We all have a ‘natural’ proclivity to express anger — a reaction that symbolises aggression. The response, juxtaposed by bellicosity, denotes a reflex intent to internal and external stimuli. It is also an ‘impulse sortie’ that connotes powerful, combative feelings and behaviours. You’d connect it to the ‘fight-or-flight’ response — a biological reaction that allows us to ‘fight’ and ‘defend’ ourselves when we are ‘under the weather,’ or facing danger.
Anger is a rudimentary behavioural phenomenon — it is imperative for our survival. This does not signify that we can tangibly ‘beat to pulp’ every object, or ‘bash up’ every individual that offends us. Else, there would be no rule, or social norm. This is also one principal reason why a diversity of conscious and unconscious processes helps us to cope with our irate feelings. They include expressing, suppressing, and calming actions. Declaring your angry feelings is assertion, not aggression. It relates to being ‘respectful’ of yourself and also others. It is the best, also the most powerful, mode to express anger. The only caveat is one should learn how to make it apparent vis-à-vis what one’s needs are, or how to get them organised, without hurting others. The goal of anger control is aimed to reduce your emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that it provokes.
You can’t get rid of, or avoid things, or people, that make you fly off the handle, nor can you change them, but you can always learn to control your anger response before it gets out of bounds. Anger can be curtailed, suppressed, converted, or redirected. When anger is suppressed, it can lead to emotional upheavals with psychosomatic overtones. More so, with childhood memories that emote the Freudian underpinning. The consequence is often a dejected outlook, or bitterness, with self-destructive propensities — the prompt being emotional anguish, intimidation, or humiliation experienced, perhaps, in school, or at home, thanks to a strict teacher, demanding parent, or peer.
When you ‘hold in’ your anger, or stop thinking about it, and focus on something positive, your resolve may curb your anger. You convert it into constructive behaviour. The big glitch of this proviso and also response, however, is — when you stifle your outward expression, your anger may recoil on you. Research suggests that such protracted emotional forays could be one likely trigger for high blood pressure (hypertension), or depression. A study published in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology quantifies the link between our frenzied, bumpy emotions and heart disease. It underscores the credo that anger and hostility are significantly associated with “more heart problems” in essentially healthy people as well as “a worse outcome for patients already diagnosed with heart disease.”
When anger is not expressed, it can create other problems, leading to ‘pathological’ expressions — viz., passive aggressive behaviour, or being eternally contemptuous and intimidating. The former relates to getting back at people indirectly, without telling them why, rather than managing things directly. When you see someone who is continually putting others down, finding fault with everything, and making disparaging comments, it connotes that they have not learned how to usefully express their anger. Such individuals may most likely have but too few successful relationships.
Anger control does not mean that you can’t calm down from the inside out. The whole idea relates to controlling your outward behaviour, also internal responses, lowering your heart rate, while ‘letting go’ your feelings, or allowing them to subside. When you are unable to control anger, you will obviously be hurting something, be it the paperweight, coffee cup, or your spouse.
All of us get angry in different ways — one may be like a ‘volcano’ waiting to erupt too quickly than someone you know, while others may not show their anger in a deafening, overbearing manner, but may be persistently petulant and snappy. It’s also a fact that ‘easily angered’ individuals don’t always curse and fling things; they may actually be too withdrawn socially, or brood endlessly. They may, in the process, fall sick and develop systemic illnesses like hypertension and diabetes.
One can ‘measure’ and ‘evaluate’ the intensity of angry feelings, or how inclined you are to being angry at the drop of a thought, and how well you manage it. When you know you’ve a problem with anger, you’d be able to help yourself to ‘beat the urge’ better. However, when your anger goes out of control and becomes just too hot to handle, you may need professional help — to finding better modes to dealing with the effervescent emotion.
— First published in India First
