June 9, 2006

Anger and Health

The effects of anger on health have more to do with duration than frequency and intensity. The normal experience of overt anger lasts only a few minutes. But the subtle forms of anger, such as resentment, impatience, irritability, grouchiness, etc., can go on for hours and days at a time. Consistent, prolonged levels of anger give a person a five times greater chance of dying before age 50. Anger elevates blood pressure, increases threat of stroke, heart disease, cancer, depression, anxiety disorders, and, in general, depresses the immune system (angry people have lots of little aches and pains or get a lot of colds and bouts of flu or headaches or upset stomachs). To make matters worse, angry people tend to seek relief from the ill-moods caused by anger through other health-endangering habits, such as smoking and drinking, or through compulsive behavior such as workaholism and perfectionism.

Laboratory experiments have shown that even subtle forms of anger impair problem-solving abilities and general performance competence. In addition to increasing error rates, anger narrows and makes rigid mental focus, tending to obscure alternative perspectives. The angry person has one "right way" of doing things, which, if selected in anger, is seldom the best way. There is nothing you can do angry (resentful, irritable, grouchy, impatient, chilly) that you can’t do better not angry.

Because it acts on the entire central nervous system as an amphetamine, anger always produces a physiological "crash," often experienced as depression when the issues causing the anger remain unresolved. Think about it. The last time you got really angry, you got really depressed afterwards. The angrier you get, the more depressed you get. And that is merely the physiological response, even if you keep from doing something while angry that you're ashamed of, like hurting the feelings of someone you love.

Whatever the form of anger, in persistence you run the risk of becoming a reactaholic, with your thoughts, feelings, and behavior totally controlled by whoever or whatever you’re reacting to. The more reactive you are, the more powerless you feel; anger is ultimately a cry of powerlessness.

But there’s one thing that even the most exuberant or obstinate of children cannot do: They can’t make us angry. They cannot force us to give up internal regulation of our emotional experience. To understand this scientific fact that seems to fly in the face of common sense, consider the psychobiological function of anger.

Is anyone really stupid enough to turn off a lamp with a rock? When angry, everybody is that stupid. The problem has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with how hurt we are. Anger is always a reaction to hurt. It can be physical pain, which is why, when you bang your thumb with a hammer while trying to hang a picture, you don’t pray.

Far more often, though, anger is a reaction to psychological hurt or threat of hurt, in the form of a diminished sense of self. Vulnerability to psychological hurt depends entirely on how you feel about yourself. When your sense of self is weak or disorganized, anything can make you irritable or angry. When it’s solid and well-integrated, the insults and frustrations of life just roll off your back.

For instance, if you’ve had a bad day, if you’re feeling guilty, a little bit like a failure, or just disregarded, devalued, or irritable, you might come home to find your kid’s shoes in the middle of the floor and respond with: "That lazy, selfish, inconsiderate, little brat!" Yet you can come home after a great day of feeling fine about yourself, see the same shoes in the middle of the floor and think, "Oh, that’s just Jimmy or Sally," and not think twice about it.

The difference in your reaction to the child’s behavior lies entirely within you and depends completely on how you feel about yourself. In the first case the child’s behavior seems to diminish your sense of self: "If he cared about me, he wouldn’t do this; if my own kid doesn’t care about me, I must not be worth caring about." The anger is to punish the child for your diminished sense of self. In the second instance, the child’s behavior does not diminish your sense of personal importance, value, power, and lovability. So there is no need for anger. You don’t need a tank to solve the problem of the shoes in the middle of the floor. Rather, the problem to be solved is how to teach the child to be more considerate in his behavior; you won’t do that by humiliating him because you feel humiliated. His reaction to humiliation will be the same as yours: an inability see the other person’s perspective, an overwhelming urge to blame, and an impulse for revenge or punishment.

Modeling Anger Regulation for Children
Although their intellectual maturity is far less advanced than that of their parents, children experience anger for the same reasons as adults, mostly to defend the sense of self from pain and temporary diminishment. At the moment of anger, both children and adults feel bad about themselves. Making angry people feel worse about themselves will only make things worse. Rather, children must learn from their parents that the sense of self is internal and can be regulated only within themselves. They must restore their own sense of core value while respecting the rights of other people, which means regulating the impulse for revenge through validation of the hurt causing the urge for revenge, and through understanding the perspective of the person at whom the anger is directed. They will only learn to do this by watching their parents do it.

Self-Compassion and Compassion for Others
Mastery of the three steps of self-compassion and compassion for others makes us virtually immune to the ill-effects of anger. The first step of self-compassion is seeing beneath the symptom or defense (anger, anxiety, manipulation, obnoxious behavior) to the cause, which is some form of core hurt (feeling unimportant, disregarded, accused, devalued, guilty, untrustworthy, rejected, powerless, unlovable). Second, the core hurt must be validated (this is how I feel at this moment), and, third, changed (this behavior or event or disappointment or mistake does not mean that I’m unimportant, not valuable or lovable.) Compassion for others is recognizing that their symptoms, defenses, and obnoxious behavior come from a core hurt, validating it, and supporting them while they change it. Compassion does not excuse obnoxious behavior. Rather, it keeps us from attacking the already wounded person, which allows focus on changing the undesired behavior.

Anger Regulation
Here are a few of the common activators of anger, which we call core hurts: feeling disregarded, unimportant, accused, guilty, untrustworthy, devalued, rejected, powerless, unworthy of love. Once activated, core hurts put the sense of self at stake in solving the problem, which greatly distorts thinking, blows the problem out of proportion, and increases the emotional intensity of the response. Of course the child is responsible only for his/her behavior, not your sense of self.

To regulate anger, we must reduce the sensitivity of these activators. We must learn to view anger as a signal, not to assign blame to our children for tripping the activator, but to look within the self to reset the activated core hurt, i.e., to restore Core Value, a sense of personal adequacy and worthiness. With the sense of self no longer at stake, the problem, no longer a source of self-diminishment, can be solved for what it is: a call for more attention/effort, an inconvenience, disappointment, or mistake.

Emotional regulation skills can be learned fairly quickly in three concentrated learning sessions, with consistent practice between sessions. But whether learned through training or through personal experience that internally regulates anger activators, successful parenting, personal happiness, optimal work efficiency, physical and psychological health, and the capacity to sustain viable attachment relationships demands self-regulation of the impulse to anger and resentment.

Among professionals, attorneys may be the most susceptible to anger and resentment problems that lead to diminished performance on the job, greatly increased risks to health and psychological well-being, and ultimately, to unhappiness at home.

Virtually all my non-court-ordered clients with anger problems are attorneys whose continual irritability has disrupted their lives, including a few judges who fear that their anger at attorneys will unfairly influence their rulings.

The high rates of divorce, domestic violence, and alcoholism among attorneys are indications of this susceptibility that may have more to do with habits of motivation and concentration than with the stress of the job.

The practice of law requires diligent attention to a great many details that are not inherently interesting. To sustain intense focus and adequate energy levels in the absence of interest/excitement, the brain often taps into its most accessible reserve of energy, one of the more than a dozen forms of anger/resentment.

In reviewing a dull document, for instance, the brain might look for something to get peeved at, which provides the energy and focus necessary to complete the task. The brain must find provocation, however obscure, for a dominant-submissive response that evokes fear of defeat, failure, or humiliation (or fantasies of victory and dominance) to get its jolt of focusing energy.

This innocent use of anger as motivation does nothing less than put the sense of self at stake even in the most mundane tasks. Repeated over time, the entire personality shifts to a defensive adjustment. Even trivial disappointments seem like failure and rejection when consumed in a joyless drive and surrounded by a moat of irritability.

Because it acts on the entire central nervous system as an amphetamine, anger arousal always ends in a physiological "crash," often experienced as depression when the issues stimulating the anger remain unresolved. Think about it. The last time you got angry, you got depressed afterwards. The angrier you got, the more depressed you got. And that is merely the physiological response, even if you kept from doing something while angry that you were ashamed of, like hurting the feelings of someone you love.

To escape the pain of depression, the brain will look for excuses to get angry. Thus, anger springs a terrible addictive trap by providing immediate relief from the depressed mood that it eventually worsens.

Anyone can become an anger junkie, using some form of anger for:

• Energy/motivation. You can’t get going or keep going without some anger or irritation.
• Confidence, a stronger sense of self, you only feel certain when you’re criticizing someone or angry with someone.
• Anxiety reduction. Anger makes you feel more at ease, especially in new or uncertain situations.
• Relief of depression. You tend to need a morning jolt of anger.

The addicted brain compulsively justifies the anger it craves, ignoring all contrary evidence in the process. Thus, judgment and reasoning are greatly impaired during anger arousal. Failure to comprehend most relevant possibilities that justify anger. That’s why people justifying their anger can sound like alcoholics claiming that they drink for the unique nutritional value of booze.

Regardless of personal levels of intelligence, during anger arousal, we perform generally as if we have a learning disability. Laboratory experiments have shown that even subtle forms of anger impair problem solving and general performances.

In addition to increasing error rates, anger narrows and rigidifies mental focus, obscuring alternative perspectives. The angry person has one "right way" of doing things, which, if selected in anger, is seldom the best way.

With the lone exception of hurting someone, there is nothing you can do angry--or resentful, irritable, grouchy, impatient, or chilly--that you can’t do better not angry.

To make matters worse, angry and resentful people tend to seek relief from their ill moods through other health-endangering habits, such as smoking and drinking, or through compulsive behavior such as workaholism and perfectionism.

According to Professor Arthur Miller of Harvard University Law School, good attorneys make opposing arguments seem like rank obscenities. This might be sound strategy in the courtroom—it may also explain why my clients who are judges see lawyers as impediments to their work—but it creates disaster in attachment relationships.

The formula for success in love relationships is quite the opposite: Validating the perspective of loved ones must precede disagreement. In fact, disagreement is not nearly so important as validation of emotions. People get the angriest, which means the most hurt, not about getting their own way, but when they feel misunderstood or disregarded by loved ones.

If adversarial skills work at all in the home they must be applied first to the building the case of loved ones, then fairly and compassionately comparing it to your own.

Winning is a goal for the courtroom, but in families, it causes only resentment, covert hostility, and intimacy barriers. Virtually every sexual problem I have ever seen in couples has its roots in resentment. When one person in a family wins, everybody loses.

A common myth about anger problems is that they only involve hurting someone or destroying property. But this is only one of dozens of kinds of anger problems. You have an anger problem if some subtle form of anger/resentment—that you might not even be aware of—makes you do something that is not in your best interest or keeps you from doing what is in your best interest.

This could be simply putting a chilly wall between you and your loved ones, or a continual impatience that keeps you from noticing the compassion of others.

Practitioners most vulnerable to anger/resentment problems are the most actively adversarial, in general, trial lawyers.

Next are those faced with job insecurity on top of highly stressful work conditions: associates in general and partners in struggling firms. Lawyers with poor social supports and family problems and those who must fight invisible barriers of sexism and racism are also highly vulnerable.

To assess your risk of developing an anger/resentment problem, ask yourself: "Do my emotional responses seem like the fault of someone else? Does it seem that other people are trying to ‘push my buttons?’ Is the first thing that occurs to me when a problem arises ‘Who’s to blame?’ or ‘How do I get even?'"

COMPASSION POWER SERIES - "BOOT CAMPS" for parents
Stop walking on eggshells! Turn resentment, anger, or emotional abuse into a compassionate, loving relationship
Anger and Health: The affects on anger and the family
Family Violence: Why we hurt the ones we love
Compassionate Parenting: Raising the emotional intelligence of parents and children
Emotional Abuse: You are not the cause of his anger or abuse
 

REFERRALS: CAICA is not a referral agency. CAICA does not refer to or promote facilities or transport companies for children or teens. CAICA warns parents that the parent pay / parent choice programs ie. Residential Treatment Centers, Therapeutic Boarding Schools, Behavior Modification Programs, Christian Programs, Positive Peer Culture Programs, etc., are not regulated by the Federal Government and that it is a "Buyer Beware" industry. CAICA provides the following for parents: Message to Parents, Help for Distraught and Desperate Parents, and Questions to Ask and Warning Signs.

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