Good Anger — Harnessing a Misunderstood Emotion
Episode Stats
Summary
Most people think of anger as a problem, something to avoid or repress. It s irrational, immature, and best left behind. But what if anger isn t bad? What if it can actually be an incredibly positive, productive, and energizing life force? My guest argues we ve misunderstood anger, and that doing so has made us more anxious, depressed, and stuck. His name is Sam Parker, and he s the author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. Today, we explore the surprising psychology and philosophy of anger.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Most people think of anger as a problem, something to avoid or repress. It's irrational,
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immature, and best left behind. But what if anger isn't bad? What if it can actually be
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an incredibly positive, productive, and energizing life force? My guest argues we've misunderstood
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anger and that doing so has made us more anxious, depressed, and stuck. His name is Sam Parker,
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and he's a journalist and the author of Good Anger, How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives.
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Today on the show, we explore the surprising psychology and philosophy of anger. Sam explains
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how anger should be understood as a neutral emotion that imparts valuable information.
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He shares why we confuse anger with aggression, how anger can point to unmet needs and violated
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boundaries, and why repressing it can be damaging our health. We also talk about anger's role in work,
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creativity, and relationships, and how to channel anger. It helps achieve more,
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maintain our self-respect, and live a more grounded life. If you ever thought anger was something to
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outgrow, this conversation may just change your mind. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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at awim.is slash goodanger. All right, Sam Parker, welcome to the show.
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So you got a book out called Good Anger, How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. This is all
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about, you did a deep dive into the emotion of anger that we often think of as something problematic.
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How did a 10-minute session with a heavy bag kickstart an exploration of anger?
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Well, I was having a year of anxiety and thought that the way to get out of that was to learn to
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relax. And so I've been trying all these different wellness techniques to do that, and everything from
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sort of yoga and meditation, so, you know, stuff that's been proven for a very long time, to cold
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plunging and gratitude journaling, some of the more modern stuff. And nothing was working for me. And
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I was trying out various exercises at this time in my life, and boxing was one of them. I'd never
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really been a boxing guy before. And one morning while I was going about my sort of regime, as such
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as it was, punching away at the bag, about 10 minutes in, I felt this strange surge of energy
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kind of coming up from somewhere lower down in my body. And I just started punching and swinging
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away with like, this kind of energy that I'd never had before, but also this feeling that I'd never
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had before in my body. And this went on for, you know, however long I managed to box for. And
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afterwards, I was kind of sweating and bent over, exhausted, but I felt better than I had in months.
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And I realized that the feeling that I tapped into was anger. I was absolutely furious. And I was
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thinking about the things in my life that were going wrong and the conversations I needed to
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have to put them right. And everything was kind of unfurling beautifully in my thoughts. Everything
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was looking like targets rather than things to be afraid of. And my relationship with anger until
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this point had been pretty much non-existent. I believed that anger was sort of a nuisance emotion,
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something that if you're sophisticated, you've kind of moved beyond something that flared up now and
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then that you had to get rid of as quickly as you could. And I'd never really considered that
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anger could be a source of power and energy. And that was what I got a glimpse of that day at the
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bag. And so as a journalist, I thought, okay, I'm going to explore this with the most open mind that
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I possibly can. I'm going to come at it with a blank slate and see where it leads me. And that was the
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start of the book. Okay. So let's talk about this. What is anger? I think a lot of us, if you describe
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like, what does it feel like to be angry? We could describe it like, but how do the psychologists describe
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anger, maybe philosophers even, how do they describe what anger is? So there are five core
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emotions. Most psychologists are in agreement with this. Anger is one of them. And the mistake we
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make is to conflate anger with aggression or even violence as though they're the same thing.
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And it's actually a little bit of an anomaly because when you think about it, if I was to say to you,
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I saw such and such yesterday, he was really sad. You wouldn't immediately picture that person
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crying in the corner, you know, curled up in a ball. But if I say to you, I saw such and such,
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and he was angry, quite often people immediately think that means that they were ranting and raving,
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that they were, you know, getting into some kind of confrontation. They needed to be calmed
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down physically. They're two separate things. So anger is a healthy emotion. It gets called a
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negative emotion because we don't always enjoy the experience of it, but not because it's negative
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in that it's inherently bad for us or wrong or needs to be gotten rid of. It's an emotion. And then
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aggression and violence is a behavioral choice. It doesn't always feel that way, but it is.
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And when you start to separate out the idea of anger, the healthy emotion, that's actually
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neutral, that you can act on however you want, and aggression and violence, which is a behavioral
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choice, that's when you can start to have a calmer relationship with anger yourself.
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The best way to think of aggression actually is as a rejection of anger. Because when we get
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aggressive, what we're really saying is we can't tolerate the insecurity, the pain, the fear,
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the disrespect, whatever it is that the anger is pointing us towards, we find intolerable. So we get
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rid of it by losing our temper. So we feel certain things with certain emotions. So when you
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experience sadness, you feel low, you feel like you don't want to do anything. When you experience
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happiness, you feel excited. How do we feel when we experience anger?
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Well, one thing you feel is a surge of energy. And I think that's the thing that people don't
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always know what to do with. And so, you know, the classic sort of stereotype of, you know, smashing a
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plate or kicking a wall or something like that, you know, you feel like a, some people call it an
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amygdala flooding, which is when that part of your brain becomes flooded with chemicals. And so
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you become momentarily disorientated. You can struggle to articulate yourself. You can struggle
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to understand your own thoughts, all the rest of it. It's a bit of a sort of mental scrambling.
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So that's rage. That's when it overtakes you in a big flash. You can, of course, experience anger on
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a lower level where it's more of an irritation. Yeah, it's not a positive emotion. Like it normally
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doesn't feel great. I mean, you can get like a flush of righteousness that can feel kind of good.
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But for most people, yeah, anger is not a positive emotion, which is one of the many reasons why
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having a sort of conversation about its uses can be difficult to get off the ground because people
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immediately think it's, it's almost like a paradox. What do you mean good anger? What do you mean healthy
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anger? But that's a misunderstanding of what emotions are. You know, they're not about feeling good or bad.
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They're about giving us useful information about something we need to change in our life.
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So what kind of useful information does anger give us? Like what do the psychologist hypothesize
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it's trying to tell us? So the hypothesis is that there's three basic buckets of information that
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anger is offering to us. The first is like a boundary violation. So this is like the most
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straightforward, you know, like if you bump into me in the street, that's a boundary violation.
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I'm going to step back and go, you know, whoa, whatever. I'm going to engage my anger to protect myself
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in some way, whether verbally or physically. The second thing it can be alert to is an unmet need.
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Like something is wrong in our life. And I think this is useful in things like a work context where
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the action of a colleague, let's say, makes you feel really angry, but it feels a little bit out
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of proportion to the thing that they've done. Right. And you're kind of like, oh, that's annoyed me
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more than I can. Why is this annoying me quite so much? And then you can analyze that and you can go,
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well, maybe I don't feel like I'm respected well enough by this person or perhaps my boss or perhaps
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the wider team on this point. Right. So there's an unmet need there that I need to address as
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something that isn't, that isn't quite lining up in my life can work well in relationships as well.
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So sometimes it's an unmet need. The third thing anger can be alerting us to, which is trickier
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is a wound from the past. So it is reminding us in a way that psychologists would call transference.
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It's reminding us, or it's taking us back to a time in our life when we felt helpless or disrespected.
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And so our anger in the moment belongs more to the past. And I think this happens with kids quite a
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lot. You know, sometimes the way your kids act around, you can just make you so full of rage in
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a way that you know doesn't really belong to them because they're too young to really have
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meant it in the way that it feels. Often that's because it's reminding you of something in the
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past that maybe you still need to address or work on. So there's kind of like three layers of depth
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of information that anger is pointing us towards. Usually sometimes it's a mixture.
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You talk about how psychologists make a distinction between trait anger and state anger. What's the
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Yeah. So trait anger is like a fixed personality trait and it is partly genetic. It does vary
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from person to person. And this is where we're really talking about temperament. And state anger
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is when you are experiencing anger in the moment because of something that's happened. And that comes
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for all of us, whether we are, you know, people who have high trait anger or not. And the book
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is really about how do we deal with the state anger and how do we get better at recognizing
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it's there? Because if you're anything like me, someone who thought they have no relationship
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with anger at all, then even recognizing when state anger has come along is very, very difficult.
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And I think this sits at the root of anxiety and depression for a lot of people.
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Yeah. We'll talk more about that, how depression and anxiety might be a mask for anger, but walks
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through a history of anger. You do this too. Look at the philosophy of anger and that's why
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we have such a conflicted view about it. We typically think of it as like, oh, it's a bad
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thing. I don't want to experience anger. But sometimes we think, oh, well, sometimes anger
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is good, you know, that righteous indignation. So why do we have such a conflicted view of this
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It's, I mean, anger was the subject of the first self-help book, arguably, which was Seneca in AD
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45. He wrote a book called On Anger and he dismissed it as the most intractable of all the
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passions. He called it a monster that we needed to banish from the human experience. So we've kind
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of been debating whether anger is a good thing or not for a very, very long time. The way I trace
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it in the book was really through the story of Christianity. That was the backdrop to my upbringing.
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It's obviously been a huge shaping hand on Western civilization. So there were many places you can
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start the history of anger. I decided to go with religion. The seven deadly sins began as eight
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evil thoughts, which was a list written down in a desert just outside Alexandria by a hermit monk
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who was writing a handbook for other monks on how to live a pious and good life. That idea kind of
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got passed down through the generations and over time it evolved into the seven deadly sins. And
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that became the kind of moral checklist by which early Christian societies were judged, right?
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So we kind of just absorbed this idea that anger was a sin, anger was sort of inherently bad,
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but there were some kind of renegades in that history, in that story from ancient times to now.
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And I talk about some of them in the book. Aristotle was much more balanced on anger. He believed that
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we should pursue feelings and appetites with neither excess nor defect. And he had this term for it,
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hexis, which is an ancient Greek word that means a relatively stable arrangement, which I love.
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And he, you know, Aristotle didn't condemn anger as a sin. He linked it to courage and dignity. He thought
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it could motivate us to stand up for justice. But his, his was a sort of minority view. And it was
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one that got kind of lost when his writings got lost. Jumping forward to the Middle Ages, Thomas
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Aquinas, who was one of the most formative Christian thinkers in the history of the church. Around the
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Middle Ages, Aristotle's writing was rediscovered. And he was the one that sort of took up the challenge
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of trying to assimilate what Aristotle had to say into the sort of Christian doctrine of the time. So he took
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a more moderate position on anger as well. So there are people throughout the history who have had
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this more balanced view of it. But the dominant view and the one that we still live with now is
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Yeah, your section on the history of anger and Stoicism was interesting because I think it's
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really relevant today because, you know, Stoicism has become really popular again. I mean, for the
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Stoics, you know, anger was a negative thing. They saw anger not as a sign of strength, but as like a
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temporary madness, it was a loss of reason. And that contrast with Aristotle who said, no, you know,
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anger, if you use it in the right way, can actually be a really productive emotion. But the trick is
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trying to figure out how to be angry at the right things at the right moment in the right amount.
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Right. Yeah. And he called that good temper. Seneca was very clear that he was, you know,
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not a fan of anger in any shape or form. I think the other Stoics had a bit more balance to their view
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and some of what they taught about, you know, framing emotions in the right way and so on is
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useful in this discussion as well. I wouldn't want to sort of say that the Stoics were completely
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wrong on anger, but yeah, for sure they were more disapproving of it than people like Aristotle.
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But, you know, I think there's useful stuff in all of that, really. I mean, even Seneca had useful
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things to say about anger, but you've got to remember the context these people lived in, right? I mean,
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Seneca, I think he worked for Caligula, who was mad enough to declare war on the sea at one point.
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You know, there was a lot of bad anger going around at that point in history. So I can kind
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of see why, you know, it got a worse rep than it needs to today, perhaps.
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So Aristotle and Aquinas, are they kind of laying the foundation for what you call good anger?
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I'd say so. I mean, the quote that you mentioned there is one that I opened the book with,
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you know, Aristotle talking about being angry is easy, but being angry with the right person in the
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right way to the right amount is difficult. And that really is the crux of it, I think.
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It's, you know, it's interesting to me that in the public mental health conversation,
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we have done so much to destigmatize sadness and fear, which is depression and anxiety. We've come
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to a much more sophisticated place with that. Anger, we haven't, and there's many reasons for that.
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And one of them is just that it's so difficult. You know, this mastering anger, I don't believe you
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ever can fully, but trying to master anger is really difficult, really difficult stuff.
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And so even that framework that Aristotle laid out, when you read it, it's like, my God,
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yeah, that really is difficult. And whether you apply it to big or small issues in your life,
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it's very, very challenging. But if you can get it right, or you can get it half right,
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you're in a much better position than if you ignore anger or you let it overcome you.
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Yeah, I think that difficulty of harnessing anger is why we often take an either or approach to it.
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It's like, well, it's going to be harder to do it right. So I just try not to be angry at all.
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Yeah, exactly. And that makes sense. Right. And that's certainly how I
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lived for a very long time. What I didn't clock was that it was making me physically and mentally
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ill. So, you know, it's the price that we pay for that anger suppression bit is I think what
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we're just starting to wake up to. And I think that's the conversation that we need to have on
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So what are the benefits of good anger? So you mentioned Aristotle connected it to
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courage and action. I guess anger just gets you to do things in the world?
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Yeah, well, I think, you know, anger is a voice that says to you primarily that you're
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worth defending. If you can't get angry on your own behalf, when somebody has wronged you in
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some way, then you're not valuing yourself really, you know, it's incredibly energizing
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emotion as well, the most energizing emotion of them all. You know, sadness makes us in a
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fear makes us in a love can be very motivating, but you need to be angry on behalf of the thing
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that you love to defend it. So yeah, I mean, it has a lot to offer us in terms of wisdom.
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It has a lot to offer us in terms of energy. It can be the difference between standing up
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for ourselves and not, it can be the difference between really going after the thing that we
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want to go after. I call it the FU energy. And I interviewed one woman in the book who
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had been in prison as a teenager. She was a drug addict. Her name is Marcia Reynolds.
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She's an amazing Ted talk on the energy of anger. And she talks about the fact that the
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emotion that got her not only out of jail, but to the top of a business, uh, to be an
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incredibly successful professional person was the, I'll show you anger that she felt
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at the way she'd been let down by people early in her life or, or, or dismissed as a lost
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cause by society and the people around her because she went to jail. And she says she wrote
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that FU I'll show you energy of anger, you know, right the way to a top of a business.
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So I don't believe there's any other emotion available to us that could have quite done
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I love reading biographies of artists or writers. And it's amazing how many times a writer or
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painter put out a great piece of work just to show someone like, Hey, I got this. You
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's the great Beethoven example that I mentioned in the book. I can't
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remember the name of the, um, the piece of music, but he had originally written a tribute to
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Napoleon who he very much admired. And then before he'd finished the piece of music, Napoleon
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declared himself emperor of the French, which scandalized Beethoven because he saw it as
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a betrayal of the ideals of, of the, uh, of the revolution. And so he wrote a different
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piece of music to our ears is this steering, beautiful piece of music, but for him was an
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attack on Napoleon, the memory of a great man. He said it was a tribute to, and this piece
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of music, I wish I could remember the name of it, the symphony, but it transformed, uh, the
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course of Western music. I mean, people were listening to it in Vienna and literally falling
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off their chairs, you know? So there's loads of great examples of anger inspiring, not just
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like heavy metal and, you know, sort of angry per se music or art, but you know, quite beautiful
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art often has come from an angry place, a desire to give the world something it didn't have
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before by getting into conflict with it, you know? So yeah, I agree that the link between
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anger and creativity is also under, under discussed, but very strong.
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Yeah. I didn't know if I, I've experienced that using anger as a motivating force. You
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know, when I played American football in high school, one thing I sometimes did, I would
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just imagine the guy across from me on the line as just like, you're just this evil dude
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and I'm just going to demolish. And like, I'm sure the guy, the guy was probably really
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nice, great kid. Um, but I needed that energy to play.
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Yeah. Well, I said to my, my nephew who's 11 at the time, I asked him about anger and how
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he used it. And he's a very sweet and loving boy. And he said that he was warming up for
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a park run, which is a thing in England where people do a 5k together at the weekends. And
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he saw a woman being rude to someone else and felt angry at her. And so quietly he decided
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he was going to beat her in the race. And so he just enacted this, this noble revenge
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and quiet and just lapped her a couple of times around the race. And she would never have
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known, you know, but he used that as motivation. He used that as fuel for his run. So yeah,
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I love that example. Yeah. And I think I interviewed proper boxers and things in the book and, you
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know, they talk about using anger in a very calm and considered ways. You know, you can't
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hate your opponent. You can't lose your temper at them because then you're in trouble, but
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you can channel your dislike of them or the disrespect you feel they showed you or something
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like that. And, and use the anger in a sort of calm and powerful way. And I think sport
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is a great way to do that. One thing you explore is how men and women experience anger
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differently. What's the difference there? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, what probably
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the longest standing myth about anger is that it's gendered and somehow belongs to men. And
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I think that comes back a lot to the conflation with aggression and violence, because statistically,
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you know, most acts of violence and aggression are carried out by men. But in terms of actually
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just feeling the emotion, this has been studied since at least the 1950s as a guy called Arnold
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H. Buss, who was kind of the great psychologist when it came to measuring anger and hostility
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in individuals, he was a pioneer of it. And he studied this sort of supposed gender gap
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from the 1950s all the way up to the 1990s and concluded very clearly that there was no
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difference between the sexes in terms of experiencing the emotion of anger. Interestingly, that may have
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slightly changed recently. There was a Gallup poll in 2022 that saw women pulling ahead of men
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globally for the first time in feelings of anger. I think the anger gap is now at about 6%. So if
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anything, if we're going to gender anger, we could say that women are angry with the men at the
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moment. But no, it's an emotion that the genders feel equally. The differences in how we express it
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typically. My tendency towards suppression and repression is a more classically female way of
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dealing with anger, responding to anger. Men, you know, tend to be more likely to be anger out,
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which is the people who become to become aggressive. So there is a difference in how we
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express it and also how we socialize it and how we condemn it. You know, I think a woman who loses her
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temper in public is going to be viewed in a worse light in a lot of ways than a man who does. We still
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live with that sort of inequality, I think. And you talk about too, not only are men and women
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socialized differently and how to express anger, but there's like physiological differences in our
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brain that tends to cause men to express anger through aggression and women not to. Like they're
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slower to express it through aggression than men are. Yeah, this is one theory. The part of the brain
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that moderates risk-taking behavior is stronger in women than men. And so if you extrapolate that to
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an instance where you get angry, men are more likely to take the risky path in expressing their
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anger, which is to get into a confrontation. So there's some biological basis in the idea that
00:21:22.620
men are more aggressive than women. There's also the argument that, you know, for women, it's much more
00:21:28.700
dangerous to get into confrontations and to express anger. And so there's the socially moderating
00:21:33.760
impact as well. So yeah, you know, there is a difference and that contributes to the misunderstanding
00:21:40.800
that, you know, somehow men are angrier than women, which they're not.
00:21:45.120
Does anger start in the mind or in the body or is it a combination of the two?
00:21:50.140
So it's a combination of the two. And I think this is another reason where people go wrong with the
00:21:54.460
emotions in general. There's still the sort of sense that was believed around the time of the
00:22:00.520
enlightenment that the brain is where emotions happen and that, you know, our emotions are
00:22:05.120
responses in the brain to experiences. Actually, the most recent biological understanding of it is
00:22:12.620
that emotions are generated by the whole body and by the mind as well. So it's actually a physical
00:22:17.260
thing as much as it is a mental thing. And that understanding that was, you know, talked about boxing
00:22:22.780
before, but understanding the way that emotions and anger in particular manifest in the body was
00:22:28.560
like a real eureka moment for me because I was somebody who struggled to know when anger was there
00:22:34.060
and the body was a way to start to get much better at that. And I still rely on that now. There are times
00:22:41.340
when my mind hasn't caught up to the fact that I'm angry yet, but my body is telling me pretty clearly
00:22:46.000
that I am. And that kind of helps me understand what I'm feeling about something a lot more quickly.
00:22:50.240
So we talked about how, because we have such a conflicted view of anger, a lot of people
00:22:55.160
have a hard time recognizing it. And then you talk about how often anger can be masked by other
00:23:02.740
emotions like depression or anxiety. How does that work? How can anger show up as depression or anxiety,
00:23:09.300
et cetera? Yeah. So there's an expression that a lot of people will be familiar with, which is that
00:23:15.020
depression is anger turned inward. And this was something that Freud first wrote about in 1917
00:23:20.600
in an essay called, um, mourning and melancholia. And he compared the state of mourning with the state
00:23:26.280
of what wasn't called depression quite then. It was called melancholia, but he compared those two
00:23:30.860
states. What's the difference between them? In many ways, they're very similar in the way that you
00:23:34.880
respond to being in mourning and being depressed. The difference that he found was that depression
00:23:39.800
contains a lot of angry self-talk. And, you know, if you were to externalize the inner voice of
00:23:46.720
someone who's suffering from depression, and often these are the most outgoing, friendly people you
00:23:50.820
meet, right? Their internal voice is very angry. So what they're doing is they're turning anger in on
00:23:55.700
themselves and they're doing it in their private thoughts. And this is a huge part of why they feel
00:24:01.100
depressed. Less well known, I'd say is that anger plays a very similar role in anxiety. So for people who
00:24:09.460
have difficulties expressing anger, confidently recognizing in themselves, uh, being comfortable
00:24:16.340
with it, all of those things that often manifests as, um, anxiety disorders. And so this is what was
00:24:22.200
happening with me. I had generalized anxiety disorder, spent many, many days feeling a dread
00:24:28.980
and an anxiety that I couldn't really, uh, place on anything. Very much thought it was my lot in life
00:24:34.500
in some sense. You had some teeth grinding going on. You were like grinding your teeth to a pulp.
00:24:39.060
Yeah. Yeah. So, so the, the, the physical manifestations of it, when I look back now,
00:24:44.100
you know, uh, really quite shocking, but yeah, I mean, I ground my teeth to a point that I had
00:24:48.620
dentists, you know, looking at me with real despair. Yeah. You know, I'd wake up every morning
00:24:53.980
feeling like I'd been punched in my sleep and these symptoms, the anxiety and some of the physical
00:24:58.580
symptoms were the first things to be alleviated when I started working on anger. So anger repression
00:25:03.120
can write itself across the body. It can write itself across our mental health. And yeah, you know,
00:25:08.780
it's an invisible problem. This is the thing is we know about the anger out problem because
00:25:12.880
obnoxious, aggressive, violent people take up a lot of time and space. They take up the mental space
00:25:18.700
of the people around them. There's a big social problem, crime, the rest of it. So of course,
00:25:22.940
that's where our focus has been so far, but the other anger problem that's hidden is anger
00:25:27.780
suppression. And it's individuals who are paying the price for that. And often it's in the form of
00:25:31.600
anxiety or it's in the form of physical illness.
00:25:33.720
Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. So if anger is an emotion that tells you that something's
00:25:38.160
not right, like there's been a boundary violation or there's an unmet need in your life, and then
00:25:43.600
you don't have a way to use that emotion productively and-
00:25:49.040
Even though it's there, like you kind of develop like a learned helplessness. It's like, well,
00:25:52.880
I'm feeling this thing. I can't do anything about it. And now I feel depressed because I can't do
00:25:56.560
anything about it. So I can see how anger could lead to depression in that sense.
00:25:59.700
Yeah, absolutely. That's it. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:26:06.160
And now back to the show. So let's talk about some specific examples where anger shows up
00:26:10.580
frequently. You mentioned work. What's interesting about work is that in the past three decades or so,
00:26:16.400
there's been a lot of time and money spent trying to make work more pleasant and less anger prone.
00:26:24.500
I mean, managers and employees, they get training on soft skills that should help reduce anger.
00:26:28.900
But you highlight paradoxically, many people are experiencing more anger at work. What's going
00:26:36.540
on there? Well, I was always very puzzled by this, you know, is being angry at work an advantage or
00:26:44.020
not? Because in a typical team of 10 people, there might be one person who's sort of outwardly quite
00:26:49.380
angry and quite confrontational. And what tends to happen is that the other nine people tiptoe around
00:26:54.760
that person, they take up a lot of energy, but are they getting ahead or are they not? What I started
00:26:59.780
to look into was the quiet quitting phenomenon, which I'm sure most people will have heard of,
00:27:04.000
you know, it's been much discussed in recent years, but this idea that people are just disengaging at
00:27:08.180
work. They're kind of there, but they're not there in body and mind, although they're in body, not in
00:27:12.800
mind, not in soul. And so I started to dig into the stats behind this phenomenon. And what it turns out
00:27:18.300
is that a lot of people now, they're quiet quitting, not because of remuneration, not because of how
00:27:24.640
much they believe the company cares about them. You know, companies are very careful now to seem
00:27:28.580
caring and, you know, might even have good policies to that. What they often feel is unchallenged. They
00:27:35.620
don't feel that they are giving enough direct constructive feedback and guidance. And I think what's
00:27:41.440
happened is that, you know, of course there are exceptions. There are still workplaces that are full of
00:27:45.720
bullying and toxic behavior and aggression. But in many workplaces, I think there's been an
00:27:50.660
overcorrection to the point where we feel like anger has absolutely no place at all at work, because
00:27:55.740
if you're a boss, it can get you into trouble. If you're a peer, it can mark you out as, you know,
00:28:00.360
a problem, you know, someone who doesn't collaborate properly, all those sorts of things.
00:28:04.540
And we sort of lost the ability or perhaps we never had it in a work context to just sit with
00:28:09.440
somebody and say, you've angered me with what you've done there. And I think some of it is about this
00:28:14.060
and some of it might be about my own stuff, but can we talk it through? Instead, what happens now
00:28:19.200
is that someone pisses you off at work and you go to Slack and you find your ally and you slag them
00:28:26.320
off for a morning, you know, and it's the most unproductive thing that can be happening really.
00:28:31.200
And so work has become this area of life where there's so much unexpressed anger and so much
00:28:37.080
sort of frustration that we have with each other in private. I don't think it's healthy. And I think
00:28:42.800
part of it yet, as you say, is the fact that we've gone so far in the other direction with
00:28:47.100
trying to make sure that workplaces are kind of, you know, very polite and caring places. And that's
00:28:53.780
not a bad aim at all, but you know, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
00:28:57.540
Yeah. Work can feel just sort of like this mushy, amorphous, because anger can set boundaries. It can
00:29:03.720
push back when you need to, but when you don't have that, you lose that. And so people just feel like,
00:29:08.960
what are we doing? I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. What's the metric I'm supposed to hit?
00:29:12.800
And because they don't feel like they have any direction to work, they're like,
00:29:15.740
oh, I'm just not engaged and I'm going to bounce out.
00:29:19.400
Yeah, exactly. You know, people just feel like, well, what's the point of this? You know,
00:29:23.460
I'm not being challenged. I'm not being developed. And I think, you know, there's the bad boss.
00:29:28.620
You know, what used to be a bad boss was a kind of an obnoxious bully and they still exist. But
00:29:33.120
actually the more common bad boss now, I think is the one who's just afraid to upset you. You know,
00:29:36.980
they just want to be everyone's best friend and they want to be first down the pub and they want
00:29:40.180
everyone to like them. And I've been guilty of this, you know, as a manager over the years as
00:29:43.720
well. So I say it from a point of, you know, self-reflection as much as anything. But if you
00:29:49.440
don't have that gear where you can give honest feedback and say, when you're not happy with
00:29:54.260
someone, then no one really, you know, it's sort of stasis, isn't it? It's kind of, um, everything
00:29:59.400
gets quite, quite static and yeah, it's not good.
00:30:02.780
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure people have experienced this. They've had a boss that's very demanding,
00:30:06.260
strict, can seem angry, but sometimes they're like, I love working for that guy because we got
00:30:12.880
things done. Like I knew where I stood and it was productive. Um, I know I experienced that,
00:30:17.560
you know, when I played sports, I loved having that really stern kind of mean coach because like,
00:30:23.600
I knew that they were doing it for a purpose. Like I knew they wanted to help us win,
00:30:27.440
but then you had the coaches kind of your buddy, buddy and you slacked off.
00:30:31.120
Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You actually, you cite a study in the book that, uh, people
00:30:37.680
actually prefer an angry boss over non-angry boss, as long as they're angry and helpful.
00:30:45.740
Uh, and that just goes back to, you know, that, well, you know, they know what's expected
00:30:49.140
of them and they don't know that unless their boss says, you know, Hey, look, you messed up here.
00:30:53.740
So it's not a toxic anger. It's not bullying. Uh, but it's just being willing to say, you know,
00:30:59.040
I'm frustrated, uh, because you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. And then just for
00:31:03.680
everyone at work, when you're an employee, it's good to recognize when someone else is making you
00:31:08.140
angry and figure out what to do about it than to ignore it. Yeah. And it, and it comes back to that
00:31:14.040
idea of we're very good at spotting what anger has told us about someone else. It's the first bit
00:31:20.660
of information we get. We've been wrong. Somebody's done something that's pissed us off. You have to
00:31:25.720
like learn to ask yourself the second question, which is, well, what is this anger telling me
00:31:29.160
about me? And at work that often means I feel insecure. I'm not sure I'm respected enough on
00:31:34.580
this part of what I do. I'm under challenged by my boss. And so that's part of why I'm getting
00:31:40.180
frustrated with this, not working out. You know, if you, if you look at your anger and what it's
00:31:44.620
telling you at work, you actually get to the nub of like, what's making you unhappy a lot quicker
00:31:49.020
and addressing that as well as having the honest conversation from time to time,
00:31:54.040
but addressing that deeper unmet need that the anger is pointing you towards can be so useful.
00:31:58.940
And I've found it so useful in my career, looking at anger that way and thinking about what's really
00:32:05.200
making me frustrated here. Cause at the end of the day, we sort of know that like work isn't
00:32:08.700
that important, you know, like it's for most of us, it's something we do for money and, and,
00:32:13.420
and so on. But if you're losing sleep at the weekend over something at work, chances are,
00:32:18.760
you know, there's, there's something a little bit deeper going on than just someone sent the email.
00:32:22.240
Yeah. Well, this is useful. This goes back to that idea of transference. You talked about
00:32:25.920
earlier that Freud were like, sometimes we'll bring to the table a problem that we're experiencing
00:32:30.620
another person, like some of the stuff we dealt with as a kid. And so, you know, what, if you
00:32:35.860
experience that at work, if you experience anger at work, you have to ask yourself, okay, is it what
00:32:40.300
this person's doing? That's making me angry? Or is like, am I bringing something up from my past on
00:32:45.320
like how it was dealt with as a child? Like I'm, I'm transferring my dad treating me like making me
00:32:51.340
feel crappy to my boss giving me critical feedback. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that happens all the
00:32:58.460
time. And my, yeah, something I've had in, in my life is that sometimes people in charge of me really
00:33:05.020
bring out that people pleaser and, uh, you know, I'm desperate for their approval, you know, and
00:33:09.980
that's about my own baggage from the past. And it stops you sometimes from, uh, sticking up for
00:33:16.060
yourself. It can make you a bit of a pushover. It can mean people take advantage of you. And again,
00:33:20.480
that's not honoring your anger because you feel like there's no place for it or that it, how could
00:33:24.660
I possibly be angry with my boss? Well, of course you can be, you know, and maybe your inability to
00:33:30.080
feel it towards them is, as you say, is the case of transference. So it works the other way around.
00:33:34.400
You can be getting too pissed off with someone at work and they don't really deserve it. And you're
00:33:37.620
doing a bit of projecting from the past, or you can be underreacting to something at work,
00:33:42.020
which I see just as often. So yeah, the role of transference at work is so fascinating and not
00:33:47.200
many people have written about it that deeply, but I think there's a really good book to be
00:33:50.300
written on that and itself probably. Why is anger and an important emotion to experience in a
00:33:55.920
romantic relationship or even a friendship? So this comes down partly to a concept called
00:34:01.000
rupture and repair, which is basically that any healthy relationship, whether it's a friendship
00:34:05.980
or romantic relationship or parent and child goes through phases of rupture and repair where you
00:34:11.740
break apart symbolically, you know, you argue, you drift, and then you come back together and
00:34:16.300
reconcile and reaffirm your love for each other. And this is the flux that all healthy relationships
00:34:20.800
go through. When a relationship has no space for anger, when you have two people together who don't
00:34:26.960
know how to argue, don't know where to say that they're angry with each other, the rupture and repair
00:34:31.660
sort of gets, it gets snagged. It's not working properly and it can create this really sort of like
00:34:37.020
inauthentic, quite tense environment. I don't know if you, I mean, I've certainly been in
00:34:41.580
relationships a bit like that and, you know, you're wondering why things are a bit tense and
00:34:45.440
weird behind you. And it's almost like the weather before a storm, you know, like the storm needs to
00:34:49.720
break between you, but if you can't access your anger, then it doesn't happen. So anger is a really
00:34:55.200
important part of, of love. You know, if you don't know what makes your partner angry and if your
00:35:00.340
partner doesn't feel confident enough to show you when they're angry, then you're not really being your
00:35:05.620
full self with each other, right? It's about being, you know, it's an overused word now, but it's about
00:35:10.120
being authentic, isn't it? If you can't be angry and with the person that you were closest to
00:35:14.760
ostensibly and most linked with and tied up with, then something's not right. So yeah, anger is a huge
00:35:21.920
part of love. So how do we get better at recognizing anger in ourselves? Well, I think the first thing is
00:35:28.380
to really sit and think about what you think anger is. And I'm glad we started this conversation
00:35:33.260
talking about definitions because, you know, that has to be the starting point for people,
00:35:37.600
I think. And if you have in your head, the anger is an inherently catastrophic, dangerous thing or
00:35:44.140
something to be ashamed of, which is another thing a lot of people feel, then you really got to start
00:35:48.800
with resetting that and believing in yourself that like anger is an acceptable emotion. It's a neutral
00:35:54.020
emotion. It's something we have a choice about, but it's also something that we can't avoid.
00:35:58.340
There is no life without anger. Then it's about like learning, okay, well, if I'm not comfortable
00:36:04.600
with anger, like what do I do in its place? You know, what's my racket emotion? They call it in
00:36:09.260
psychology, which is when you replace one emotion with another one that you think is more acceptable.
00:36:14.500
So the classic racket emotion for women and anger is sadness. It's to start to cry.
00:36:19.440
And I spoke to many, you know, very professionally accomplished women who have this frustration of
00:36:24.800
like when they get angry at work, they start to cry. Another good example of a racket emotion is
00:36:29.480
the guy who you can't stop telling jokes when he's sad, the clown who's crying on the inside.
00:36:33.900
Figuring out what your racket emotion is, like what do you do when you're angry instead of be angry,
00:36:39.480
is like one way that you can start to get the pieces on the map to figure this thing out.
00:36:43.640
The next, which we touched on before, is to look at your body. So I know now when I grind my teeth,
00:36:48.720
and I don't know why I'm grinding my teeth, something's happened at some point recently that's made me
00:36:53.100
angry. And I'm just not ready to accept it yet, or I haven't quite come to terms with that yet.
00:36:57.560
So then I can kind of look at what's going on in my life at that moment, my relationships,
00:37:01.280
recent conversations, and try and find the thing that I'm angry about, because my body's telling
00:37:05.660
me that I'm angry, even though my mind hasn't quite caught up yet. So tuning into your body is a great
00:37:10.180
way to start to find your anger. You know, some people do use physical activities. I spoke to a
00:37:16.020
fascinating scientist who wrote a book about embodied emotion. And this is a form of meditation where you
00:37:21.880
sit and you meditate on an emotion. So anger, often it manifests somewhere in your diaphragm.
00:37:28.720
And you teach yourself the discipline of sitting with that feeling in your body for as long as you
00:37:34.120
can, and seeing where it spreads in other parts of your body. And I think this is what happened to me
00:37:39.400
boxing that day. You know, the anger spread to my arms, it was in other parts of my body. And the more you
00:37:44.540
spread it, the more empowered you feel by it, the greater you can carry that load of it. So there's lots of
00:37:49.720
interesting ways that you can start to find the anger when it doesn't seem to be there. I've got
00:37:54.220
into a habit of just anytime I'm going through an emotional experience or something significant
00:37:58.460
has happened, I ask myself, well, where's the anger here? Because there's going to be a little
00:38:02.180
bit of anger in response to most things. And so teaching myself to look for it, even when I don't
00:38:08.400
think it's there, is another way of just normalizing your relationship with the emotion.
00:38:13.380
And what's interesting by recognizing and then naming the emotion,
00:38:16.700
in a way that helps you kind of harness it and control it, right? If you just say,
00:38:22.360
I'm feeling angry right now, just the naming of it can go a long way for you to not let it get out
00:38:28.940
of control. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, naming it to yourself is powerful
00:38:33.640
enough. I think people are afraid of anger. One of the reasons they're afraid of it is they think,
00:38:37.760
well, if I accept that I'm angry, I'm going to have to do something scary, right? I'm going to have
00:38:41.720
to go and have it out with that person or get into a fight or, you know, whatever it is.
00:38:46.500
And it might lead to that, but you don't have to, you can just, as you say, you can name it in
00:38:50.900
yourself. You can name it in the conversation with somebody else. And that goes a long way.
00:38:56.480
And then you're kind of in a place where you're being curious about the emotion rather than
00:39:00.740
overwhelmed by it, you know, and you start seeing your response to it as a choice, but it has to start
00:39:05.780
with recognizing that it's there, you know, and this is a problem that so many people have and
00:39:09.700
spoke to some amazing people who had this challenge, you know, there's very accomplished,
00:39:14.040
sophisticated, intelligent people who could not name anger in themselves and found it really,
00:39:18.780
really difficult. So we kind of have to do that first bit. And then you start getting to the really
00:39:22.980
good stuff, which is like, okay, I'm comfortable with anger now. How am I going to act on it? Like,
00:39:27.580
what am I going to do with this insight? What am I going to do with this energy? How am I going to
00:39:30.620
use it to make my life better? Okay. So the first step in harnessing good anger is just naming it and
00:39:35.900
claiming it. What do you do after that? Because I mean, I think there's these misconceptions about
00:39:41.900
if you do recognize anger, like what you're supposed to do with it. One of them you talk
00:39:45.400
about is the whole, well, you're feeling angry to get rid of anger. You have to release it like a,
00:39:50.880
like a pressure valve. So you just got to yell and punch a pillow and break stuff in one of those
00:39:56.840
wrecking rooms that are there. Does that actually do anything for anger?
00:39:59.940
No, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm very skeptical of, of that. I mean, I think it can have symbolic value
00:40:05.640
and, uh, you know, the primal scream therapy, which I think we're about the same age. I think
00:40:11.400
we're probably both a bit too young for that era, but primal scream therapy was a big thing in the
00:40:15.260
seventies. Right. And it was this idea. You could go and scream out your bad emotions and
00:40:19.640
your, your difficult emotions could just be sort of vented from everything I've read. There's very
00:40:25.660
little evidence that that is genuinely cathartic. You know, you get a momentary release, but beyond
00:40:31.240
that, it doesn't really do anything for, for the anger itself. And, you know, part of the reason
00:40:35.780
is that you're not linking it to anything useful. So this is like, now we're back to the good anger
00:40:39.760
bit, right? If I go and smash a plate, cause I'm frustrated, it might feel good for 0.5 seconds,
00:40:45.320
but then all I'm left with is a smash plate. If I take that anger and I go and channel it into,
00:40:50.580
you know, you mentioned American football or boxing or something, the acquisition of a skill,
00:40:55.000
something that we see as being healthy and useful, then great. Okay. I've linked anger to,
00:41:00.060
to something useful. That's a good step on the road to using it. Well, socially, what it looks like is,
00:41:06.500
okay, I felt this anger. I've taken a moment to really be honest with myself about what it's
00:41:11.640
saying, not just about the other person, but me, what my unmet needs are, what my insecurities are.
00:41:16.300
I've got the measure of like how bad this thing is and I still need to do something about it. Well,
00:41:22.280
that means I'm going to have to go and have a conversation with this person.
00:41:25.340
And I'm going to have to find a way to say to them, I'm angry with you, which can be really
00:41:29.180
difficult. And then you work on a way forward together. That's, you know, defined by mutual
00:41:34.100
respect and empathy and everything that makes a conversation productive. But you know, you can't
00:41:40.560
just, um, siphon it out. It doesn't really work like that. And this is where we go wrong online as
00:41:45.100
well. Sorry to jump around a little bit, but you know, one of the problems with expressing anger on
00:41:51.340
social media, which is where most people do their, their venting now is that by design,
00:41:56.660
you know, these platforms don't want you to go anywhere. They certainly don't want us to have a
00:42:00.640
productive conversation with each other. So we can get on with our day, you know, having sort of
00:42:05.460
reached a good conclusion with our anger, they want us to stay frustrated. So what we get is the
00:42:09.720
opportunity to vent, to smash the plate, but absolutely no opportunity for a cathartic
00:42:14.780
resolution to the anger. So venting anger without purpose, without any sort of proper resolution is
00:42:21.860
not very useful for us. In fact, it's actually pretty unhealthy. It feels rubbish. And this is why,
00:42:26.480
you know, if you spend an afternoon on Twitter, arguing with someone and you're not listening to
00:42:30.860
each other, it feels crap. You know, no one walks away from that experience feeling good,
00:42:35.420
but you can walk away from the experience of being angry with someone in real life and feel great,
00:42:41.060
you know, because you can get to a point where you both feel more respected than you did before.
00:42:45.000
Yeah. So I, I've read research about the whole venting thing. They found that it actually just
00:42:48.580
makes you angrier, but it's like not a productive anger. You stew. Yeah. You just stew and just,
00:42:52.440
you feel more and more upset and more riled up. Right. And it doesn't do anything. No. So how can we
00:42:57.300
turn anger into, you call it a life force, an energy, that thing that Aristotle talked about where it
00:43:04.400
compels us to solve the problem, write a great book, create a great piece of art.
00:43:11.740
What can we do to make anger a positive energy in life force?
00:43:16.380
Well, I think, you know, you have to make a choice with what am I going to do with this energizing
00:43:20.460
feeling that I've got? You know, is it going to be the difficult conversation with someone?
00:43:23.960
It may be that that is impossible or undesirable. You know, it may be that tactically it's just not
00:43:29.240
the right thing. So the choice you're making is, am I going to channel this into a productive
00:43:34.260
conversation or am I actually just going to take the energy and turn it into the, I'll show you
00:43:38.080
energy. And I'm going to go and, you know, write the report that makes me outshine this person.
00:43:43.060
I'm going to go and work on the side project that's going to help me get out of this job where
00:43:47.340
I feel things are hopeless. You know, it's, it's making that choice about what you're going to do
00:43:51.660
with the energy that the anger has given you coupled with the insight that it's provided.
00:43:55.020
And then you take it forward. But I mean, talking about having it as something that's kind of
00:43:59.920
integrated into your life in a general sense, which is where I try and end the book and something
00:44:04.500
I'm still working towards myself. I think that takes a long time. And I think that one of the
00:44:11.540
beautiful things about being more in touch with anger is that paradoxically, it actually makes
00:44:15.760
you feel more at peace in other areas of your life. And this has been my experience. I used to have
00:44:21.460
quite an ungenerous interpretation of certain other people who might have certain traits or
00:44:26.140
behave in certain ways. And what I didn't realize I was doing was I was projecting a lot of the
00:44:30.740
frustrations I had and a lot of the anger that I wasn't really in touch with onto other people.
00:44:34.860
And I think people do this in politics. People do this online. People do this with,
00:44:38.840
you know, lots of different issues that are out there in the world at the moment.
00:44:42.860
Well, once you've actually integrated anger into sort of being a daily part of your life and you're
00:44:46.820
very comfortable with it and you're actually pretty kind of chill with it and you can have fun with it,
00:44:50.480
but act on it when you need to and all those things, you get a greater sense of balance and
00:44:55.340
how you see the world in general. And that was the lovely surprise for me when I've been able to
00:45:00.680
work on anger productively is how much more balance it's given me in the rest of my emotional life.
00:45:06.020
So I think that's what having anger on your side feels like most of the time.
00:45:11.940
I think this kind of goes into what Aristotle is saying. You experience the emotion of anger,
00:45:15.660
then you have to kind of stop and figure out, okay, how can I channel this for the right reasons
00:45:19.780
in the right amount. And even like the more nuanced Stoics had this idea too, that, okay,
00:45:24.080
you can, you don't have any control over the emotions you feel. You can't control how you
00:45:29.060
express or respond to that emotion. Any tactics you came across where, okay, you experienced the
00:45:36.220
emotion of anger, you feel it flare up, you name it. Any other things that work to sort of give you
00:45:42.660
that space so that you can formulate an appropriate response? Like, is it the counting to 10 thing or
00:45:49.220
leaving the room? Is that what you do? Yeah. So the count to 10 thing actually is not bad advice
00:45:54.220
per se, or it's like halfway there. So what is recommended physiologically? If you're in an
00:45:59.380
argument with your partner, let's say, and you've had the amygdala hijack, you've just,
00:46:03.000
you've lost your head. Somehow between you, you find the wisdom to say, okay, let's go cool off.
00:46:09.120
They reckon 20 minutes is about the amount of time that you need for your body to kind of reset
00:46:13.580
itself. In that time, rather than rehearse the thing you're going to say, or kind of obsess about
00:46:19.120
why you've been hard done by, if you can, you should go and listen to a podcast or read or do
00:46:25.000
something else to try and take your mind off it. That's the best way to reset yourself physiologically.
00:46:29.480
So that's, that's one thing. Another thing that I found really useful was this idea of the
00:46:34.820
discomfort caveat, which is where if you do have to have a conversation about something you're angry
00:46:40.840
about, and you, you, maybe you haven't quite had the time to calm down yet, as much as would be
00:46:45.640
ideal. It's confessing to the other person at the start of the conversation. It's saying, okay,
00:46:50.540
just so you know, I'm angry right now. I might struggle to express myself as clearly as I would
00:46:56.040
like to. And then you're immediately disarming that person. You might be angry with you and you're
00:47:00.520
kind of setting each other. You're setting the conversation of quite an empathic footing,
00:47:03.920
but you're also not pretending you're not angry. You're not betraying your anger. You're saying,
00:47:08.000
look, it's there and I'm going to have to get into it, but bear with me. And I think that can
00:47:11.320
be really useful. So there's definitely tips and things that you can employ to try and help you in
00:47:16.520
the moment. Um, I don't know if you've come across the idea of meta awareness, you know, that the
00:47:21.700
idea of trying to, it's kind of a mindfulness thing, really. It's like learning the inner curiosity
00:47:27.460
that you can have with emotions so that when you start to feel angry, you almost immediately try and
00:47:32.540
elevate above that in your consciousness and go, Hmm, okay, I'm, I'm angry right now. And, you know,
00:47:37.020
try and almost like third voice it to, to, to look at anger from, from a sort of zoomed out
00:47:42.100
perspective. If you can learn to do that, that can help you in the moment as well, not become so
00:47:46.560
overwhelmed. So there's definitely techniques out there. Yeah. I mean, it's been interesting to watch
00:47:50.620
my 14 year old son trying to get a handle on his emotions. You know, he's got hormones coursing
00:47:56.640
through them. So of course you're feeling big emotions. And the other day he was having,
00:48:00.480
starting to have like a, he calls it a crash. I was like, Oh, you know, just, it's like the dumb
00:48:03.520
teenager stuff. But then he, I think he had this, this self-awareness. I was really proud. He's like,
00:48:07.220
I got to go take a walk. So he went for a walk and he came back 10 minutes later and he was just
00:48:11.520
calm and collected. And he was able to talk about the situation in a cool, calm, collected way. And it
00:48:16.720
was productive. I mean, I have to say, first of all, there's no chance I could have done that at 14.
00:48:21.360
Um, uh, and secondly, I think that's about as good, uh, example of, you know, good anger that
00:48:26.500
I can think of. I mean, that's, I think that's perfect. You know, go give yourself the time you
00:48:30.360
need, admit to the feeling and then come back and get into it productively. But you know,
00:48:35.380
you don't want to wait too long that the anger has passed completely. That's the other thing is
00:48:38.380
that you still want to act when the energy is there or it just kind of gets repressed or you lose
00:48:43.720
confidence in it. Was I really, you know, am I in the right actually? You can, you can start to doubt
00:48:49.440
yourself if you leave it too long. But yeah, I think that sounds like a great example.
00:48:53.360
Sam, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your
00:48:56.100
work? So, uh, I do have a sub stack that's also called good anger. The book can be ordered on,
00:49:02.380
you know, all the usual, usual places and yeah, just good anger is, is out now. Thank you for
00:49:08.460
such a great conversation. I've really enjoyed it.
00:49:10.560
Well, thank you, Sam. I enjoyed it too. My guest here is Sam Parker. He's the author of the book,
00:49:15.140
good anger. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information
00:49:19.020
about his work at his sub stack, good anger.substack.com. Also check out our show notes
00:49:23.560
at awim.is slash good anger. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:49:35.340
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:49:39.100
at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And while you're there, sign up for the
00:49:43.040
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00:49:58.720
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00:50:02.040
it's Brett McKay. Remind you to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.