Anger Makes Us Stupid

Everyone knows what it’s like to be angry. Our hearts beat faster, our chest tightens , we feel fixated on the person or thing that caused our anger, and we start thinking about how we can get even.

Anger is a natural human reaction to situations that we don’t like, but it isn’t a very effective one. If you take a moment to think about the consequences of anger, you might realize that it rarely solves whatever the problem was that provoked it. If we become angry about another person‘s behavior, it probably won’t result in changing their behavior. if we become angry about an unfavorable event that happens to us, our anger will do nothing to reverse what has happened.

What’s worse is the anger inhibits our ability to respond to the situation intelligently. There have been psychological studies that have shown that people process information less thoroughly and judge others more harshly when they’re angry. This can cause us to behave in ways that only perpetuates anger instead of addressing at cause.

In short, being angry, makes us stupid. We make horrible decisions, and most often regret the things we’ve said in the heat of it.

Anger is fully related to our instinctual fight or flight response. Anger is marked by psychological activity that prepares our body to fight off an aggressor, such as a release of adrenaline in our brain and increased blood flow to our muscles.

For our early ancestors, anger was auseful motion. It helped them control or kill animals, or other humans who pose a threat to their life. Angers, natural intensification of “us or them” making also might have been useful for protecting the tribe during conflict, increasing the individuals chances for long term survival.

The survival benefits of anger in rendered mostly obsolete in modern civilization. Physical assault and murder are not acceptable in our society. Today we are expected to solve interpersonal disputes, using logic, reason and understanding. This is much harder to do when we are angry.

Anger is not caused by what happened to us, but by how we habitually think about things. For example, if a stranger on the street makes a rude comment toward us, we can view it in one of two ways, as a personal attack on our character, or an outburst that reflects more on the speaker than on you. If we think about the situation in the first way, we are much more likely to become become angered.

There’s a way to change our thinking so we are less angered. The first step is to desensitize ourselves to our environmental triggers.

If we make a list of every situation, we can think of that typically makes us angry and then imagine these situations in our mind. Then we can concentrate on each one and take slow deep breaths. With practice, we can become much better controlling our emotions and staying calm when confronted with our anger inducing situations.

Once we are desensitized from our anger, triggers, then we can work on reframing our thoughts about them.

Once we take some time to think about the things, we are angry about, we might discover it was usually because I assumed the worst intentions.

If we work on changing the way, we think about the situations that anger us, we will find in time that anger no longer controls us. This is also the best way to help ourselves make smart, effective decisions in anger, inducing situations instead of ineffective, stupid ones.