently added to my loving-kindness meditation the lines:
“I am not powerless.
I am not powerless.
I am not powerless.
…
I don’t need to be powerful.
I don’t need to be powerful.
I don’t need to be powerful.”
These days, I rarely get angry, and the bouts of severe anger that used to be common for me are all-but gone. But I do still get frustrated on a fairly regular basis, as I’m sure most people do, and sometimes that frustration threatens to boil over into anger. And one morning last month, while I was on the verge of exactly that, I had an insight:
Anger has never done me any good.
Woah. The truth of this insight hit me like a ton of bricks.
Anger has never served me. I have not benefited from feeling angry even one, single time. Anger has only harmed me, and it has never helped me.
Seeing this truth instantly shut down my rising anger. I saw my emotions shifting toward anger and saw where it would lead: a set of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that would do me no good; a state of mind that I did not want to experience.
If anger doesn’t do me any good, why does it exist?
Great question.
Anger, like all feelings, evolved to help our ancestors pass on their genes.1 Your emotions result from human nature blending with modern culture and your current situation. Sometimes the result is a helpful emotion, sometimes not.
In a hunter-gather tribe, you knew everyone, and most actions were more-or-less public. So if someone wronged you by, say, stealing from you, and you responded with violent anger, everyone learned that you were a bad person to steal from. This improved your odds of passing on your genes.1 This is probably the best explanation for why anger evolved.
There are at least two reasons why this no longer serves us.
One is that we no longer live in the environment of our ancestors; we live in much larger communities. Many of the people we encounter are strangers whom we will never see again, so showing them that we’re a bad person to mess with doesn’t do us any good. Furthermore, we have laws, police officers, and prisons to enforce social norms like not stealing.
The other reason is that, even if anger does serve our genes, that doesn’t mean it serves us. We might not care about having as many offspring as possible. (To me, at least, that sounds like a terrible goal.) We probably care more about being happy or being good people. Natural selection only favors traits that enhance genetic proliferation; it does not care about whether those traits make you happier or more moral. And anger, in most cases, is not the morally right thing to do, and I don’t think it ever makes us happier.
So, when anger feels right, it’s fooling us. In the modern world, anger just makes us feel bad and drives us to behaviors we’re not proud of.
Now, you might now be thinking of a common counterargument to this perspective:
But anger motivates me to take action, to speak up, to protest, to make change!
Does it really?
Compare how often you’ve felt anger in your life to how often you actually took steps to improve the situation. If you’re like most people, your anger rarely inspires positive action.
Or consider two of the most effective protest-leaders of the 20th century: Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Both of these men worked hard to reduce the anger of their followers, advocating for non-violence and love because they knew that anger was counterproductive.
So you don’t need to hold onto anger for any practical purpose. You can feel inspired and motivated to make change without losing your cool. You can simply take determined, mindful action. You can get the same productivity with none of the toxicity.
Now, in addition to these insights, I want to offer some unconventional strategies that have helped me become better at dealing with anger. If you have an anger problem, please remember, the problem is not you; the problem is just a hard problem, and it has mechanical solutions.
Here we go…
8 Unconventional Anger-Management Strategies
1. Remember that it’s okay to feel angry.
I used to get angry at myself for feeling angry, which meant minor anger would turn into major anger. Then, as the anger subsided, I would feel ashamed for getting so angry. And then the shame would give way to sadness. So instead of just feeling angry, I would suffer through a series of negative emotions.
My problem was that I wasn’t giving myself permission to be human. Anger, as we discussed earlier, is a normal, natural human emotion. It’s okay to be upset. And as my example shows, getting upset with yourself for feeling upset only makes things worse.
So don’t resist the emotion. Don’t try to fight it. But also don’t ignore it. Don’t try to hide from it or pretend it’s not there. Instead, call it out. Call it what it is. And that brings us to our second anger-management strategy.
2. Mentally step back from it.
Just as you are not your thoughts, you are also not your feelings. By naming what you’re feeling, and labeling it as a feeling, you can create some psychological distance from it. Here’s a progression of self-talk you can walk yourself through:
- “I’m angry.”
- “I’m feeling”
- “I’m noticing that I’m feeling angry.”
With each step, you put more space between you and the emotion. First, you are the emotion, but at least you’re aware of it. Then, you’re feeling the emotion and recognizing that it’s just a feeling – it’s not who you are. Finally, you’re noticing the emotion; you’re recognizing your own awareness of the emotion. In the last stage, you’ve mentally stepped back far enough to regain self-control.
You can use a similar progression to step back from angry thoughts:
- “He’s a jackass!”
- “I’m thinking that he’s a jackass.”
- “I’m noticing that I’m thinking that he’s a jackass.”
First, you unquestioningly believe that he’s a jackass. Then, you realize that this assertion is just a thought. Finally, you become aware of your own awareness of the thought. This psychological distance gives you the best chance of reassessing your thought, applying your thought bouncers, and replacing them it with a better thought. Or maybe he really is a jackass, but now you’ve mentally stepped back enough to realize that you shouldn’t engage this person because you are not the jackass whisperer.
3. Mindfully observe your anger.
In addition to diminishing the power of angry thoughts and feelings, noticing that you’re experiencing them gives you an opportunity to learn about them.
Once you’ve noticed the feeling and distanced yourself from it, you can then observe it mindfully. This means looking at your anger with open-minded curiosity.
- What does it feel like in your body?
- What does it feel like in your head?
- What thoughts is it producing?
- What other feelings is it triggering?
These questions can help you come to a better understanding of your anger. By getting to know it more intimately, you can deconstruct it and demystify it.
Perhaps you can even get better at addressing it before it gets out of hand. If you become familiar with the various sensations that your anger produces, then you stand a better chance of noticing them in their early stages, when they’re more subtle, and taking steps to reset.
Try to take a neutral, nonjudgmental approach to studying your anger. Observe it like a rain forest biologist would observe the behavior of a new species of tree frog. Cultivating mindfulness via meditation will enhance your ability to do this.
There’s a component of mindfulness that is essential here: acceptance. It’s impossible to observe something accurately while simultaneously hating it, feeling ashamed of it, or otherwise rejecting its existence. Accepting anger just means saying to yourself, “I’m feeling anger, and that’s okay.” Acceptance doesn’t mean that we like the feeling, and it doesn’t mean we embrace it or act on it.
And that brings us to our next strategy:
4. Don’t express your anger. Instead, do the opposite.
I mentioned the “do the opposite” technique in my article on interpreting reality. Since our emotions, thoughts, and actions are connected in a bi-directional feedback loop, we can use our behaviors to influence our thoughts and feelings.
Specifically, with anger, we can take non-angry actions to counter our angry thoughts and feelings. If you feel like yelling, speak calmly. If you feel like slamming or smashing things, handle things gently. If you want to be mean to someone who is upsetting you, be nice to them. Take deep breaths. Go for a slow walk in the park. Take a nap. These non-angry actions signal to your brain that it should stop feeling angry.
There are many possible opposites to anger – happiness, tranquility, rationality – but there’s one that might beat them all: gratitude.
5. Express gratitude.
It’s tough to feel angry and grateful at the same time, so if you can get yourself to feel grateful for something, your anger should dissipate.
If you’re angry at a person, try to notice or remember something that they’ve done that was good or helpful to you, and thank them for it. If you’re angry about some device malfunctioning – your computer, say – be grateful that you live in an era that has computers at all and marvel at the wondrous technology we usually take for granted. If you’re angry that something didn’t work out the way you’d hoped, think about all the times when things did work out and be grateful for that, or think about some way it could have gone worse and be grateful it didn’t.
Sometimes, when I was in a fit of anger, the path out of it began with gratitude journaling. I saw myself spiraling out of control, and I didn’t like where my mind was heading. But I knew I had a tool I could use to combat the negative thoughts and feelings swirling around my head. So I would lie down in bed, open my gratitude journal, and force myself to write down some things to be grateful for. And if my mind was too stormy to think of anything, I would read old entries. My journal is a repository of evidence that my life is, in fact, very good.
6. Look at the big picture.
Anger often arises from focusing on the details of a situation. Something goes wrong, and your brain hones in on every minute aspect of what went wrong and why it’s wrong. You zoom in on the problem so much that it’s all you can see.
Sound familiar? If you read about the 3 M’s and the 3 P’s, you’ll know that we’re talking about the first M: magnifying. If something upsets you, and you stare at it with a mental magnifying glass, it will only seem worse. The elements of it that are wrong become blown out of proportion, and you become blind to everything else.
The answer is to apply the first two P’s: perspective and find the positive. Zoom out and look at the big picture. Odds are, most things are going right. And even if they’re not, actively look for something that is going right. There has to be something. Seek out a different perspective and find something positive to focus on.
7. Make slack.
In my post on slack, I talked about how increasing the slack in your life reduces stress. Well, it also reduces anger.
How much more likely are you to get angry at “bad” drivers who slow you down when you’re running late?
How much more likely are you to get mad about a parking ticket when your budget is tight?
How much less likely are you get angry about an unjustified criticism of you at work when you know you have a very secure position?
How much less likely are you to get mad at your partner when you have plenty of slack in your relationship?
Increase the slack in your life, and you’ll greatly reduce the number of situations that can lead to anger. But slack, it turns out, is just one aspect of a larger prevention-system that I deploy against anger and other negative emotions, which leads us to our final strategy…
8. Prevent anger with a full-court press.
Like I said at the beginning, I used to get angry a lot, but I don’t anymore.
One reason I have a better handle on this particular emotion, of course, is that I use the tools described above. The techniques offered in this article are effective methods for addressing anger before it gets out of hand. But the main reason I don’t get angry much anymore is prevention.
Long-time readers will know that I run a full-court press on myself because I’m prone to depression, addiction, and difficulty focusing. In order to mitigate these tendencies, I’ve adopted a “do everything” strategy: I meditate, exercise, and eat well; I prioritize sleep, spend time in nature, and feed my mind wisdom every day; I practice gratitude and generosity; and I do meaningful work that satisfies the four quadrants of the Ikigai diagram.
Each of these practices incrementally increases my mental health and psychological resiliency, thereby reducing the likelihood that I’ll get angry in the first place. So take good care of yourself, in every way you can, and you’ll reduce both the frequency and severity of anger.
And remember, anger has never done you any good. It’s just a reaction against feeling powerless that, unfortunately, makes you even less powerful.
1 Wright, Robert. The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
. Vintage Books, 1994.