All this disputes the idea that you should bottle up anger, and suggests you should instead let it out in order to reduce stress and get things done.
But, as ever, anger is not so simple. It comes from the brain, after all. We’ve developed many ways to suppress the anger response. The classic “count to ten” or “take deep breaths before responding” strategies make sense when you consider the anger response is very quick and intense.
The orbitofrontal cortex, highly active during experiences of anger, is involved with the control of emotions and behavior. More specifically, it modulates and filters emotional influence over behavior, damping down or blocking our more intense and/or primitive impulses. When an intense emotion is most likely to cause us to behave dangerously, the orbitofrontal cortex steps in as a sort of stopgap, acting like the overflow outlet on a bathtub with a leaky faucet; it doesn’t address the underlying problem, but stops it from getting too bad.
The immediate visceral sensation of anger isn’t always the extent of it. Something that angers you can leave you seething for hours or days, even weeks. The initial threat-detection system leading to anger involves the hippocampus and amygdala, areas we know are involved in forming vivid and emotionally charged memories, so the anger-causing occurrence would persist in the memory, leading us to dwell on it, or “ruminate” to give it the official term. Subjects ruminating on something that made them angry show increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, another area involved in making decisions, plans and other complex mental actions.
As a result, we often see anger persisting, even building up. This is especially the case for minor irritations we have no response for. Anger may make your brain want to address the aggravating problem, but what if it’s a vending machine that didn’t give you any change? Or someone recklessly cut you off on the highway? Or your boss saying you need to work late at 4:56 p.m.? All of these cause anger but there are no options for dealing with them, unless you want to commit vandalism/crash your car/get fired. And these things can all happen on the same day. So now your brain is in a state of having multiple angering things to dwell on and no obvious options to deal with them. The left-hand element of your behavioral response system is urging you to do something, but what is there to do?
Then a waiter accidentally brings you a black coffee instead of a latte and then that’s your limit. The hapless service person gets both barrels of an enraged tirade. This is “displacement.” The brain has all this anger built up but no outlet, and transfers it onto the first viable target it encounters, just to release the cognitive pressure. This doesn’t make it any more pleasant for the person who unintentionally opened the furious floodgates.
If you are angry and don’t want to show it, the brain’s versatility means there are ways to be aggressive without using crude violence. You can be “passive aggressive,” where you make another person’s life miserable via behavior they can’t really object to. Talking to them less or speaking to them neutrally when you’re normally quite friendly, inviting all your mutual friends to social events but not them; neither of these behaviors is definitely hostile, but as a result they lead to uncertainty. The other person is upset or uncomfortable but they can’t say for sure if you’re angry at them, and the human brain doesn’t like ambiguity or uncertainty; it finds them distressing. Thus the other person is punished without violence or violation of social norms.
This passive-aggressive method can work because humans are very good at recognizing when another person is angry. Body language, expression, tone of voice, chasing you with a rusty machete while screaming; your typical brain can pick up on all these subtle cues and deduce anger. This can be helpful, as people don’t like it when others are angry; it means they present a possible threat or may behave in harmful or upsetting ways. But it also reveals that something has genuinely aggrieved that person.
Another important thing to remember is the experience of anger and the response to anger are not the same thing. The sensation of anger is arguably the same for everyone, but how people react to it varies substantially, another indication of personality type. The emotional response when someone threatens you is anger. Should you respond by behaving in a manner that will harm whoever’s responsible, this is aggression. To round it off, the thinking about causing harm to someone is hostility, the cognitive component of aggression. You catch a neighbor painting a swear word onto your car, you experience anger. You think, “I’m going to absolutely batter them for this”—that’s hostility. You throw a brick through their front window in response, that’s aggression.?
So should we let ourselves get angry or not? I’m not suggesting you go and argue with colleagues or force them through the office shredder every time they irritate you, but be aware that anger isn’t always a bad thing. However, moderation is key. Angry people tend to have their needs addressed before people who make polite requests. This means you get people who realize that being angry benefits them, so they do it more often. The brain eventually associates constant anger with rewards, so encourages it further, and you end up with someone who gets angry at the slightest inconvenience just to get their own way, and then they inevitably become a celebrity chef. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you.
Believe in yourself, and you can do anything . . . within reason
(How different people find and use motivation)
“The harder the journey, the better the arrival.”
“Effort is just the foundation of a house that is you.”