[Exploring Life] Anger is a strong emotional reaction in response to a perceived provocation or injustice. The emotional reaction consists of an often unintended improvisatory abyss of displeasure, irritation, resentment, outrage, and enmity. Anger is an extreme reaction that takes our body and mind to the very edge of a threshold in which rationale thinking and clear reasoning begin to break. Of course, there are times when anger is a necessary and effective response to a situation – no emotion is purely negative. Acute anger occurs in a specific moment and is a short-term response to an antagonizing situation; it may be a helpful response or not. Chronic anger is more mercurial in that it tends to shift our perception of our circumstances so that we look out into the world through the lens of heart-felt irritation. And what we tend to perceive in the world we also tend to attract.
Emotions are a natural and unavoidable part of life. All emotions reveal something about us to ourselves; they are part of our story, our narrative of being here on this wonderful yet mysterious planet. Life would be bland, dull and immensely boring in the absence of our emotional terrain. However, emotions are not neutral and they can have a dark side, especially if a reaction becomes chronic, habitual, and even addictive. Anger, when chronically out of control, has immense potential for personal destruction on physical, mental, and spiritual levels. In a way, we can literally lose ourselves and our identity to the shadow side of anger. Any emotion when pushed to extremes over a period of time becomes a form of confinement and suffering.
The Body of Anger: When we look out into the world around us we interpret that world in a complex manner that we do not fully understand. It is reasonable to presume that part of that interpretation is influenced and conditioned by our own emotional context. If we are happy we interpret our immediate situation and circumstance in a much different manner than if we were angry. To an angry person, the world around them appears to be a persistent confrontation in which perceived injustices to one’s ego must be corrected at all costs. The body language of an angry person presents defiance, separation and indignation while a happy person will present gratitude, belonging, and joy. Emotions transform of physical appearance, the way we stand, sit, and most especially our facial expression. It is entirely possible to see a person from a distance and have a very good understanding of their emotional state.
Emotions such as anger and hostility quickly activate the “fight or flight response,” in which stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, speed up your heart rate and breathing and give you a burst of energy. Blood pressure also rises as your blood vessels constrict.
While this stress response mobilizes you for emergencies, it might cause harm if activated repeatedly.
When I am angry about something, I can feel a kind of tension in body, mind and spirit. It is as if my very presence constricts and is squeezed from all sides. It is an unpleasant, undesirable and often unhelpful space to inhabit. Anger invites physical confinement, muscular constriction, aggravates the central nervous system, and we are thrust into the midst of our primitive and often over-used fight or flight syndrome. Annoyance is something less confining and constricting than anger. When we are annoyed there is a much smaller degree of tension within and we are not hijacked with the same intensity.
Persistent anger can ravage the body. While there is a need for our flight or fight response, the activation of it should ideally remain highly specific, context-sensitive, and short in duration. Unfortunately, anger can become habitual, chronic and addictive and we literally inhabit the world through the lens of anger. Our bodies begin to demand a constant supply of adrenaline and cortisol, that only serves to ever so seductively lead us to an early grave. The constant chemical stimulation of the nervous system limits the ways in which we can live, experience, explore, investigate and enjoy the world around us. When our bodies are confined by constant patterns of chemical reactions we find ourselves in stuck in the midst of what appears to be a bog of eternal suffering.
Feeling anger is, of course, not a good or desired feeling. However, the problem is not anger in and of itself, but the source and cause of the anger. One of the most powerful forms of learning is direct and personal investigation of our experience. When are bodies are confined by anger, one potent means to investigate it is to draw our attention to it, to observe its presence, and to become fully aware of how it is presenting itself as a physical force within our body. This presumes two conditions: a) that we can consciously bring awareness to our anger and not become lost in the moment; and b) that we have the mental integrity that allows us to conduct a “body scan” in order to simply be aware of its effects on us. In this sense, we are not making an attempt to attack and eliminate our anger, we are simply exposing it.
The Mind of Anger: Anger transforms how we think, what we think, what we say, and what we do. The etymology of the word anger is interesting: in Old Norse the root angr means sorrow or grief, Old High German the root means angust angst or fear, and in Latin the root angor means anguish. To my thinking, the German reference to angst or fear reveals the source of all anger. Anger originates in fear. When we are angry we are actually in a state of intense fear and angst (deep and pervasive feeling of dread and anxiety) that we perceive as an emergency. Whether the state of emergency we perceive ourselves to be in is real or imaginary is irrelevant since all that is required is for us to believe we are in a state of emergency.
…it [anger] hints at an underlying vulnerability–or lack of conviction about your resources to maintain mental and emotional equilibrium in the face of perceived adversity.? In most cases, the outward provocation isn’t related to iminent physical harm. It’s simply tied to your ego’s feeling under attack. And having this subjective experience of being aggressed against typically suggests a fragile ego far more than it does a strong, resilient one. Conversely, the stronger and more secure your sense of self, the less likely you are to react to a person or situation as menacing.
- Leon F. Seltzer Ph.D. in Psychology Today
When we are angry we naturally fearful, anxious, insecure, and to some extent scared. In the midst of anger, our thinking, behaviour and communication originate in fear and angst. We may try to hide away and avoid being noticed, or we may lash out in some form of attack on the perceived source of the immediate problem. Perhaps we may even be able to quiet our anger over a long period of time only for it to emerge in an unfortunate outburst of some kind that may have only a frail attachment to the immediate issue or present moment. The mind can store up the energy of anger and if left to fester it will eventually find a means to express itself in what usually becomes some kind of unfortunate and regrettable event.
When we are angry our minds function in a very limited and rather dysfunctional manner; reason and clear thinking are usually not the result of anger. The requirements of living in the modern age invite rather than prevent the accumulation of stress. The feeling of being overwhelmed by our social and economic responsibilities seems to only intensify, which in turn reveals the immense immaturity of our culture. Chronic stress is a silent enemy of our body, mind and spirit. Sometimes we can burst out in anger without really understanding what we are angry about, except that we feel some kind of nondescript indignation toward certain unidentifiable aspects of our lives. Anger can inspire chronic malcontent in our thoughts, words, and actions.
Chronic anger ultimately presents itself as a fragile and insecure ego in the theatre of our mind. When angry we lose our resilience and our ability to maintain equilibrium in the face of adversity. This is not to say there are not appropriate and essential situations in life in which the sudden emergence of angry is not only appropriate but essential. It is when we become mired in anger, when we have difficulty navigating the landscape of fear, grief and angst that anger traps us in cycles of self-generated and self-perpetuated suffering. Ironically, we can even place ourselves into a state of being angry at our own anger. Worse, we can trap ourselves into a morass of guilt over our anger. We can’t change the past, but we can learn to forgive those moments in which we acted less than we wished we had.
The Spirit of Anger: We can become angry when our own sense of purpose and meaning in life becomes illusive. It is also easy to become angry at the constant barrage of destruction, lies, greed, poverty, want, ignorance, war, pain and suffering that seems to be pervasive across the human experience. With global communications and instant access to the media we sometimes find ourselves drowning in a cesspool of humanity’s less admirable ventures. Of we maintain a belief in a superior force, a version of God, we can even become angry at our maker. What would blank do? Often we look for inspiration and direction in the lives of others whom we admire and respect. In this sense, a person’s life can become a model for our own lives, a reference point we constantly return to in order to help us make meaningful decisions and live purposeful lives.
Maintaining the energy of anger wears on the fabric of our spirit. In the absence of a spiritual connection (spiritual does not refer to religion in any manner), we lose our sense of belonging to life. Without our spirit to guide us, the mind is left to its own devices, which is a intensely frightening and deeply undesirable proposition. Chronic anger ravages our spirit and animates us with the unfounded and miscreant energy bitterness, resentment, and indignation. Our sense of belonging becomes adversarial, our sense of gratitude morphs into anguish, and our sense of beauty vanishes. Anger can even usher in a dark night of the soul.
The spiritual landscape is, for me, the primary terrain for learning to become more resilient in the presence of anger. In other words, anger first requires a spiritual solution, which will in turn inform our mind (psychological solution) and our body (physical solution). Because we often have confused notions of what spirituality is, and worse all too often confuse it with religiosity, a spiritual solution seems foreign to us. Further confounding the problem is our belief in the power of the the mind, when in fact we are essentially dealing with a pattern-making engine that can easily get mired in addictive and harmful loops. That is not to say that reason and rational thinking is not important, but it is to say the mind is not a solution as much as it is a problem.
The Heart of Anger: All emotions have physical, mental and spiritual dimensions. One of our most important source of power is the power to overcome our own afflictions, to overcome our own internal fears and anxieties that prevent us from embracing life, with all it joys and sorrows, in an open and vibrant manner. Anger, when chronic and frequent, is an affliction – and as such is also a potent opportunity for growth and transformation. There is no greater power in life than developing the power to transform ourselves into individuals with exquisitely developed powers of resilience, equanimity, acceptance, gratitude, grace, empathy, and compassion.
My dear friends, I suggest that there is another kind of power, a greater power: the power to be happy right in the present moment, free from addiction, fear, despair, discrimination, anger, and ignorance. This power is the birthright of every human being, whether celebrated or unknown, rich or poor, strong or weak.
- Thich Nhat Hanh in The Art of Power
When we are in the midst of anger, in a moment when we feel the pain of internal rage, and we can find a way to interrupt it, to become aware of its negativity in our lives, and to attend to its wares, we have then fought a battle that is essential to our survival. We need not make anger an enemy, but we do need to reveal what its source is – what is essence is – in order to rescue our humanity. In the end, if we are able to lift ourselves out of our anger and to find a deep and meaningful resolution to it, we have achieved the ultimate service to ourselves and those around us.
Thank you. I am touched you took the time to read through my blog.
I appreciate your kind words and encouragement.
Happy Canada Day.
I was doing a Google search on how to delay responding to others when I am in the midst of anger–and instead discovered, here, through your writing, just how deep and pervasive my anger seems to be. It really doesn’t take much to set me off, which, I now suspect, has nothing to do with the people or things “making” me angry–and everything to do with how I am waking up and seeing the world. I’ve requested one of Hanh books from the library to pursue this further. In any event, I just wanted to say thanks for this great article.
Hi Alana,
Thank you for your comment. An important learning for me was the realization that the object of my anger ultimately isn’t someone or something “out there.” Though far from perfect, when I feel anger rising I try to bring awareness to it in order to focus on the actual source and origin of it. For me, anger is a clear sign that my ego is weak and frail. Certainly there are external objects of our anger that may trigger my angry reaction, perhaps even justifiably, but I have learned that they are never really the actual source of my anger – the origin of anger is something I always find within. This remains a very humbling process for me.
I was reading your weblog and came across this wonderful phrase: “I am also what I think, what I feel and how I act.” And we the beauty if this is that we have the power to decide what we wish to think, how we wish to feel , and how to express ourselves to the world around us. Thich Nhat Hanh is an inspiration and I hope you enjoy his wonderful writing. I use it as a constant source of reflection and contemplation. Feel free to keep in touch.
Kind regards,
Brian