Zen And The Art Of Breaking Things

We’ve talked before about identifying emotions and the importance of being able to express them:

Answering The Most Difficult Question: How Are You?

However, there can be a difference between “expressing how we feel” and “being possessed by how we feel and bulldozing everything in our path”

…which is, of course, primarily a problem in the case of anger—and by extension, emotions that are often contemporaneous with anger, such as jealousy, shame, fear, etc.

How much feeling is too much?

While this is in large part a subjective matter, clinically speaking the key question is generally: is it adversely affecting daily life to the point of being a problem?

For example, if you have to spend half an hour every day actively managing a certain emotion, that’s probably indicative of something unusual, but “unusual” is not inherently bad. If you’re managing it safely and in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the rest of your life, then that is generally considered fine, unless you feel otherwise about it.

A good example of this is complicated grief and/or prolonged grief.

But what about when it comes to anger? How much is ok?

When it comes to those around you, any amount of anger can seem like too much. Anger often makes us short-tempered even with people who are not the object of our anger, and it rarely brings out the best in us.

We can express our feelings in non-aggressive ways, for example:

When You “Can’t Complain”

and

Seriously Useful Communication Skills!

Sometimes, there’s another way though…

Breathe; don’t vent

That’s a great headline, but we can’t take the credit for it, because it came from:

Breathe, don’t vent: turning down the heat is key to managing anger

…in which it was found that, by all available metrics, the popular wisdom of “getting it off your chest” doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny, at least in the short term:

❝The work was inspired in part by the rising popularity of rage rooms that promote smashing things (such as glass, plates and electronics) to work through angry feelings.

I wanted to debunk the whole theory of expressing anger as a way of coping with it,” she said. “We wanted to show that reducing arousal, and actually the physiological aspect of it, is really important.❞

~ Dr. Brad Bushman

And indeed, he and his team did find that various arousal-increasing activities (such as hitting a punchbag, breaking things, doing vigorous exercise) did not help as much as arousal-decreasing activities, such as mindfulness-based relaxation techniques.

If you’d like to read the full paper, then so would we, but we couldn’t get full access to this one yet. However, the abstract includes representative statistics, so that’s worth a once-over:

A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage?

Caveat!

Did you notice the small gap between their results and their conclusion?

In a lab or similar short-term observational setting, their recommendation is clearly correct.

However, if the source of your anger is something chronic and persistent, it could well be that calming down without addressing the actual cause is just “kicking the can down the road”, and will still have to actually be dealt with eventually.

So, while “here be science”, it’s not a mandate for necessarily suffering in silence. It’s more about being mindful about how we go about tackling our anger.

As for a primer on mindfulness, feel free to check out:

No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

Take care!

What’s In A Dream?

We were recently asked:

❝I have a question or a suggestion for coverage in your “Psychology Sunday”. Dreams: their relevance, meanings ( if any) interpretations? I just wondered what the modern psychological opinions are about dreams in general.❞

~ 10almonds subscriber

There are two main schools of thought, and one main effort to reconcile those two. The third one hasn’t quite caught on so far as to be considered a “school of thought” yet though.

The Top-Down Model (Psychoanalysts)

Psychoanalysts broadly follow the theories of Freud, or at least evolved from there. Freud was demonstrably wrong about very many things. Most of his theories have been debunked and ditched—hence the charitable “or at least evolved from there” phrasing when it comes to modern psychoanalytic schools of thought. Perhaps another day, we’ll go into all the ways Freud went wrong. However, for today, one thing he wasn’t bad at…

According to Freud, our dreams reveal our subconscious desires and fears, sometimes directly and sometimes dressed in metaphor.

Examples of literal representations might be:

• sex dreams (revealing our subconscious desires; perhaps consciously we had not thought about that person that way, or had not considered that sex act desirable)
• getting killed and dying (revealing our subconscious fear of death, not something most people give a lot of conscious thought to most of the time)

Examples of metaphorical representations might be:

• dreams of childhood (revealing our subconscious desires to feel safe and nurtured, or perhaps something else depending on the nature of the dream; maybe a return to innocence, or a clean slate)
• dreams of being pursued (revealing our subconscious fear of bad consequences of our actions/inactions, for example, responsibilities to which we have not attended, debts are a good example for many people; or social contact where the ball was left in our court and we dropped it, that kind of thing)

One can read all kinds of guides to dream symbology, and learn such arcane lore as “if you dream of your teeth crumbling, you have financial worries”, but the truth is that “this thing means that other thing” symbolic equations are not only highly personal, but also incredibly culture-bound.

For example:

• To one person, bees could be a symbol of feeling plagued by uncountable small threats; to another, they could be a symbol of abundance, or of teamwork
• One culture’s “crow as an omen of death” is another culture’s “crow as a symbol of wisdom”
  • For that matter, in some cultures, white means purity; in others, it means death.

Even such classically Freudian things as dreaming of one’s mother and/or father (in whatever context) will be strongly informed by one’s own waking-world relationship (or lack thereof) with same. Even in Freud’s own psychoanalysis, the “mother” for the sake of such analysis was the person who nurtured, and the “father” was the person who drew the nurturer’s attention away, so they could be switched gender roles, or even different people entirely than one’s parents.

The only real way to know what, if anything, your dreams are trying to tell you, is to ask yourself. You can do that…

• by reflection and personal interrogation (see for example: The Easiest Way To Take Up Journaling)
• or by externalising parts of your subconscious (as in Internal Family Systems therapy)
• or by talking directly to your subconscious where it is, by means of lucid dreaming.

The idea with lucid dreaming is that since any dream character is a facet of your subconscious generated by your own mind, by talking to that character you can ask questions directly of your subconscious (the popular 2010 movie “Inception” was actually quite accurate in this regard, by the way).

To read more about how to do this kind of self-therapy through lucid dreaming, you might want to check out this book we reviewed previously; it is the go-to book of lucid dreaming enthusiasts, and will honestly give you everything you need in one go:

Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life – by Dr. Stephen LaBerge

The Bottom-Up Model (Neuroscientists)

This will take a lot less writing, because it’s practically a null hypothesis (i.e., the simplest default assumption before considering any additional evidence that might support or refute it; usually some variant of “nothing unusual going on here”).

The Bottom-Up model holds that our brains run regular maintenance cycles during REM sleep (a biological equivalent of defragging a computer), and the brain interprets these pieces of information flying by and, because of the mind’s tendency to look for patterns, fills in the rest (much like how modern generative AI can “expand” a source image to create more of the same and fill in the blanks), resulting in the often narratively wacky, but ultimately random, vivid hallucinations that we call dreams.

The Hybrid Model (per Cartwright, 2012)

This is really just one woman’s vision, but it’s an incredibly compelling one, that takes the Bottom-Up model and asks “what if we did all that bio-stuff, and then our subconscious mind influenced the interpretation of the random patterns, to create dreams that are subjectively meaningful, and thus do indeed represent our subconscious?

It’s best explained in her own words, though, so it’s time for another book recommendation (we’ve reviewed this one before, too):

The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives – by Dr. Rosalind Cartwright

Enjoy!