Once the anger and fight goes out of you, you’ll possess the objectivity and distance needed to deal successfully with vexing situations.
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“Everything in life is practice for everything else” ~Dan Bostian, circa 2009, or so
What makes your eyes red, the hair stand up on end, the blood in your veins literally boil like witches surrounding a cauldron on All Hallows Eve? What makes you want to say words that can’t be taken back?
I’m talking about Anger with a capital A. The definition of anger is when someone has broken the social contract, and that sends you out of your workaday self into a Hulk Inspired Rage. You may stop here and yell HULK SMASH just for fun. (Fun fact: Lou Ferigno, the original hulk is a cousin of mine, about 30x removed).
When I was a younger person, I would do what everyone did—complain about it, pretend it didn’t matter. Eat a Whitman’s sampler for Thursday dinner….what? No one else does that? You know you do—you just don’t admit it.
Then I noticed it was a regular part of my emotional calendar—and it’s an incredible motivator.
I moved from the East Coast, where it is part of the social contract to be angry at all times to the West Coast, where anger is treated as though it is emotional leprosy. I learned quickly that it would need to be channeled in a more reasonable fashion.
After the meeting, I followed him out to the parking lot and let him have it.
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When I was working for the underwater robot people in Boston it was my job to engage the various departments to do triage on the issues. The head of the operations was supposed to attend these meetings, and blew them off repeatedly. He finally did attend one and took a call in the middle of it, not bothering to leave the room as he did, rendering me insane with disrespected anger. After the meeting, I followed him out to the parking lot and let him have it.
He never did it again.
When I moved to the West Coast there were fewer opportunities for resolving things at the top of my lungs. People here spoke softly, in “hand wavy” ways and rarely said exactly what they meant. This drove me nuts. Pushing people rarely resulted in the decisions I wanted. So I turned to finesse instead of the sledgehammer effect, also being soft spoken and allowing for ambiguity.
They say you can take the girl out of New Jersey…but what to do with all that leftover energy?
When talking about the social contract, I mean that you and whomever it is that you are pissed off at have made an agreement to get along, sometimes tacit, sometimes spelled out, and that agreement has been broken.
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When talking about the social contract, I mean that you and whomever it is that you are pissed off at have made an agreement to get along, sometimes tacit, sometimes spelled out, and that agreement has been broken. This can affect co-workers, family members, friends, or that goombah riding his bike in the slow lane towing a kid on a busy street. For instance, we might have agreed you would leave me some pizza to have for dinner when I got home from work. We (collectively) might have agreed there is no cutting in line, or speaking unkindly to the person serving you at the store.
When the terms and conditions have been broken without discussion—you get a surge of fight or flight energy, ready to take on the perceived threat. Some of this is leftover from the need to get the heck away from the charging rhino or the leaping bobcat that was about have you as an hors d’oeuvre in a much earlier era. Now it’s more likely you’ll flare at TSA feeling you up, or your co- worker taking credit for your work.
Since there are fewer saber tooth tigers in your workplace, control is something you need to learn to use.
Some people smash Anger down, grit their teeth and get on with it. Some road rage it up using their 2,000 lb vehicle as a substitute for a charging rhino. Some sublimate and take on that look of having eaten a whole lemon. It can cause drama unrelated to the original drama, make you snap at your kids, drink cheap whisky , or if you don’t manage Anger properly, it can ultimately cause depression.
We all deal with the minor annoyances of life every day, but their cumulative effect is stressful and can be hard on the system.
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But it doesn’t go away, and can fester until it explodes. We all deal with the minor annoyances of life every day, but their cumulative effect is stressful and can be hard on the system. And we experience a range of anger- from annoyance to rage.
Someone cutting you off in traffic, the person in front of you getting the last everything bagel at the coffee shop, your boss passing you over for the project you wanted, your kid not cleaning his room when asked for the eighth millionth time—the list of stressors in modern life is endless.
Your output can be harnessed to make yourself more effective in your life.
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Think about your body like the meat machine that it is—everything input into it can be used in one way or another. Your output can be harnessed to make yourself more effective in your life.
This is my 5 step plan for turning anger into fuel:
- Notice when you are angry. This is generally pretty easy. The physiological signs can be anything from your stomach clenching, an increased heart rate, sweaty palms , shaking or trembling. Emotionally, you may want to run away from the situation; you may feel anxious, resentful, or desirous of delivering a knuckle sandwich.
- Accept Anger as the gift it is. Modern life is filled with noise, and the one thing that invariably interrupts my focus is white hot rage when someone has made my life more complicated/busy/difficult.
- Identify an activity that burns Anger off. Try to do this before you go nuclear, and make it an easy-to-access pastime. A walk around the block, cleaning a messy house, pulling weeds, moving that big box of stuff that has been sitting in the crawlspace. Some of my best artwork comes from being cut off by that Humvee that has never been off-road.
- Don’t think too much about the Anger. For me, it takes about an hour to get past the burning . Your experience may vary.
- Come back to the situation that annoyed the crap out of you after you have used up all the extra energy. When you have mastered yourself, you’re in a better position to evaluate what made you angry, whether or not it was valid, and what your response should be .
You will find that once all the fight’s gone out of you, you aren’t angry anymore. Then you also will have achieved the emotional distance needed to deal more successfully with the situation. Or not. Either way, not allowing it to dictate your actions gives you great power.
Photo credit: Getty Images
This doesn’t address the real issue relating to men with rage. May want to do some research on Intermittent explosive disorder. It’s a real thing that men have and the disorder is completely ignored.