Anger, aka Thief of Sanity, is a slippery little rapscallion.
It, of course, resides in the brain. Anger’s just another mode of firing neurons. When those neurons get going, they wreak havoc by switching on many lifesaving body functions. Unfortunately, while these lifesavers are helpful in small doses, when anger gets BIG, or LASTS A LONG TIME, or becomes CHRONIC, they become toxic. Here is a brief rundown about the process from a blog post called The “Angry” Brain.
A look into the brains of normal subjects revealed that anger increases blood flow to a reasoning part of their brains, an area over the left eye just behind the forehead, technically called the orbitofrontal cortex. This flow inhibits thoughts of rage. At the same time, blood flow increased activity in the amygdala, an almond-shaped knot of tissue deep in the brain that deals with emotion and vigilance.
Angry feelings arising in the amygdala are normally cooled by activity in the frontal cortex, part of the thinking region of the brain. However, in some severely depressed people
That about describes the process, except that I would take exception to the phrase that “a lack of both recognition and control of anger, can lead to violent rage.” Many people do react poorly to anger. It still doesn’t follow that there is a causal connection between anger and violence. Just because they sometimes hang out together doesn’t mean that one causes the other.
If I were to see any cause there, it would make more sense to say that violence causes anger, not the other way around.
That doesn’t tell us much about what to do, does it?
If anger does start in the brain, it would seem that the first step in understanding the process would be to have some way to explore, befriend, and influence your own brain. Si?
That presents another problem. I wrote a post on my other blog, This Old Brain. Net, about a research experiment. This experiment, using fMRI imaging, that decisions we make can normally be predicted approximately six seconds before we make any move to follow through.
That seems daunting. Many people think acting out there anger is something they cannot help. Many of them, maybe you, certainly me at a younger point in my life, have sincerely tried many things to “manage their anger,” and at best got hit and miss results.
This is where mindfulness comes in. There are numerous demonstrations now that a mindfulness practice actually grows the prefrontal cortex, described above as the “reasoning part of [the] brain” in people who were less prone to the feeling of anger.
How Does That Work?
When we are under the spell of our automatic thinking patterns, we are like children in a way. We have an itch and we automatically scratch it. And sometimes that works okay. It’s not like putting our hand on a hot stove, where we learn quickly that this is a bad idea. What we don’t realize about scratching an itch is that sometimes, like if we have psoriasis or something, scratching only begets more scratching, and will even spread the problem to other parts of our bodies. Sometimes we have to take a step back and consider that maybe a salve would work better.
Tara Bennett Goleman, Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart
Mindfulness offers us a way to access the gap between intention and action, and to use the power of a veto to break the chain of habits. What ordinarily is an invisible chain of automatic sequences leading us onward through life comes onto the screen of awareness, suddenly giving us a choicepoint where before there was none. We do not have to go along with the impulse to act, we can just say no.
Mindfulness is a practice that gives us a choice. And it is one of the keys to becoming aware of anger, the stories we buy into that perpetuate it,
and the ability to use the feeling of anger simply as information.
If you have any experience with mindfulness, or with anger, your opinion would be valued in the comment section.
You can also sign up for the choicepoint newsletter and get information on a new online offering that will be available soon on line — AngerFlex, a new way to live with anger without anger living you.
photo credit: Tomi Tapio
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