“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”― Mark Twain
Anger is such a powerful emotion that can muddle our rational thoughts, hijack our logical brain, and let our emotional brain take over when left unmanaged. With an angry state of mind, it’s easy to hurt someone out of impulse, thus, resulting in regrets and broken relationships.
Come to think of it, have you ever stopped to listen to what your mind was telling you the moment you got annoyed, ticked, or just plain furious? Perhaps, if you read between the lines, there are things that your anger is trying to tell you.
Turns out, Ryan Martin, a University of Wisconsin, Green Bay psychology professor, has spent years doing just that. He learned that our initial thoughts in response to the first flare of anger can only result in either of these two: it can send us over the edge or help us control that emotion for good.
As he spent his career trying to decipher rage, anger, fury (or whatever you like to call it), he was able to realize the signals it tries to send. With just the right mindset and attitude, you can invert that strong feeling into good use.
1. Anger may cause trouble, but it’s not actually bad for us.
If you try to see it through an evolutionary vision, you’ll learn that anger plays a role in our survival skills. “It helps alert us to the fact that we’ve been wronged,” Martin states. When your anger starts to flare up, your heart starts to pound and your face turns red. It’s a sign that your body is preparing for a showdown. For Martin, those signals mean one thing: it’s our fight or flight response. It kicks in to “energize us to confront injustice,” he explains.
2. Manage your thoughts instead of letting anger manage you.
Growing up, his family has an inside joke about the ‘Martin temper’ or what they like to call those with short temper in their family. He saw how his father snapped at waiters in restaurants and how teens get into trouble due to anger management issues when he volunteered at a shelter for at-promise youth in college. That’s when he discovered his fervent nature to help people handle such emotions.
To find out healthier patterns, Martin dug deeper into the thoughts behind anger to answer these essential questions: What types of angry thoughts drive people to snap? Are other thoughts more damaging than others?
Together with his advisor Eric Dahlen, they set out on a quest to develop a scale for measuring these thoughts. They used surveys as a weapon to devise hypothetical scenarios that often result in angry feelings, like having someone cut in front of you in a queue. Then, they were able to script the thoughts that people were likely to have in response to such scenarios.
3. Angry Cognitions Scale (ACS): the finished product of their extensive research
To make it work, the user will read nine blood-boiling scenarios. From there, they must choose how they are likely to react out of the six possible reactions. With the help of the ACS, the users can assess their angry thoughts. This can help them be more conscious and alert for the automatic reactions that could be hurting us.
4. Angry thoughts make us angrier in general.
When angry thoughts are not managed, they push us to take them out as anger on ourselves and others. As proof, Martin used the scale to perform a study on undergraduate psychology students to see how angry thoughts can affect them. For five days, the students kept track of their emotions and described the most emotional situation of the day and how intense it was. Martin threw in six options among those experiences to flag their anger management problems: negative emotions, aggression, risky driving, drug use, damaged friendships, and self-harm.
As a result, he found that students who have maladaptive thoughts are more likely to be angrier overall and have the tendency to express their anger in unhealthy ways.
5. Don’t label people, instead…
Most people label other people out of anger which can be especially toxic. For one, inflammatory labeling invalidates a fellow human being. It transforms them into an object you release your anger toward. Moreover, it minimizes any of their other qualities, and “you just think of them as this thing that you’ve called them.”
The best antidote to inflammatory labeling is to show empathy. Instead of labeling them, we must think of other people from another perspective. Martin even argued that “we might see there’s a perfectly good reason why they engaged in their behavior.”
6. See through what your anger is telling you rather than ignoring it.
What I really want is for people to have accurate thoughts — thoughts that accurately reflect what’s going on in the world around them,” Martin says. It’s not right to simply dismiss your anger, especially when it alerts us to possible injustice.
If, for example, a driver backs out and almost hits you, don’t sugarcoat the situation. Don’t think that “he or she must’ve not seen you,” you might just be lying to yourself. Rather, try to focus on the fact that no damage was done. Doing this can lead you to feeling gratitude. As a consequence, it can put you in a calmer state to face the main issue eyeball to eyeball.
Sure, the ACS can help you determine which of your angry thoughts can cause a third world war. But changing them takes time. “People need to know that it takes practice. We spend a lifetime developing our thinking habits, so to undo them is really tricky,” Martin warns.
It may take you hours, if not days, to realize that you were labeling other people. But know that there’s nothing a substantial amount of practice can’t fix.
As for Martin himself, he was able to keep his cool and subside his Martin temper. It changed the way he interacts with the world. While he still feels angry most of the time, he learned how to reflect on his anger. And that’s the best way to respond to his feelings of anger.