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Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. Have you ever noticed that when people get anxious, they very easily transition into anger? This is something that we saw during the pandemic. It's a time of a lot of anxiety for everybody, but soon there were big factions in society and people were angry. People were yelling at each other. People were blaming each at each other. At a time when it probably would've been more productive for us to try and calmly work together and listen to each other's sides, et cetera. But you probably have noticed this in your own experience as well, that when you feel afraid, you easily slip into anger. Why is it that this happens? Well, it becomes clear when we examine more about these different emotions and how they work in our brains. When we're in anxiety, we feel like everything is uncertain. We don't have control, we don't have power. We feel really vulnerable. We feel really helpless 'cause we feel like something dangerous might be out there, but I don't really understand what it is and I don't really know what to do. So you feel immobilized. You're kind of stuck in this freeze and worry mode, which feels really bad. Anger on the other hand also acknowledges just like anxiety, that there's something out there that's bad, that's happening, there's a problem, but instead of feeling helpless and frozen, you feel like you know what to do. You need to fight it. You need to push against it. You need to blame it. It, it turns into action. It feels powerful, and that's why it feels better than anxiety. It feels like a relief because it moves you out of the freeze and worry mode, into the fight and act mode. And so it gives you this, this burst of certainty and control, and that's why it feels better than anxiety, even though anger isn't a pleasant emotion either, it helps you to escape those helpless feelings of anxiety. But as we all know, as we've seen played out in our society and in our personal lives, anger isn't always a great alternative to anxiety because even though it can re provide temporary relief from the anxiety, it can also escalate, in the long term, conflict, stress and regret. It can be really harmful for relationships because the goal of anger is the anger says, you know, I'm gonna change this outcome by changing the other person's behavior, by attacking them. And we know that attacking doesn't always work so well to change the other person's behavior. The other problem is that we have this concept that if you just get it out, if you just, you know, catharsis, if you can just voice your anger, you'll feel better. But research shows that venting usually backfires. Venting just makes us feel more angry and more aggressive. It, it augments the anger. And what does chronic anger do to your health? Well, it's related to hypertension, to heart disease. And suppressed anger also is not good. That also has serious consequences on physical health and depression, hypertension and mental health issues. So while, while there might be a situation or two where attacking can actually resolve the problem long term, we know, we all have seen a lot of situations where it does not, where it makes it worse, and it's really not a great alternative for anxiety.

But what's the option once you're already in anger? We've already talked about how venting doesn't make you feel better. It just makes the anger more inflamed. Suppressing it makes it worse. So what can you do? Well, regulating it is really the answer, reappraising the situation. Changing that story in your head. So I'm gonna give you a couple of examples of people that have done this, that I've worked with, or people that I know who have found a way to regulate out of anger or have found a way to bypass anger from the anxiety spot, to bypass it into something more productive.

So we've talked about before several times about how when our brain organizes an emotion, it's really answering, asking, and answering three secret questions. I call them secret because they're kind of secret to us. Your, our brain does this unconsciously. But it's asking, how good or bad is this? Whose fault is it? And what should I do? And when we are in anger the answer to the first question is that this is really bad because this has come in conflict with my goals and my needs and my desires, and it's the other person's fault for sure. And the answer to what should I do, is attack. That's how our brains answer those questions when we're in anger. So if we want to go in and change our story that is producing that anger, we need to examine our answers to those questions.

And looking at that first question, how good or bad is this? The, the answer that anger gives us that this is bad is really because this situation has come in conflict with our goals and our needs. And so if we can zoom in on those goals and needs and understand what they are, then that can give us more insight into the situation. Once we understand what our goals are that we feel have been impeded, then maybe we can start looking at whose fault is it actually, and what should I actually do about this in a way that can really be healthy in the long term, that can resolve the situation in a more healthy way than being angry and attacking the other person.

So I'm gonna give an example first of someone that I coached, who I'll call Anna, and she was really angry about someone in her life who had made it so that she had lost a really important opportunity. She had been planning her life around this opportunity. She had actually moved to another state in order to have access to this opportunity. She saw it approaching on the calendar. She did all of the application process so that she could have access to it and this person in her life created a situation in which Anna was just between a rock and a hard place, and she could not have access to this opportunity in the way that she had envisioned anymore. This was in the past a few years previous to the time that she was talking to me about it. But she said that even now, even though this person was no longer in her life and she had nothing more to do with this person, every time she thought about this, she felt so angry. And she didn't know what to do with his anger. So we started zoning in on on these questions that her brain was asking and answering. How good or bad is this? And we, we zoomed in on what it was that was so important to her about this goal. And she talked about how it was, it was important for her professionally. It was important for her personal growth. It was something that she had already, always dreamed of doing. And we started to really understand how important this goal had been to her that she felt had been impeded. When we, when we moved on though to the last question about what should I do about it, that's when she started feeling really angry because she felt like the opportunity was lost, that time had passed and she was not going to be able to ever access that same opportunity in the same way. And while this was true, because that particular part of her life had passed and that specific opportunity wasn't available anymore, we talked about how she could go about creating something similar, some kind of similar opportunity, although it would take a lot more work on her part. And how this anger, anger as an emotion can be useful because it get, it does make you feel energized, you know, whereas anxiety makes you feel stuck and frozen and worried. Anger makes you feel like you're in that action and powerful mode. And she could use that anger that she felt about having missed that opportunity to motivate her to do all of those things that she would need to do in order to create a new opportunity for herself. Because it would take a lot of energy. It was gonna be hard for her to create this opportunity by herself out of nothing. But in talking together, she realized, yeah, I think this is a better option for me to use that anger to fuel me toward being able to do the tasks that I need to do to create a new opportunity so that I can fulfill this goal. So anger is attractive because we feel powerful, right? In anxiety, we feel helpless. In anger, we feel powerful. But if we can find an alternate way to feel powerful, that if the answer is that we really want to take our power back, we can find an alternate way to feel powerful by finding another way to meet those goals rather than feeling aggression and the desire to attack this person that has impeded our goals.

I'll move on to another client who I coached, who I'll call Amy. And Amy was a person that had a lot of anxiety in her life, and it ended up influencing her relationship with her husband. But unfortunately in her relationship, it ended up transforming into anger a lot of the time, and blame in this mysterious way that we have talked about already about how anxiety so easily converts over to anger because anger feels better than anxiety because it feels more powerful. But Amy didn't wanna feel this way. When we started zooming in on the her these questions that her brain was asking, how good or bad is this? Whose fault is it and what should I do? So that first question, how good or bad is this? And she, we started talking about different situations in her marriage and how she felt like we started uncovering the different needs and goals and desires that she had that her brain felt like we're being impeded or blocked or, or ruined by her husband. And we started to understand that there were different goals that her brain had about feeling more secure, about feeling more valuable, about feeling more wellbeing. And we started to talk about alternate ways that she could go about meeting these needs rather than attacking her husband to try and change his behavior to meet all of those needs. Maybe she could take care of those needs herself. Maybe she could ask for help when she felt overwhelmed. Maybe she could take more naps when she felt tired. She was wishing that her husband would compliment her on things that she had done, but maybe she could compliment herself on things that she had done. Maybe she could do more to reach out to friends and have a greater social network so that she could have more social involvement, more social support. We started to find all kinds of things that she could do to address these needs. And once she started to be more aware of these needs and goals that she had that were underneath her emotion and look for ways that she could go about fulfilling them that were more healthy, than attacking her husband for not being able to fulfill them from the outside, then she started to be able to break out of both anxiety and anger and be able to feel more powerful and more wellbeing.

A third example that I have is my dad, who I interviewed a couple of months ago on the, on the podcast, who, there are a lot of things in the world that could be giving him anxiety and which give a lot of people in our, in our society anxiety, different political situations, different environmental concerns. And what he does is try and find what edge of those problems are within his control and focus on those. And so instead of feeling aggression and anger at all of the people out there who are doing it wrong, he focuses on what he can do. And that ke takes him out of anxiety and also helps him avoid that anger trap.

So in all of these three situations, these three people started to ask, is there another way that I can achieve this goal that I have or that I can satisfy these needs that I have? Is there a better way than attacking the other person? What can I actually do to reduce this stressor right now? So the reason why this works is because the person is able to feel powerful, because they identify where they are able to act. Anxiety keeps us in that frozen worry spot. Anger gets us in the powerful acting spot. But there are other ways to access power that are not so destructive to our relationships, to our health, to our long-term out outcomes. So the key to really avoiding the anger trap is to look for where you can find power in a way other than aggression. Because you feel terrible in anxiety, and you choose anger because you feel that need to feel some power to feel action, to not feel immobilized, to feel some more certainty. But if you can instead understand what your needs and your goals are and find some other way within your control to address those needs, then you will feel a lot better than when you're angry.

So those are some ideas for you today. Short and sweet. Thanks for listening. We're gonna have our kindness narrative now, stay tuned. Remember, it's so important for your overall wellbeing to include these types of things in your awareness, to be aware of kindness in your world. And don't forget to share your own kindness narrative. You can do it by email or by Instagram. Stay tuned after the kindness narrative to hear the information of where to send your kindness narrative. Thank you so much to everyone who shared yours. Have a great week. This is a kindness narrative that was shared with me in written form by a generous listener, so I'm going to read it to you.

There was a very simple moment, a long time ago that left a deep mark on me. My oldest son, Bernardo, was 14 Then. He's 42 now, but this small gesture of his is still vivid in my memory. It was late afternoon edging into evening, and we were working on a jigsaw puzzle together. I can't remember how many pieces it had, but we were making steady progress, focused and absorbed. Eventually I got tired, not the lazy kind of tired, but true exhaustion, and I went off to bed. The next morning when I came downstairs in our two story house, I saw our round yellow table and there was the puzzle almost complete. Only one piece was missing, and right next to it carefully set aside was that final little piece. In that moment, my heart swelled because Bernardo could easily have finished it on his own, but he chose to leave the last piece for me. It was his way of saying, mom, I know this was something we did together, even though I hadn't stayed with him until the end. It was a gesture of respect, of tenderness, of love, and it struck me how often we think only the big gestures matter, when really it's the small, quiet, everyday ones that carve themselves into our hearts and stay there forever.