Understanding Anger

Anger is probably the emotion the public have the greatest problem with. Anger can be felt at varying levels depending on how you perceive the trigger event and how strongly your brain wants to urge you to do something about it. Here we deep dive into understanding anger.

Anger is a Feeling

What Anger *Should* Tell Us

Fundamentally, our biological Anger response is to draw our attention to a thing that needs to be done and prepare our body to do it. That preparation includes an increase is both Adrenaline and Noradrenaline (epinephrine and norepinephrine for USA people).

We can feel anger for a range of reasons. We aren’t likely to feel anger because things are going well or expected to go well (although there are some complicated reasons why we might). We generally feel anger because of situation that we perceive going wrong now or soon, to us or someone we care about. Simply, we most often feel anger because we think that the situation is bad.

When another human is involved, it is generally because their action has crossed a boundary of behaviour or benefit and you find yourself worse off. We can also feel anger when we think we now owe someone and this social debt is predicted to be used against us.

We can feel anger when we feel powerless in a situation where we fear harm to ourselves, or harm to people we care about, or where we will be held responsible. We can also feel anger when we feel that we need to push mentally or physically harder to get the result we want.

Lastly we can also feel Anger out of context if our biology is out. Factors that can throw our biology out is lack of sleep, nutritional problems, fatigue, or neurotransmitter imbalance.

If our body has the wrong level of adrenaline, we can struggle with anxiety and anger responses. This can be a direct problem, or secondary to another condition. Most often too little prompts anxiety, anger and exhaustion, frequently characterised with the consumption of caffeine, sugar and nicotine to compensate. This can frequently be misdiagnosed as an anxiety disorder, anger management problem or chronic fatigue. Too much can cause odd thinking, often paranoia and agitated anxiety with mood snaps.

Biological problems need biological solutions. For the remainder of this, we are going to focus on Anger in response to an external situation.

Anger and Aggression are Not the Same Thing

We have a number of tools to manage a bad situation. We’ll cover most of them soon, but the elephant in the room that we need to talk about here is aggression. Anger is often mistaken for aggression. They are not the same thing – aggression is a tool of anger, but it isn’t the only tool.

Aggression is a tool that pushes for a simple solutions through violence. If I’m trying to move a heavy object that my normal strength isn’t adequate to, then getting angry and adding a bit of adrenaline can push up my strength and another aggressive effort might do the trick. This can also work if someone is being bad to me – verbal aggression can encourage them to stop, and in the case where I am being physically attacked, I can aggressively defend myself.

Generally aggression should be one of the last tools that we try to use to solve a problem.

Early use of aggression can be a substitute for feeling powerless. We need to be mindful that applying aggression to the wrong target can fool us into thinking that we are making progress on the problem, and while we are under the illusion that we are making progress, frequently it isn’t actually solving the problem. Aggression to people often just delays the problem for a bit. If you find yourself using it often, something needs to change.

We will cover the various tools to addressing problems a bit later.

Anger Response Series

Passive (Freeze)

Watch and be ready. Alert, but not alarmed.

At this point, the problem is likely to cost more to address than to put up with. This is useful if the situation is temporary or resolves itself, which is the cheapest solution to this problem with the lowest risk to yourself.

Tying this in with

• The Fear response system, this is the Freeze response to Fear. Don’t draw unnecessary attention from the problem.

• Grief / Change system, this is the Surprise and Denial phase.

If the problem that triggers your anger resolves itself, then this is a smart method of dealing with it.

Passive Aggressive

Still hoping that this situation is temporary or will resolve itself, you are passive to the thing that may need addressing, however, your body is preparing for an emergency action, preparing the Flight or Fight response.

The longer this matter persists, the more you need to act on that Flight / Fight response. This causes aggression venting.

• Aggression at other people or things
• Aggression to our self, which can include:
  • Negative self talk
  • Hurting oneself
  • Impulsive adrenaline based actions
• Deflected Anger
  • Finding things to be Angry at to justify the feeling of Anger without admitting what the source is
• False compliance
  • Faking compliance, saying you will do a thing, but you don’t
  • Malicious compliance, pedantically doing the stated thing, missing the spirit of it

This is called Passive Aggressive as you are being Passive to the cause of your Anger, but Aggressive to things that are not the cause. Even if you are Aggressive to the cause, it isn’t an action that will create a good outcome.

Tying this in with

• The Fear response system, this is still Freeze
• Grief / Change system, this is useless Bargaining

If the problem that triggers your anger resolves itself, then this is a smart method of dealing with it.

Assertive

The situation has persisted or escalated to the point where a solution needs to be implemented.

Assertive behaviour is where you explicitly make it clear what your stance is, expectations are and open up to negotiate reasonable solutions. Your body language, tone of voice and language are indicating that you won’t back down, but also that you are not necessarily looking for a fight – the positive outcome is more important than black and white compliance or fighting.

Tying this in with

• The Fear response system, this is a non aggressive Fight
• Grief / Change system, this is useful Bargaining and Anger

If the problem that triggers your anger can be reasoned with and a reasonable solution agreed upon and enacted, this is a smart method of dealing with it.

If you have had to deal with irrational people too often (abusive, toxic, narcissistic), then you may have learned to skip this phase. When you get away from those elements, it is important to learn to manually insert this back in to your Anger Response System.

Aggression (Fight)

When the problem is not amenable to reasonable discussion and problem solving, things need to become more black and white. In this case, you are going to fight for your outcome and the other person is going to lose – well, that’s the goal.

Aggression doesn’t have to be physical. Aggression can be:

• Body language
• Verbal language
• Group action
• Threats
• Appealing to a higher power (lawyers, police, HR etc)

Fighting is not automatically evil. It should be an action of last resort, made when you feel that you can’t retreat, give any more ground and recognise that change must happen.

Tying this in with

• The Fear response system, this is Fight
• Grief / Change system, this is Anger

Fighting isn’t automatically bad. If your first response to Anger is Aggression, and your default Aggression response is to escalate conflict and become what is socially considered abusive, then you do need to address this. You may need to change your environment to be less adversarial, or if you have escaped from an adversarial environment, remember to manually insert the Assertive phase.

You may also be struggling with a biological problem, where your adrenal response kicks in too fast and too hard. There is likely a problem with your neurological Noradrenaline (norepinephrine) neurotransmitter, which will require some medication.

Run (Flight)

Sometimes we cannot win. When we cannot continue in the current circumstance, and we know that the problem cannot be reasoned with, we need to get out of harms way.

Leaving the problem means it is not going to directly affect you. It may come back to visit later, but hopefully you have better resources to deal with it then.

Tying this in with

• The Fear response system, this is Flight

Leaving a conflict when it is not feasible to negotiate or win is smart. If you always leave, then this needs to be considered in context – do you need to change your circumstances, or do you need better strategies?

Types of Anger

We can often tell when we feel Angry – or can we?

Anger is a mood that has various strengths, and in English we have a number of words to approximate the strength of our feeling. I often hear people say “I’m not angry” or “I don’t get angry”, shortly followed by “that was frustrating” , or “it really irritated me”, or “I was then beating myself up in my head” (negative self talk). That is all anger.

Anger is a feeling that informs us of a situation.

First we’ll look at the scale of anger, then we will try to determine if the feeling of Anger is Primary, Secondary or Tertiary.

The Scale of Anger

Anger is a response to a situation where you feel that you should act for a better outcome. You feel like something is wrong and it should be addressed before things get worse – but sometimes addressing that problem is actually worse than not addressing it.

For mild problems, or things that will resolve themselves soon, we are likely to feel annoyed, frustrated or irritated. This is Passive or Passive Aggressive.

When we feel peeved, angry or very angry, we are likely to take an action towards the problem, most likely being Assertive.

When we are feeling Very Angry, Furious, Ropable or Hulk Smash, we are likely to solve the problem with Aggression.

Corresponding to the elevation to your Anger mood is an increasing “Urge to Act”. The stronger your Anger, the more you feel that you have to do something. Unfortunately, we often feel less able to think it through in these times, as our Ability to Think and Choose is compromised, while the less strongly we feel about the problem, or the more sure we calculate that it will resolve itself, the more brain we can throw at the problem to solve it creatively.

Primary vs Triggered Anger

Often anger is a primary response to a circumstance as described above. Sometimes, Anger is a secondary, or even a tertiary feeling. We can then mistake the Anger reaction as a primary reaction, mistaking what we should be doing or focusing on.

Take a quick look at Fear. Our survival portfolio will then kick in with the Four F’s – Freeze, Fawn, Flight and Fight. If our response to a threat is Fight, then we may think we are primarily Angry, but our primarily feeling is Fear. A Fear first approach recognises the present threat of painful consequences first, before thinking about problems that need solving – that is, get safe from the pain, then solve why it was a threat.

In Australia, the culture for male presenting people is that we should be tough. Tough people aren’t scared, disgusted, sad or in love. We can express joy about sport, women or some new hardware tool. We can be angry. We learn to replace fear, disgust, and sadness into Anger, and we mute Joy to only being happy about things, not the feeling of love we feel for someone. This can often mean that we think we are Angry about something, when we are actually scared, worried, concerned, disgusted, put off, reserved, sad, lonely, uncertain and so on.

Once we recognise that Anger was secondary, we can pause our actions and spend some time working out what our first feeling was. Sometimes, to do that we need to look at the situation and logically work out that Anger is not the appropriate feeling for this situation, and then logically work out what we probably are feeling. Then work on what that feeling informs us. This manual method is slower, but less likely to go wrong.

If the situation you are in is an actual emergency, where someone is about to be hurt, then do the automatic thing, but if no one is going to be hurt, take the time to work it out. We cover this below in Anger Management.

Biology Induced Anger

Anger Management

There is no problem feeling angry, despite the media hype. Anger management is not about not feeling anger, it’s about knowing what to do with it. If you didn’t have anger, how would you know something was wrong, or knowing that something is wrong, thus do something about it? Anger helps us not be taken advantage of.

Anger Situational Assessment

There are a few reasons why Anger can go wrong. We can be over or under reactive to a situation, have an Anger feeling in the absence of a triggering event, or we may be using the wrong tool to address the situation that is evoking the Anger.

Before we act on our feeling of Anger, we need to perform a Reality Check. We will use a scale of 1 to 10 to evaluate both the Trigger of our Anger, and our Emotional Reaction. A score of 1/10 is mild and a score of 10/10 is extreme.

Let us consider an event that should evoke our awareness of a problem. It can objectively range in severity from 1/10 – the first awareness of a mild problem that might cause a harm, to 10/10 where Something Must Be Done Right Now Or There Will Be Dire Consequences. Events that score beyond 5/10 should be rare. If scoring 5+/10 is common, you need to consider adjusting your surroundings or examining your biology.

Even though this is supposed to be an Objective Look at what the event is, it is important to note that there is no truly objective level to an event. Much of this is culture and subculture driven, what is tasty to the spider is terrifying to the fly. It is also important to note that society continues to evolve, so what was Objectively okay before might be bad now. To come up with a hypothetical Objective Score, let us create a hypothetical group of 100 random respectable people from your culture, and pretend that they are assessing the situation. We average out their assessment, effectively using the Wisdom of the Commons to assign the event an “Objective Score”.

How we Perceive that Event may match the Objective Score, or it might be different. Perception is a key concept here, as we feel no Anger to a situation we are not aware of. Our recent experiences can have a dramatic effect on how we interpret this specific situation, and our culture or long term experience will have a different kind of Perceptual Bias on how we interpret the event. Our Perceptual Bias will change how we Perceive an event.

After our Perception of the Event, we will have an Emotional Reaction. Our Emotional Reaction will be affected by our Perceptual Bias, levels of intoxication (if relevant), the state or our neurotransmitters, and other biological factors such as hunger and fatigue. Our Emotional Reaction works dynamically to affect how we Perceive that Event, which can spiral out of control and into a melt down.

Being aware of our history and subculture, we can manually Bias against our Perceptual Bias. When this works well, we can bring balance to our Emotional Response, but we also need to be aware that we can over compensate and shut down a valid Anger Emotional Response, which in some situations can also be harmful. At the prompting of toxic positivity or toxic social pressures, we can be convinced not to fight against mistreatment and oppression.

We can measure our Emotional Reaction via a strength value out of 10. If you feel 0/10, you did not have an Anger Emotional Reaction, while at the other end if your Anger Emotional Reaction is 10/10, your response is considering this Event to be Immediate Life and Death.

The higher your Emotional Reaction, the more Urgent you are going to feel the action needs to be and the less logic and reason you will be able to apply to your choice of actions.

The amount of cognition (Thinking) we can put to solving the problem is inverse to the strength of our Emotional Reaction. The stronger we emotionally react, the less Thinking we put to that solution. Ironically, the less strongly we feel about the problem, the less we feel the need to solve it. There is a sweet spot between around 2/10 and 5/10 where we are both motivated and able to best solve a problem. As our feelings hit 7 or higher, the more simple our solutions become. An Emotional Reaction around 7-8/10 is often simplified to Freeze, Flight, Fight or Fawn, while 9-10/10 is further simplified to generally first Fight, then Flight.

On a side note, if you find that you often have black and white thinking, take a look at your adrenaline/anxiety/anger response. This may need some medication (often an NRI, but not always) and or therapy to address perceptions and behaviour response patterns (CBT, DBT and Anger Management).

To learn more about how this Perception to Action loop works and how you can affect it, take a look at Retraining the Brain.

We now have two numbers out of 10. If you are experiencing an Objective Level 2 Event and you are feeling a Level 7 Emotional Reaction, your anger response is out and you will feel a strong urge to act that is likely the wrong action to resolve the Event. Generally you can override this, but not always.

Anger is an emotion that informs you that something has, or you expect will, cross a boundary that infringes upon your power to act and immediate or future safety.

An Event that provokes an Anger Emotional Response is likely to be present and seem immediate. Our default Actions recommended by our Emotional Reaction will start with

where a solution needs to be implemented.