Not all anger is the same. How to recognize different types of anger and what to do
I’m Dr. Jud Brewer, addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist specializing in anxiety and habit change. Yesterday, I was hosting a live office hours on YouTube to so that people that don’t have access to a psychiatrist can ask questions about how to cope with fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Someone asked how to deal with anger, and used the example of fake news and people not taking this pandemic seriously. So let’s talk about the different types of anger, where it comes from and what to do when it shows up. If we’re not careful, our responses can add fuel to the fires of frustration and anger and they blow up in our faces instead of helping.
Let’s start with the seeds of anger. Think back to the last time you were angry. Anger doesn’t just come out of the blue, it starts somewhere. Let’s use the analogy of fire. Fire needs fuel and a spark. Campfires keep us warm and make our marshmallows brown and gooey so we can enjoy s’mores, while forest fires create a lot of damage.
This applies to any situation, but right now, Coronavirus is that fuel. We are the spark. How do we use this fuel to create those glowing embers of warm connection, and spread these by kindness, instead of pouring gasoline on the fire and burning everything around us?
Here’s the science. Really briefly, there are two types of fuel for anger. Let’s call these gasoline and diesel. The gasoline type is anger born from expectations, basically not getting something that we want. The diesel type of anger is born from getting hurt, being put in a vulnerable situation, basically anything related to fear. Interestingly, similar to gas and diesel fuel which both start from crude oil, both types of anger have something in common: wanting. With expectations, we can get angry when we don’t get something that we want. With fear, we can get angry when we get something that we didn’t want. The only difference is the polarity. Expectations are related to wanting more of something, and fear is related to wanting less of something.
Let’s take the example of coronavirus. There is a lot of anger and outrage out there about fake news. Someone could be fueling their own anger with either gasoline or diesel. If their expectations of wanting people to only disseminate accurate information aren’t met, they’re adding gasoline. If they are afraid that fake news will keep people from taking the situation seriously, they’re adding diesel. Both add fuel to the fire, and neither help the situation. Why? When emotions burn hot, we can’t see or think clearly. Just like anxiety and fear, anger also makes the prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of our brain go offline. This is where the terms explosive anger and blind rage come from. It doesn’t matter what fuel caused the fire. What matters is that the forest is burning. This applies to any anger that we’re seeing out there right now. Check to see if anything has made you angry lately. Has it been your local, state or national government not doing enough, or doing something that you’re afraid will make things worse? Has it been something that you’ve seen people do at the grocery store or on social media? Has it been something that a family member has done?
So how do we bottle all of this fuel, and use its energy to drive forward together? Here is a simple, three-step process that you can use when your anger flares up.
1) Remove yourself from the situation if you can and find a safe place. This might be a different room, or just pushing back from your computer or phone. Take a few deep breaths, or do a short mindfulness exercise like bringing your awareness to your feet to ground yourself in the present moment. This will help your thinking brain come back online, so you can see that you’re standing in front of a small fire, holding a gallon of gasoline and not throw it on the fire.
2) When your thinking brain is back online, remember back to the last time you dumped that fuel on the fire. It could have been a social media post that outraged you and you angrily replied, only to get on into a Facebook or twitter fight, in front of the whole world. It could have been your spouse doing something small that caused you to blow your top. Do you feel proud of those moments? Of course not. Remember what the shame or regret feels like right now. It’s a very useful flame retardant. Just like paying attention and seeing that cigarettes taste awful or that eating 3 pieces of cake and feeling that stomach ache you just got as a result, seeing the results of your actions clearly hacks the reward systems in your brain, so that you’re less excited to do that behavior in the future. But this only works if you take a moment to really feel into those feelings of remorse and shame, not as a way to beat yourself up, but as a way to help you learn.
3) Bottle that fuel and use it to cook kindness. A really good way to channel your anger energy is to direct it toward being kind. I’ll go full on into my lab’s research showing how a specific type of mindfulness practice called loving kindness can literally change how your brain fires in a later video, but for now I’ll give you an example from something that happened in my kitchen early this morning. I was about to heat some water for tea, when my wife asked if she could use the microwave first. I noticed a couple of self-righteous “what about my tea” thoughts coming into my head and some clenching in my body, but remembering how for me selfishness feels much worse than kindness. So I said, “sure go ahead.” She couldn’t find the thing she was going to microwave, so I suggested that I get my water started while she found it. She left and came back when the microwave still had about a minute to go. I could sense a little impatience -today is her first day of teaching her college students online and she was a bit nervous- and noticed how I was starting to catch that irritability, as my mind started spitting out thoughts of “really, you can’t wait one minute”. This is a great example of the social contagion that I talked about in an earlier video. Impatience triggering irritability and so on. I had the gas and was about to dump it on the emotional fire by giving some early morning moral high ground lecture to my wife, when all she was trying to do was get her day going. We both knew from all of our previous times of me doing this, how this burns our relationship. So instead, I took a deep breath and we hugged for 40 seconds, big and strong, while the microwave finished heating my water. By the time the microwave beeped and my water had boiled, our emotions had cooled and dissolved into smiles.
This might be hard to relate to right now, but really it only takes 30 seconds to stop and hug your spouse or kids. It’s really important to remember that we’re all on edge right now, and it is critical that we step back and be understanding both with ourselves and others. We should expect stronger emotions and emotional reactions from ourselves and others, and work to not to take things personally. Don’t be hard on yourself. Don’t be hard on others.
I’ll end with a page from the book that my wife and I are reading together before we go to sleep called the boy the mole the fox and the horse.
What do you think success is, asked the boy
To love, said the mole
So today, instead of trying to be successful at being right or making people change their behavior, see if you can first remind yourself what it feels like after the fire of anger has raged through the mental forest, and see if you can instead bottle that fuel of anger and be successful at loving instead
Onward, together. See you tomorrow.
https://youtu.be/s_LY-dE-jN0