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!