Anger is a misunderstood emotion. Society often paints it in a negative light. There’s a sense of shame attached to feeling angry. But there are no wrong emotions. Every emotion provides us valuable information and guidance.
Anger is our body’s adaptive mechanism to make us aware and respond to an unmet need. The need could be concrete — like a promotion, a relationship, or more money. Or it could be abstract — like the need to be understood, or the need to be respected. An unmet need could also reflect a sense of injustice. Something is wrong, according to your values, and you need to make it right.
Anger acts as a stimulant. It causes a rise in dopamine levels, flushes the skin, and increases the heart rate. An angry brain is similar to a brain on amphetamines. It is evolution’s way of motivating and preparing us to protect ourselves.
Your anger is always justified — what you do with it is a different matter. But since it’s seen as a vice, most people don’t know how to handle anger constructively — leading to destructive behavior.
When you don’t allow yourself to feel angry, you hurt yourself. Suppressed and stored up anger often manifests as sadness. When you don’t do anything with the anger, the unmet need feels unattainable, creating a sense of helplessness. And when you push the anger below your awareness, you also fail to make the connection between sadness and anger, thereby perpetuating the despair.
Otherwise, when we hold onto a lot of anger and don’t know how to handle it properly, it is projected outwards onto other people through hostility. Instead of hurting ourselves with anger by feeling sad, we use it to hurt others. Jealousy, violence, abuse, resentment, tantrums, stealing — these are all different forms of hostility that originate from unprocessed anger.
The obvious first step towards handling it constructively is allowing yourself to feel your anger. Understand you’re not bad for feeling angry. As you become comfortable with feeling angry, you get better at locating the source of your anger. A simple way to do this is to journal on the prompt — “What do I need?”
Once you have a sense of what you need, the constructive way to handle anger is assertiveness. Look at the anger for what it is, listen to what it is telling you to get, and think of a way to get what you want while helping others get what they want. This is the ideal nature of assertiveness.
Hostility originates from a mindset that views the world as a place where others must lose for you to win. When you understand that the world is not zero-sum and that no one owes you anything, you realize that you can get whatever you need by creating value.
A lot of the time, assertiveness is simply about communicating your boundaries or just asking for what you need.
So look at anger as a good thing — it’s a pathway to healthier relationships and a more fulfilled life.
Here’s a book that does a good job of integrating the ideas of anxiety, anger, identity and self-awareness — Man’s Guide to Psychology by Mark Derian
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