The Art of Manliness - Good Anger — Harnessing a Misunderstood Emotion

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.420 Most people think of anger as a problem, something to avoid or repress. It's irrational,

00:00:16.960 immature, and best left behind. But what if anger isn't bad? What if it can actually be

00:00:22.120 an incredibly positive, productive, and energizing life force? My guest argues we've misunderstood

00:00:27.580 anger and that doing so has made us more anxious, depressed, and stuck. His name is Sam Parker,

00:00:33.220 and he's a journalist and the author of Good Anger, How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives.

00:00:38.460 Today on the show, we explore the surprising psychology and philosophy of anger. Sam explains

00:00:42.940 how anger should be understood as a neutral emotion that imparts valuable information.

00:00:46.880 He shares why we confuse anger with aggression, how anger can point to unmet needs and violated

00:00:51.260 boundaries, and why repressing it can be damaging our health. We also talk about anger's role in work,

00:00:56.060 creativity, and relationships, and how to channel anger. It helps achieve more,

00:01:00.220 maintain our self-respect, and live a more grounded life. If you ever thought anger was something to

00:01:04.880 outgrow, this conversation may just change your mind. After the show's over, check out our show notes

00:01:09.480 at awim.is slash goodanger. All right, Sam Parker, welcome to the show.

00:01:26.920 Hey, thanks for having me.

00:01:27.820 So you got a book out called Good Anger, How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. This is all

00:01:32.800 about, you did a deep dive into the emotion of anger that we often think of as something problematic.

00:01:39.680 How did a 10-minute session with a heavy bag kickstart an exploration of anger?

00:01:46.580 Well, I was having a year of anxiety and thought that the way to get out of that was to learn to

00:01:52.520 relax. And so I've been trying all these different wellness techniques to do that, and everything from

00:01:58.620 sort of yoga and meditation, so, you know, stuff that's been proven for a very long time, to cold

00:02:03.180 plunging and gratitude journaling, some of the more modern stuff. And nothing was working for me. And

00:02:08.360 I was trying out various exercises at this time in my life, and boxing was one of them. I'd never

00:02:14.220 really been a boxing guy before. And one morning while I was going about my sort of regime, as such

00:02:20.720 as it was, punching away at the bag, about 10 minutes in, I felt this strange surge of energy

00:02:26.020 kind of coming up from somewhere lower down in my body. And I just started punching and swinging

00:02:31.200 away with like, this kind of energy that I'd never had before, but also this feeling that I'd never

00:02:36.760 had before in my body. And this went on for, you know, however long I managed to box for. And

00:02:41.960 afterwards, I was kind of sweating and bent over, exhausted, but I felt better than I had in months.

00:02:49.240 And I realized that the feeling that I tapped into was anger. I was absolutely furious. And I was

00:02:55.100 thinking about the things in my life that were going wrong and the conversations I needed to

00:02:59.600 have to put them right. And everything was kind of unfurling beautifully in my thoughts. Everything

00:03:03.680 was looking like targets rather than things to be afraid of. And my relationship with anger until

00:03:09.340 this point had been pretty much non-existent. I believed that anger was sort of a nuisance emotion,

00:03:15.060 something that if you're sophisticated, you've kind of moved beyond something that flared up now and

00:03:20.540 then that you had to get rid of as quickly as you could. And I'd never really considered that

00:03:24.600 anger could be a source of power and energy. And that was what I got a glimpse of that day at the

00:03:29.560 bag. And so as a journalist, I thought, okay, I'm going to explore this with the most open mind that

00:03:35.220 I possibly can. I'm going to come at it with a blank slate and see where it leads me. And that was the

00:03:40.140 start of the book. Okay. So let's talk about this. What is anger? I think a lot of us, if you describe

00:03:45.520 like, what does it feel like to be angry? We could describe it like, but how do the psychologists describe

00:03:49.960 anger, maybe philosophers even, how do they describe what anger is? So there are five core

00:03:54.940 emotions. Most psychologists are in agreement with this. Anger is one of them. And the mistake we

00:03:59.860 make is to conflate anger with aggression or even violence as though they're the same thing.

00:04:04.260 And it's actually a little bit of an anomaly because when you think about it, if I was to say to you,

00:04:08.940 I saw such and such yesterday, he was really sad. You wouldn't immediately picture that person

00:04:13.840 crying in the corner, you know, curled up in a ball. But if I say to you, I saw such and such,

00:04:18.900 and he was angry, quite often people immediately think that means that they were ranting and raving,

00:04:23.600 that they were, you know, getting into some kind of confrontation. They needed to be calmed

00:04:26.700 down physically. They're two separate things. So anger is a healthy emotion. It gets called a

00:04:31.420 negative emotion because we don't always enjoy the experience of it, but not because it's negative

00:04:35.500 in that it's inherently bad for us or wrong or needs to be gotten rid of. It's an emotion. And then

00:04:41.380 aggression and violence is a behavioral choice. It doesn't always feel that way, but it is.

00:04:46.160 And when you start to separate out the idea of anger, the healthy emotion, that's actually

00:04:51.000 neutral, that you can act on however you want, and aggression and violence, which is a behavioral

00:04:54.900 choice, that's when you can start to have a calmer relationship with anger yourself.

00:04:59.740 The best way to think of aggression actually is as a rejection of anger. Because when we get

00:05:04.180 aggressive, what we're really saying is we can't tolerate the insecurity, the pain, the fear,

00:05:09.180 the disrespect, whatever it is that the anger is pointing us towards, we find intolerable. So we get

00:05:14.100 rid of it by losing our temper. So we feel certain things with certain emotions. So when you

00:05:18.800 experience sadness, you feel low, you feel like you don't want to do anything. When you experience

00:05:23.700 happiness, you feel excited. How do we feel when we experience anger?

00:05:29.000 Well, one thing you feel is a surge of energy. And I think that's the thing that people don't

00:05:33.100 always know what to do with. And so, you know, the classic sort of stereotype of, you know, smashing a

00:05:37.980 plate or kicking a wall or something like that, you know, you feel like a, some people call it an

00:05:42.500 amygdala flooding, which is when that part of your brain becomes flooded with chemicals. And so

00:05:48.120 you become momentarily disorientated. You can struggle to articulate yourself. You can struggle

00:05:53.300 to understand your own thoughts, all the rest of it. It's a bit of a sort of mental scrambling.

00:05:58.560 So that's rage. That's when it overtakes you in a big flash. You can, of course, experience anger on

00:06:03.940 a lower level where it's more of an irritation. Yeah, it's not a positive emotion. Like it normally

00:06:08.300 doesn't feel great. I mean, you can get like a flush of righteousness that can feel kind of good.

00:06:13.600 But for most people, yeah, anger is not a positive emotion, which is one of the many reasons why

00:06:18.660 having a sort of conversation about its uses can be difficult to get off the ground because people

00:06:23.140 immediately think it's, it's almost like a paradox. What do you mean good anger? What do you mean healthy

00:06:27.020 anger? But that's a misunderstanding of what emotions are. You know, they're not about feeling good or bad.

00:06:33.040 They're about giving us useful information about something we need to change in our life.

00:06:36.600 So what kind of useful information does anger give us? Like what do the psychologist hypothesize

00:06:41.780 it's trying to tell us? So the hypothesis is that there's three basic buckets of information that

00:06:47.360 anger is offering to us. The first is like a boundary violation. So this is like the most

00:06:51.800 straightforward, you know, like if you bump into me in the street, that's a boundary violation.

00:06:55.840 I'm going to step back and go, you know, whoa, whatever. I'm going to engage my anger to protect myself

00:07:00.640 in some way, whether verbally or physically. The second thing it can be alert to is an unmet need.

00:07:05.900 Like something is wrong in our life. And I think this is useful in things like a work context where

00:07:11.060 the action of a colleague, let's say, makes you feel really angry, but it feels a little bit out

00:07:17.720 of proportion to the thing that they've done. Right. And you're kind of like, oh, that's annoyed me

00:07:22.480 more than I can. Why is this annoying me quite so much? And then you can analyze that and you can go,

00:07:26.420 well, maybe I don't feel like I'm respected well enough by this person or perhaps my boss or perhaps

00:07:31.480 the wider team on this point. Right. So there's an unmet need there that I need to address as

00:07:35.460 something that isn't, that isn't quite lining up in my life can work well in relationships as well.

00:07:40.680 So sometimes it's an unmet need. The third thing anger can be alerting us to, which is trickier

00:07:45.400 is a wound from the past. So it is reminding us in a way that psychologists would call transference.

00:07:51.520 It's reminding us, or it's taking us back to a time in our life when we felt helpless or disrespected.

00:07:56.760 And so our anger in the moment belongs more to the past. And I think this happens with kids quite a

00:08:01.260 lot. You know, sometimes the way your kids act around, you can just make you so full of rage in

00:08:06.400 a way that you know doesn't really belong to them because they're too young to really have

00:08:09.480 meant it in the way that it feels. Often that's because it's reminding you of something in the

00:08:14.160 past that maybe you still need to address or work on. So there's kind of like three layers of depth

00:08:18.560 of information that anger is pointing us towards. Usually sometimes it's a mixture.

00:08:22.160 You talk about how psychologists make a distinction between trait anger and state anger. What's the

00:08:27.560 difference between those two?

00:08:29.520 Yeah. So trait anger is like a fixed personality trait and it is partly genetic. It does vary

00:08:37.600 from person to person. And this is where we're really talking about temperament. And state anger

00:08:42.800 is when you are experiencing anger in the moment because of something that's happened. And that comes

00:08:47.540 for all of us, whether we are, you know, people who have high trait anger or not. And the book

00:08:52.120 is really about how do we deal with the state anger and how do we get better at recognizing

00:08:57.000 it's there? Because if you're anything like me, someone who thought they have no relationship

00:09:00.840 with anger at all, then even recognizing when state anger has come along is very, very difficult.

00:09:05.820 And I think this sits at the root of anxiety and depression for a lot of people.

00:09:09.540 Yeah. We'll talk more about that, how depression and anxiety might be a mask for anger, but walks

00:09:14.920 through a history of anger. You do this too. Look at the philosophy of anger and that's why

00:09:19.840 we have such a conflicted view about it. We typically think of it as like, oh, it's a bad

00:09:23.680 thing. I don't want to experience anger. But sometimes we think, oh, well, sometimes anger

00:09:27.120 is good, you know, that righteous indignation. So why do we have such a conflicted view of this

00:09:32.260 emotion?

00:09:34.280 It's, I mean, anger was the subject of the first self-help book, arguably, which was Seneca in AD

00:09:40.720 45. He wrote a book called On Anger and he dismissed it as the most intractable of all the

00:09:46.260 passions. He called it a monster that we needed to banish from the human experience. So we've kind

00:09:51.120 of been debating whether anger is a good thing or not for a very, very long time. The way I trace

00:09:56.460 it in the book was really through the story of Christianity. That was the backdrop to my upbringing.

00:10:02.240 It's obviously been a huge shaping hand on Western civilization. So there were many places you can

00:10:06.760 start the history of anger. I decided to go with religion. The seven deadly sins began as eight 1.00

00:10:13.280 evil thoughts, which was a list written down in a desert just outside Alexandria by a hermit monk

00:10:19.500 who was writing a handbook for other monks on how to live a pious and good life. That idea kind of

00:10:27.260 got passed down through the generations and over time it evolved into the seven deadly sins. And

00:10:31.640 that became the kind of moral checklist by which early Christian societies were judged, right?

00:10:37.360 So we kind of just absorbed this idea that anger was a sin, anger was sort of inherently bad,

00:10:41.980 but there were some kind of renegades in that history, in that story from ancient times to now.

00:10:47.720 And I talk about some of them in the book. Aristotle was much more balanced on anger. He believed that

00:10:53.840 we should pursue feelings and appetites with neither excess nor defect. And he had this term for it,

00:10:59.380 hexis, which is an ancient Greek word that means a relatively stable arrangement, which I love.

00:11:04.300 And he, you know, Aristotle didn't condemn anger as a sin. He linked it to courage and dignity. He thought

00:11:09.140 it could motivate us to stand up for justice. But his, his was a sort of minority view. And it was

00:11:14.640 one that got kind of lost when his writings got lost. Jumping forward to the Middle Ages, Thomas

00:11:19.600 Aquinas, who was one of the most formative Christian thinkers in the history of the church. Around the

00:11:25.180 Middle Ages, Aristotle's writing was rediscovered. And he was the one that sort of took up the challenge

00:11:29.980 of trying to assimilate what Aristotle had to say into the sort of Christian doctrine of the time. So he took

00:11:35.580 a more moderate position on anger as well. So there are people throughout the history who have had

00:11:40.780 this more balanced view of it. But the dominant view and the one that we still live with now is

00:11:45.940 the idea that anger is a sin.

00:11:48.080 Yeah, your section on the history of anger and Stoicism was interesting because I think it's

00:11:52.760 really relevant today because, you know, Stoicism has become really popular again. I mean, for the

00:11:57.220 Stoics, you know, anger was a negative thing. They saw anger not as a sign of strength, but as like a

00:12:03.520 temporary madness, it was a loss of reason. And that contrast with Aristotle who said, no, you know,

00:12:09.480 anger, if you use it in the right way, can actually be a really productive emotion. But the trick is

00:12:14.680 trying to figure out how to be angry at the right things at the right moment in the right amount.

00:12:22.120 Right. Yeah. And he called that good temper. Seneca was very clear that he was, you know,

00:12:27.940 not a fan of anger in any shape or form. I think the other Stoics had a bit more balance to their view

00:12:33.480 and some of what they taught about, you know, framing emotions in the right way and so on is

00:12:39.220 useful in this discussion as well. I wouldn't want to sort of say that the Stoics were completely

00:12:42.560 wrong on anger, but yeah, for sure they were more disapproving of it than people like Aristotle.

00:12:47.500 But, you know, I think there's useful stuff in all of that, really. I mean, even Seneca had useful

00:12:51.400 things to say about anger, but you've got to remember the context these people lived in, right? I mean,

00:12:55.720 Seneca, I think he worked for Caligula, who was mad enough to declare war on the sea at one point. 0.58

00:13:02.320 You know, there was a lot of bad anger going around at that point in history. So I can kind

00:13:05.840 of see why, you know, it got a worse rep than it needs to today, perhaps.

00:13:10.880 So Aristotle and Aquinas, are they kind of laying the foundation for what you call good anger?

00:13:15.780 I'd say so. I mean, the quote that you mentioned there is one that I opened the book with,

00:13:20.580 you know, Aristotle talking about being angry is easy, but being angry with the right person in the

00:13:24.900 right way to the right amount is difficult. And that really is the crux of it, I think.

00:13:28.820 It's, you know, it's interesting to me that in the public mental health conversation,

00:13:34.360 we have done so much to destigmatize sadness and fear, which is depression and anxiety. We've come

00:13:40.300 to a much more sophisticated place with that. Anger, we haven't, and there's many reasons for that.

00:13:45.220 And one of them is just that it's so difficult. You know, this mastering anger, I don't believe you

00:13:50.380 ever can fully, but trying to master anger is really difficult, really difficult stuff.

00:13:55.880 And so even that framework that Aristotle laid out, when you read it, it's like, my God,

00:14:01.480 yeah, that really is difficult. And whether you apply it to big or small issues in your life,

00:14:05.240 it's very, very challenging. But if you can get it right, or you can get it half right,

00:14:09.260 you're in a much better position than if you ignore anger or you let it overcome you.

00:14:12.940 Yeah, I think that difficulty of harnessing anger is why we often take an either or approach to it.

00:14:18.320 It's like, well, it's going to be harder to do it right. So I just try not to be angry at all.

00:14:22.480 Yeah, exactly. And that makes sense. Right. And that's certainly how I

00:14:25.720 lived for a very long time. What I didn't clock was that it was making me physically and mentally

00:14:30.180 ill. So, you know, it's the price that we pay for that anger suppression bit is I think what

00:14:36.140 we're just starting to wake up to. And I think that's the conversation that we need to have on

00:14:40.280 a sort of broader level.

00:14:42.000 So what are the benefits of good anger? So you mentioned Aristotle connected it to

00:14:46.340 courage and action. I guess anger just gets you to do things in the world?

00:14:51.180 Yeah, well, I think, you know, anger is a voice that says to you primarily that you're

00:14:56.760 worth defending. If you can't get angry on your own behalf, when somebody has wronged you in

00:15:02.000 some way, then you're not valuing yourself really, you know, it's incredibly energizing

00:15:07.200 emotion as well, the most energizing emotion of them all. You know, sadness makes us in a

00:15:11.780 fear makes us in a love can be very motivating, but you need to be angry on behalf of the thing

00:15:16.680 that you love to defend it. So yeah, I mean, it has a lot to offer us in terms of wisdom.

00:15:21.100 It has a lot to offer us in terms of energy. It can be the difference between standing up

00:15:26.440 for ourselves and not, it can be the difference between really going after the thing that we

00:15:31.540 want to go after. I call it the FU energy. And I interviewed one woman in the book who

00:15:37.220 had been in prison as a teenager. She was a drug addict. Her name is Marcia Reynolds.

00:15:42.320 She's an amazing Ted talk on the energy of anger. And she talks about the fact that the

00:15:47.700 emotion that got her not only out of jail, but to the top of a business, uh, to be an

00:15:51.740 incredibly successful professional person was the, I'll show you anger that she felt

00:15:56.980 at the way she'd been let down by people early in her life or, or, or dismissed as a lost

00:16:01.980 cause by society and the people around her because she went to jail. And she says she wrote

00:16:06.620 that FU I'll show you energy of anger, you know, right the way to a top of a business.

00:16:11.220 So I don't believe there's any other emotion available to us that could have quite done

00:16:14.460 that for her. That's what she felt.

00:16:16.400 I love reading biographies of artists or writers. And it's amazing how many times a writer or

00:16:21.940 painter put out a great piece of work just to show someone like, Hey, I got this. You

00:16:28.900 you're wrong. I'm going to show you.

00:16:31.380 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's the great Beethoven example that I mentioned in the book. I can't

00:16:34.980 remember the name of the, um, the piece of music, but he had originally written a tribute to

00:16:40.300 Napoleon who he very much admired. And then before he'd finished the piece of music, Napoleon

00:16:45.160 declared himself emperor of the French, which scandalized Beethoven because he saw it as

00:16:50.080 a betrayal of the ideals of, of the, uh, of the revolution. And so he wrote a different

00:16:54.380 piece of music to our ears is this steering, beautiful piece of music, but for him was an

00:16:59.220 attack on Napoleon, the memory of a great man. He said it was a tribute to, and this piece

00:17:03.820 of music, I wish I could remember the name of it, the symphony, but it transformed, uh, the

00:17:08.220 course of Western music. I mean, people were listening to it in Vienna and literally falling

00:17:11.840 off their chairs, you know? So there's loads of great examples of anger inspiring, not just

00:17:17.240 like heavy metal and, you know, sort of angry per se music or art, but you know, quite beautiful

00:17:22.220 art often has come from an angry place, a desire to give the world something it didn't have

00:17:27.300 before by getting into conflict with it, you know? So yeah, I agree that the link between

00:17:30.940 anger and creativity is also under, under discussed, but very strong.

00:17:34.520 Yeah. I didn't know if I, I've experienced that using anger as a motivating force. You

00:17:38.160 know, when I played American football in high school, one thing I sometimes did, I would

00:17:43.020 just imagine the guy across from me on the line as just like, you're just this evil dude

00:17:47.480 and I'm just going to demolish. And like, I'm sure the guy, the guy was probably really

00:17:50.680 nice, great kid. Um, but I needed that energy to play.

00:17:55.680 Yeah. Well, I said to my, my nephew who's 11 at the time, I asked him about anger and how

00:18:01.140 he used it. And he's a very sweet and loving boy. And he said that he was warming up for

00:18:06.160 a park run, which is a thing in England where people do a 5k together at the weekends. And

00:18:11.380 he saw a woman being rude to someone else and felt angry at her. And so quietly he decided

00:18:17.800 he was going to beat her in the race. And so he just enacted this, this noble revenge

00:18:23.520 and quiet and just lapped her a couple of times around the race. And she would never have

00:18:27.000 known, you know, but he used that as motivation. He used that as fuel for his run. So yeah,

00:18:31.040 I love that example. Yeah. And I think I interviewed proper boxers and things in the book and, you

00:18:36.300 know, they talk about using anger in a very calm and considered ways. You know, you can't

00:18:41.860 hate your opponent. You can't lose your temper at them because then you're in trouble, but

00:18:46.080 you can channel your dislike of them or the disrespect you feel they showed you or something

00:18:50.380 like that. And, and use the anger in a sort of calm and powerful way. And I think sport

00:18:55.480 is a great way to do that. One thing you explore is how men and women experience anger

00:19:01.320 differently. What's the difference there? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, what probably

00:19:06.740 the longest standing myth about anger is that it's gendered and somehow belongs to men. And

00:19:11.280 I think that comes back a lot to the conflation with aggression and violence, because statistically,

00:19:17.480 you know, most acts of violence and aggression are carried out by men. But in terms of actually

00:19:22.000 just feeling the emotion, this has been studied since at least the 1950s as a guy called Arnold

00:19:27.340 H. Buss, who was kind of the great psychologist when it came to measuring anger and hostility

00:19:32.460 in individuals, he was a pioneer of it. And he studied this sort of supposed gender gap

00:19:37.560 from the 1950s all the way up to the 1990s and concluded very clearly that there was no

00:19:41.860 difference between the sexes in terms of experiencing the emotion of anger. Interestingly, that may have

00:19:46.920 slightly changed recently. There was a Gallup poll in 2022 that saw women pulling ahead of men

00:19:53.300 globally for the first time in feelings of anger. I think the anger gap is now at about 6%. So if

00:19:58.700 anything, if we're going to gender anger, we could say that women are angry with the men at the 0.80

00:20:01.740 moment. But no, it's an emotion that the genders feel equally. The differences in how we express it 0.92

00:20:06.980 typically. My tendency towards suppression and repression is a more classically female way of 0.89

00:20:13.140 dealing with anger, responding to anger. Men, you know, tend to be more likely to be anger out,

00:20:19.060 which is the people who become to become aggressive. So there is a difference in how we

00:20:22.740 express it and also how we socialize it and how we condemn it. You know, I think a woman who loses her

00:20:31.140 temper in public is going to be viewed in a worse light in a lot of ways than a man who does. We still

00:20:37.760 live with that sort of inequality, I think. And you talk about too, not only are men and women

00:20:43.680 socialized differently and how to express anger, but there's like physiological differences in our

00:20:47.600 brain that tends to cause men to express anger through aggression and women not to. Like they're

00:20:57.380 slower to express it through aggression than men are. Yeah, this is one theory. The part of the brain

00:21:03.640 that moderates risk-taking behavior is stronger in women than men. And so if you extrapolate that to

00:21:12.300 an instance where you get angry, men are more likely to take the risky path in expressing their

00:21:17.340 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-

00:25:48.420 Or even though it's there.

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 0.98

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. 1.00

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 0.98

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 0.99

00:48:03.520 teenager stuff. But then he, I think he had this, this self-awareness. I was really proud. He's like, 0.97

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

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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.

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The Art of Manliness - September 02, 2025

Good Anger — Harnessing a Misunderstood Emotion

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