I'm Mad About Being Angry

Recently one of my children sent around one of those survey exchanges in which you answer a dozen or more questions that are intended to reveal things about yourself that your family and friends might not know. The questions range from favorites books and movies to the things you most like or dislike in general, or about yourself in particular. In return, you get the scoop on the others who are participating. Every once in a while as you answer these things and read the answers from other you can run into interesting bits of information and you can occasionally tap into a vein that runs through a number of responders.

In this recent survey, one question asked us to list “four things I dislike very much”. My answer was:

1) The death of children from any cause
2) Mean-spirited people
3) My own anger
4) The arrogance of power or presumed “truth”

In the next few days I want to address each of these answers. Today I want to focus on the hinge in those answers, which is also the vein that got tapped in others who responded to the survey. It’s about the anger that courses through so many of us, through too many of us. Several other survey respondents simply chimed in with, “Yeah, what he said about anger.” Three of the things I am most angry about are found in the other three answers.

There’s good news and bad news in answer No. 3. The good news is that those of us who gave that answer are aware of the anger within us. The bad news is that those of us who gave that answer are filled with enough anger enough of the time to be aware of it, bothered by it, and include it in our list of most disliked things. That awareness then gives birth to a sense of responsibility to do something about the anger that bothers us. Then, if we fail to do something about that anger, we get angry about that, too. A completely separate topic is the anger that we’re not aware of. Who knows what lurks in those shadows.

Anger can be a killer. Anger is stressful, to say the least, and stress produces cortisol, among other things. Cortisol is a corticosteroid hormone that gets released when we’re responding to stress. It increases our blood pressure and blood sugar levels and suppresses our immune system. In the normal stresses we face, cortisol helps to restore balance in our system, which is a good thing. But, if we’re under prolonged or chronic stress then too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing. Long-term exposure to cortisol, for example, damages the hippocampus, which results in impaired learning. Maybe that explains why angry people don’t seem capable of learning anything!

Short-term anger happens. It’s a part of life. That’s not to say that we can’t avoid short-term anger. I believe we can avoid almost all of it, particularly the instances when it’s nothing more than an expression of our threatened ego. If we think about the most peaceful people we’ve known in our life, they’re almost certainly the people who are least prone to angry responses, of any kind or duration. They’re secure enough in themselves to not be threatened by the myriad of things that produce short-term anger and stress. I admire these people and I aspire to be more like them. It angers me that I’m not.

But the real killer is the prolonged or chronic anger that we hold on to and won’t release. That anger acts as an ongoing stressor that continues to pump out the cortisol and inflict other damage, seen and unseen. People who seem gripped by a pervasive negativity about life are victims of this anger. People who give answers like I gave above can be victims of this anger. People who demand fairness and justice in this life can be victims of this anger.

This blog reflects my anger, and that troubles me to some extent. I wish it were a little more balanced and I hope it becomes more so as time passes. I enjoy a good deal of peace in my life and it would be nice to express that, too. On the other hand, this blog presents an opportunity to express the anger I feel on topics that matter to me, which helps me to let go of it to some extent. On some days the list of things that I’m mad about makes my mind look like an air traffic controller’s radar screen – a bunch of wildly blipping dots that are all trying to land on the same space at roughly the same time. Sometimes the sense of urgency I feel about a topic makes writing about it the equivalent of an emergency landing. But, if you’re plane is on fire, an emergency landing is an exceedingly good thing.

I sense that a lot of people around me are also struggling with anger. It seems endemic. For many of us, our modern lives are filled with marvelous technology, convenience, mobility, opportunity, and a fair amount of prosperity, and yet we’re angry about a lot of things that just don’t seem right to us. That, of course, signals that we’re passing judgment on a lot of things. For many others, their lives are not filled with the things just mentioned, and they’re angry about that, sometimes for good reason.

What’s going on? My theory is that we have 24-hour, global communication systems that bring the people and the events of the world to us constantly. The Internet, 24-hour cable news shows, and cell phones keep us informed of the good, the bad and the ugly minute by minute. We’re inundated with information, all of which acts as a nearly constant stimulus in us on one level or the other. Fifty years ago most of us wouldn’t have a clue about what is going on in Darfur; or what nonsense just popped out of Pat Robertson’s mouth this morning; or the details of the latest round of school violence across the country from us; or the hour-to-hour accounting of the Enron or Michael Jackson trials. We wouldn’t see video of the war du jour on TV every day and night; we wouldn’t have the constant input of “investigative journalism” prying the lid off of every possible scandal in every dimension of our society. We didn’t have C-SPAN to scare the hell out of us each night as we watch the people who are supposedly driving the ship of state. Fifty years ago, we read the morning paper and/or listened to 30-minutes of nightly news, maybe.

Then, add to this the fact that we’re better educated now and have an increased ability to process this flood of information. We’re reacting to something almost every hour, and the reaction is often an angry one. The fact that we’re educated allows us to think that our judgment is sound. The fact that we’re egocentric allows us to think that our judgment matters. Then, give us blog technology and we think that we should publish our judgments for the betterment of our family, friends and the rest of the free world.

Time to stop. I have to read the paper; listen to the morning news; go online for news updates; and then check my email. There will be a blog entry lurking somewhere in all of that, I’m sure.