Anger. It’s like the huge, swirling monster that wants to devour everything in its path for a brief moment (in context of the rest of our lives) but acting in anger is something we should never do. I don’t know about you, but I blank out and I start shaking when I’m angry.
Something set me off earlier today and I was seeing red. I had all of these ideas about how I was going to deal with the situation, but I knew that I would not be handling it until tomorrow, so I took a deep breath and tried to return my body and mind back to its previous homeostatic state. Even if I were going to handle it today, I’d only do so after I’d calmed down. That is one lesson from my father that I will never forget: Don’t react; respond. I intend to respond tomorrow. For now I’m exhausted, which feels like such an evolutionary response to the stress.
From what I’ve read and experienced, anger is very similar to the fight or flight response. It’s our animal brain (our limbic brain) that gets going and our forebrain–the part of the brain where language and empathy and reasoning come from–just starts shutting down. We don’t want to listen to reason; we don’t care what the other side of the story is. We just want to rail against the injustice of it all.
As this article from Colorado State University states, anger “occurs when we sense that our progress towards a goal has been hindered, or when we feel hurt by another person’s actions or words.” Sometimes we can redirect this energy into something productive, and sometimes the best we can do is to take a deep breath and move along. Anger isn’t an emotion that I’m all that acquainted with lately; I used to be angry all the time, but now I don’t feel it very often. So, when it appears like that swirling tornado monster, I feel broadsided by it. I don’t think I’m the only one with that experience, though.
Originally posted on my other blog, The Brainy Babe.
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