Anger Can Take Over Your Thoughts

Anger is a feeling that captures your thoughts, words, and actions. It is a defensive weapon that, when misused, can act against you and could cause a lot of damage if you let it grow.

Anger. We don’t like it, but we’ve all learned many times that we can’t avoid it. It has evolved into a natural tool that we use when we experience injustice. For example, when a child complains and claims that his sibling has stolen a toy from him, this is a way to defend his interests and avoid undermining his honesty. With regard to anger, the problem arises if the child is unable to move forward from his rage.

In other words, if you get stuck in the idea that “they took my toy away from me,” your psychological and cognitive system gets stuck in a spiral of negative thoughts and feelings, and it prevents you from moving forward.

A vulnerability hidden behind anger

We don’t like to show anger in public places because we believe it shows us the negative side. We are afraid to express it, so we tend to show it only at home, to those people who know us, for we expect them not to judge us.

If hatred is not properly managed, it will not be seen as good in our society. However, as we have said many times, its expression may give you information about what is bothering you. It allows you to explore yourself and find balance.

The main reason we punish the expression of anger is to confuse it with rage  or excessive or uncontrolled expression of what is bothering us. In other words, we feel like exploding and shouting the corners of shouting when someone is bothering us.

But in reality, anger is not the same as rage. The latter is a reaction to poor anger management. You create an entire beach from one grain of sand when you hold on to your anger for too long. And then you get a rage.

When you don’t know or express the things that bother you, it turns into a powerful mixture of different emotions that control your mind, brain, and body.

Why? Because you turn a separate event into the only focus until it becomes a snowball of emotions that grows and grows as it grows.

Understanding and expression, the first steps towards calm

When you make yourself aware of your feelings, you get one step closer to managing them and making them useful instead of harmful. You can put a stop to anger by expressing yourself and freeing yourself from the emotional ballast that caused your negative mood and threatened your balance.

Going back to the example of a child whose toy was stolen, it is helpful to evaluate normal and adaptive ways to encourage equality through protest and petition and to restore the freedom that was violated.

But as we said, when anger comes to the surface because of a physical or psychological threat, it is important to turn those feelings into action. Otherwise, thoughts and actions that support negativity will dominate you without trying to solve the problem.

Anatomy of the emotional, angry brain

When you experience an injustice that is directed at you or something that involves interests about you, the limbic system (almond nucleus and related structures) gets a spark that makes the wheels spin.

In other words, it activates the nervous system to prepare the body and mind for action. Neocortex is responsible for calculating and preparing for appropriate reactions to situations.

The limbic system releases catecholamines, which help us react decisively and quickly. In moments when negative emotions are on the surface, you may feel like you are on fire. Your cheeks will warm up, your knuckles will turn white, and your mind will gallop a thousand miles per minute.

Meanwhile, the adrenal gland releases adrenaline, which prepares us for action in the longer term. This hypersensitivity can dominate the mind, which negative thoughts tend to feed.

Thus, the slightest touch can make you jump, causing anger to pack up, leading to a decrease in cognitive functioning because you are unable to think properly. This leads you to underestimate the thoughts that would slow the escalation of anger.

An emotional distance is essential to appease anger

The key to managing anger is to ease the turmoil. This can be done in two ways:

• By taking a distance physically and emotionally into a situation to prevent adrenaline from controlling you and increasing it with your irritation.
• By interrupting your inner dialogue, or in other words, deceiving yourself with something, and not giving power to thoughts that are trying to dominate your mind.

For this reason, we say that anger is a feeling that seduces your thoughts, it convinces you that what made you angry is the beginning and root of all evil.

Thinking hostile thoughts one after another eventually creates a chain of anger that grows and grows into rage. So when you question some of these chains with categorical thinking, you can calm your mind with images that caused so much stress.

Gradually, when you stop feeding the fire, it starts to disappear, and you can reflect on the situation without those chains that control you before. This is the first step towards emotional well-being.

Read about:

Goleman, D. (1995):  Emotional Intelligence (english.  Emotional Intelligence).