Anger is an unavoidable aspect of life. Everyone's had a moment in their life where they've seen red- An inconsiderate driver cut you off, then had the gall to flip you off. Maybe a relationship went horribly sour, or maybe some stranger provoked you at a bar out of the blue. Whatever the case, that anger has tempted you to do things that would have panned out poorly for you.

So why do we get angry? How do we control anger? These, and more, are questions we'll explore in this article. By the time we're through, you'll understand why anger is a necessity, and how you can use it to your advantage.

What is Anger?

Humans experience a vast spectrum of emotions, and one that's typically associated with negativity is anger. Behaviors accompanied by anger and rage serve many different purposes, and the nuances of aggressive behaviors are often defined by symbolic and cultural framework and social contexts.

Anger isn't a one-dimensional feeling. There are multiple facets to it- Multiple emotions which contribute to the feeling of anger. Frustration and irritability, anxiety and stress, and feelings of overwhelm can heavily influence and contribute to anger. These all sound negative, but anger is also crucial in motivating you to take action and approach rather than always avoiding confrontation. Anger is necessary to help pursue goals, protect your values, and aid you in survival and self-preservation. Let's take a deeper look into how this happens:

• Signaling a problem: When you're faced with an obstacle, or a need of yours isn't being met, or your boundaries are being crossed, anger acts as an internal alarm. It lets you know that this situation needs your attention.
• Motivating action: Now that you know that this situation demands your attention, you need the energy to act on it. Anger provides this energy and motivation.
• Protecting boundaries: By getting angry, you deter people from breaching your boundaries. People who are passive are much more likely to have their boundaries ignored and end up being treated like doormats.

Earlier, we mentioned that anger helped with survival. Humanity has had several millennia to develop the "Fight-or-Flight" response. This response is triggered by dangerous situations where your life may be threatened. If your body decides to fight, anger can provide you with the energy and focus to defend yourself, escape from harm, and even motivate you to protect your resources and energy. It signals to others that you will not tolerate the way you're being treated, acting as a form of communication in setting up boundaries. When expressing anger in a healthy manner, it can actually help resolve conflicts and improve relationships.

The Degrees of Anger

Anger is a spectrum, and it's important to understand how the intensity of anger escalates. Understanding the different degrees of anger is how you can recognize your anger triggers, and take steps to manage your anger before you face unnecessary consequences.

Irritability

Irritation is tan early emotional state that may escalate into anger. It's a subtle feeling which slowly builds up, and it's usually triggered by minor inconveniences and annoyances. This is usually easy to manage, and people tend to dismiss or distract themselves from it.

Frustration

Continued irritation leads to frustration or exasperation. When you want to do something and you're unable to do it, or you're faced with someone making the same mistake repeatedly, or you feel helpless in some kind of scenario, you'll feel frustrated. This feeling can also be accompanied by feelings of impatience, resentment, and helplessness.

Anger

Anger is a step up from frustration. Irritability and frustration tends to just seethe within you, but anger is much more likely to be expressed outwardly(although internalized anger, like passive aggression, for example, is also a frequent thing). When something angers you, you'll feel the urge to retaliate. It's often accompanied by physiological changes like increased heart rate, faster respiratory rate, clenched fists, muscle tension, and a flushed face. Though you may be more prone to impulsivity at this stage and have intrusive thoughts, you're still most in control of yourself.

Rage

Rage is an overwhelming, intense form of anger. This intensity of anger is often associated with the phrase "Seeing red", and it's usually accompanied by a loss of control, impaired judgement, and even verbal and physical aggression. Actions you take in this state of mind can have dangerous consequences for yourself as well as others. Rage is usually incited after an experience that leaves you feeling deeply violated, betrayed, or threatened. It may also be a symptom of Intermittent Explosive Disorder.

Common Triggers of Anger

Many things can trigger anger, but they can be broadly classified into two sections:

External Stressors

External stressors are the most obvious triggers for anger. It's usually events, situations, or other people:

• Annoyances: Irritations and inconveniences which don't really impact you, but slightly ruin your mood. This includes things like loud noises, being interrupted, and so on.
• Frustrating situations: When you're unable to carry out a task the way you want to, or you feel helpless, you feel frustrated. Dealing with someone else's ineptitude, slow internet, or the slow work process of government entities can make you feel this way.
• Threats: Feeling threatened, whether it's real or perceived, can trigger the fight-or-flight response. This can lead to anger and aggression.
• Conflict: Issues with family members, friends, coworkers, and even strangers can lead to anger, especially if one of the parties feels like they've been treated unfairly and with disrespect.
• Breach of trust: Having a partner betray your trust, or a friend or coworker go against their word can cause you to be angry, and understandably so.
• Mistreatment: Being discriminated against (racism, sexism), unfair treatment (playing favorites in the workplace or with family), and so on can leave you feeling mistreated, which will then make you feel angry.

Internal Stressors

When people think of reasons to anger, they often think of external stressors. The truth is that internal stressors are just as likely to trigger anger, just in more subtle ways. It can result in you being angry at self-critical or feeling ashamed as a form of internalized anger, or even lashing out at others for seemingly unrelated things. Here are some of the most common internal stressors:

• Personal expectations: We often have expectations of ourselves that can't be met. This can lead to disappointment, frustration, and anger.
• Negative past experiences: Things like trauma, betrayals, and other negative experiences from the past can make you more prone to anger in similar scenarios.
• Unmet needs: When you're hungry, you aren't yourself. You're quick to anger when you're hungry or sleep deprived, because you're much more irritable.
• Insecurities: Feeling inadequate or vulnerable can make you defensive or angry.
• Negative thinking patterns: Patterns of thought where you constantly criticize yourself, blame others, or spiral can amplify feelings of anger.

The Science Behind Anger

Anger triggers a physiological response in your body, meaning it's much more than just a feeling. Let's take a deeper look into how anger induces changes in your body:

Amygdala Response

The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure inside the brain, and is a part of a larger network in the brain known at the limbic system. The amygdala, along with the limbic system as a whole, are vital to human survival as they automatically detect danger. The amygdala processes fear-related stimuli, which means it can deal with your "Fight-or-Flight" response.

The amygdala-hypothalamus-periaqueductal gray is thought to mediate reactive aggression in humans. It does so in the following way:

• Rapid Assessment: The amygdala has been proven to show fast responses- within 74ms of stimulus onset. This happens specifically towards stimuli that cause fear. Acting as an early warning system, the amygdala quickly assesses the situation and determines whether or not you're in danger. Typically, this is an unconscious act.
• Emotional Response: The amygdala is responsible for fear primarily, but it also controls aggression and links emotions to memories. With its ability to control anger, the amygdala can give you the surge of energy needed to fight or flee from a dangerous scenario. Its ability to link emotions with memories also helps you escape dangerous scenarios by providing you with a sort of "gut feeling", where you'll feel that negative emotion before you consciously process what's happening.
• Overriding Logic: Depending on the intensity of the situation, your amygdala might override your logic centers. For mild and moderate threats, your frontal lobes retain control. However, in life-threatening situations, your amygdala triggers the fight-or-flight response. This overrides any logic you'd normally have, and puts your body in survival mode, where it pumps you full of stress hormones to help you fight or flee.

Hormonal Changes

When the fight-or-flight response is triggered, the amygdala activates the hypothalamus, which initiates the HPA axis, ultimately leading to hormone secretion. The main ones are as follows:

• Adrenaline: This hormone helps your body immediately react to the dangers its facing. Your airways dilate, allowing more oxygen to pass to the muscles. Your blood vflow is redirected by vasodilation in skeletal muscles and vasoconstriction in less vital areas like digestion or skin. Each of these physiological changes serve to help you fight or run away to survive.
• Cortisol: This hormone helps you cope with stress. It increases your blood sugar levels increase to increase energy levels in stressful scenarios. Cortisol regulates your stress response after the release of adrenaline, allowing you to stay on high alert. It also regulates your metabolism in addition to your blood sugar levels. Elevated cortisol also raises your blood pressure, and has a role in controlling your circadian rhythm.

The Importance of Understanding Anger

Understanding anger is your first step to stopping it from controlling you. In the right hands, anger can become a useful tool that can be used to set boundaries, develop relationships, and achieve goals, when managed well. This can only be done if you hone your skills of self-awareness and empathy. Let's explore how these two things are essential in understanding anger.

Self-Awareness and Its Link To Emotional Control

Self-awareness is the ability to recognize your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in context, which aids emotional regulation. Being self-aware helps you become a better decision-maker, and it gives you more self-confidence. By understanding your triggers, patterns, and the things that you're vulnerable to, you'll be able to control your anger and other emotions more effectively. With respect to anger, here's how self-awareness can help:

• Identifying your triggers early: Each person has specific scenarios or things that provoke their ire. Through self-awareness, you can learn to recognize what these triggers are, and avoid them before becoming overwhelmed by them.
• Recognizing the warning signs of anger: With the onset of anger, you'll experience a variety of physical and emotional changes. Becoming aware of these sensations can help you understand that you may be on the verge of an outburst, allowing you to take preventive measures.
• Learning your patterns: People express anger differently. Try to understand how you express it, and reflect on the impact it has on yourself and the people around you.
• Challenging your negative thoughts: Constantly having negative thoughts about yourself or the situation you're in can negatively affect your mental fortitude, and cause you to become angry quicker. It's important to recognize and challenge these negative thoughts, and then try to reframe them in a more positive manner.
• Taking responsibility: The final step of self-awareness is to understand your shortcomings, and take responsibility of the consequences of your actions. You must learn from this and attempt to do things differently in the future.

The Role of Empathy in Diffusing Anger

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Through empathy, you can see things from someone else's perspective, and understand their emotions. Dealing with someone who is angry can be difficult, and learning to be empathetic can go a long way in defusing the situation:

• See their side of the story: Most people don't get angry for no reason. It's important for you to understand what set them off so that you can avoid it from happening again.
• Make them feel validated: The easiest way to make someone upset is by tossing aside their feelings. When someone's sad or angry, they don't want to be told that they're being irrational. They want validation. If you want to make progress in defusing anger, this step is crucial.
• Active listening: When someone's angry or upset, they want to be heard. In these conversations, you shouldn't just be waiting for your turn to speak. You need to pay attention to what they're saying, ask questions, and show that you care about their side of the story.
• Do not be defensive: If you try to be argumentative or defensive, you'll simply prod the person you're talking to into being upset again. It's important to regulate your emotional response to stay calm and objective.
• Find a solution: Compromise is important, so this is where you try to find a solution that works for both of you as long as both sides feel like they've been heard and they're ready to cooperate.

How is Anger Expressed?

When you experience angry feelings, you'll want to express it in one way or another. This section can also be useful to help you identify when someone else is starting to feel anger. There are three main categories to explore:

Outwards Expression

It's anger expressed outwardly, which is obvious to spot. This tends to be explosive in nature:

• Verbal aggression such as shouting and cursing in general, as well as being verbally abusive towards others
• Physical aggression such as throwing and breaking things, as well as being physically abusive towards others

Inwards Expression

Anger can often be internalized. This tends to happen in people who are non-confrontational, but that anger still needs to go somewhere. Here's what happens:

• Self deprecating thoughts
• Withdrawing from the world
• Self-harm
• Depressive symptoms such as denying yourself food and things that made you happy

Passive Aggression

This is a form of subtle and indirect expression of anger:

• Being sarcastic, but not expressing anger directly
• Ignoring others out of spite
• Refusing to do tasks
• Sulking

How Does Anger Negatively Affect You?

While anger is a necessary emotion for conveying your own needs, defending yourself, and setting boundaries, it also has a negative side. Anger can significantly impact your health in both the short and long term, which is why learning about it is so important. First, let's understand what the difference between acute and chronic anger is, and then learn the negative impact each one can have on your body.

Acute Anger

Sudden and intense outbursts of anger are known as acute anger. It can often be characterized by a loss of control, and makes you prone to physical or verbal aggression. Acute anger can trigger an "amygdala hijack"- Intense, acute anger causes the amygdala to temporarily override the prefrontal cortex, which is the rational thinking part of the brain. This leads to impulsive and potentially harmful actions. It's often accompanied by symptoms like a racing heart, sweaty palms, and difficulty thinking clearly.

Acute anger has also been shown to cause stress cardiomyopathy, also known as takotsubo syndrome or broken heart syndrome. This is a rapid weakening of the heart muscle, caused by a sudden acute stress.

Finally, acute anger can also manifest in Intermittent Explosive Disorder. This is a diagnosable psychiatric disorder which involves repeated, sudden bouts of impulsive, aggressive, violent behavior or angry verbal outbursts. They typically last less than 30 minutes, and the reactions are often too severe for the situation.Such behavior is often misinterpreted as a personality flaw, which, however, isn't true. It's a long-term condition that can go on for years, and this disorder is treated with talk therapy and medication to control aggressive impulses.

Chronic Anger

Chronic anger is when a pattern of anger persists over time. Anger is meant to be a temporary emotion, and when it stays with you over a long period, you'll experience detrimental changes in physical health, as well as emotional changes:

• Hypertension: Chronic anger can cause elevated blood pressure in the long term, and this will contribute to the deterioration of cardiovascular health. The high blood pressure is caused by the release of adrenaline and cortisol, which causes your blood vessels to constrict.
• Atherosclerosis: Anger is associated with heightened atherosclerosis. Short bursts of anger may temporarily damage the ability of blood vessels to properly dilate, which is pivotal in preventing arteries from hardening.
• Stroke: Anger has been linked to a 30% higher risk of having a stroke within experiencing these emotions.
• Coronary heart disease: Chronic anger increases production of catecholamines, which increases blood pressure and plays a roles in the development of artery-clogging plaque. After a few years, this can lead to coronary artery disease.
• Disruption of key immune functions: Increased inflammation, suppression of immune cells, disruption of cytokine production, and reduced antibody production
• Irritable Bowel Syndrome: Studies suggest that a predisposition to anger may contribute to the development and evolution of IBS, possibly through modulation of colonic motor activity.
• Peptic ulcers: Although H. pylori infection and NSAID use are the primary causes of ulcers, stress and anger can aggravate the condition by increasing acid secretion and slowing healing.
• Sleep disturbances: Chronic anger reduces your parasympathetic nervous system's ability to relax your body, leading to sleep disturbances such as insomnia.
• Hormonal imbalances: Chronic anger causes an elevated level of cortisol. Over time, this can also affect production and regulation of sex hormones and thyroid hormones. This can lead to weight gain, decreased libido, mood swings, and fatigue.
• Anxiety: Chronic anger is linked to anxiety. Cortisol levels are heightened due to chronic anger, which has been directly linked to increasing anxiety, exacerbated mental health disorders, and other long-term health problems.
• Depression: Chronic anger can cause problems such as damaging relationships, an intolerance for mild irritation, outbursts where you throw things, and so on. Losing control in this manner can lead you to feeling extreme guilt, especially when faced with the consequences of your anger. When an anger problem is unmanaged, it can increase stress and anxiety, which can contribute to or exacerbate symptoms of depression.

As you can see, acute anger is typically normal and doesn't carry many downsides, unless it is of severe intensity. Chronic angry feelings, on the other hand, can cause significant physical and mental health problems. Anyone suffering from chronic or excessive anger should consult a mental health professional in order to enhance their quality of life.

Are There Any Coping Strategies For an Angry Person?

Dealing with anger can be intimidating, but it's not the end of the world. Take a look at some tips that can help secure your emotional well being against anger and its negative effects:

• Breathing exercises: Taking a second to breathe deeply and relax sounds like the equivalent of telling someone to restart their PC to fix a problem they have- It sounds too simple to be true, but more often than not, it works. Activities like the Physiological Sigh, Progressive Muscle Relaxation, and Diaphragmatic Deep Breathing can help stave off explosive anger.
• Identify and avoid triggers: Anger arises from triggers. Things like traffic jams, rude coworkers, slow internet, and so on can make you feel angry. In order to take care of your emotional well being, the easiest thing to do is to identify these triggers, and then avoid them.
• Exercise: Anger needs an outlet, and getting some exercise in is the best way to dispose of all that extra energy. You'll get to decompress, clear your mind, and have a healthier body for your trouble. It's a healthy form of anger expression.
• Distractions: There are some situations that make you angry, but you have no control over. Obsessing over it won't help you, so the next best thing to do is distract yourself with a different activity. Play a game, go on a walk, cook a meal. Do anything that'll take your mind off of it.
• Consult a mental health professional: Severe and uncontrolled anger can't always be resolved at home. Oftentimes, you'll need to talk to a mental health practitioner who can help you address underlying feelings that may be the root causes of your anger, or prescribe medication to help you.

Conclusion

Not all anger is bad, but uncontrolled anger can impact your life negatively in the short and long term. Through this article, we've learned what anger is, why we get angry, how it's expressed, and how to challenge anger. Anger isn't easy to conquer, but learning about it is the first step in your journey. We at Liven hope that this article was as informative as you needed it to be, and that you won't have to deal with the disappointment of anger outbursts again.

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