Stopping Anger In Its Tracks

Everyone gets angry now and then. We blurt out things we later wish we hadn't, make choices we can't defend, or behave so unlike ourselves that afterward we shrug and say, 'That wasn't me.' Anger can push our reactions past anything we'd normally allow, and the wreckage is real. It bruises our closest relationships, chips away at how people see us at work, pushes friends away, and leaves us thinking less of ourselves.

Once it has hold of us, anger behaves almost like a separate will. Breaking loose feels close to impossible. We try one method, then another, and somehow we land in the exact argument we swore we'd avoid, or we feel the pressure climbing in our chest while we swear at the car that cut us off, no matter how many promises we made to ourselves beforehand. Counting to ten can feel useless. Stepping away to cool down is almost physically painful. Relaxation exercises, oddly, can make us even madder. So what actually keeps the red haze from rolling in?

A useful starting point: Anger has a younger sibling called Annoyed. It doesn't leap out fully formed, claws bared. Trace your thoughts in the minutes before a temper really catches fire and you'll usually find you began somewhere mild, just a flicker of irritation. The thoughts picked up speed, the irritation gathered force, and only then did it tip over into real anger. It's the same arc as a small spat that balloons into a screaming match. When we watch those climbing thoughts from a little distance, we get some room between ourselves and the heat we feel while thinking them.

The ancient Hindus pushed this idea further with a practice called Rasa Sadhana. Rasa translates loosely as 'emotion' or 'impression,' and Sadhana means 'study' or 'endeavor,' so Rasa Sadhana is roughly the study of emotions. The practice is a way to fast from a feeling. Plenty of people fast from food for a stretch of time, hoping to clear out body and mind on the way toward some spiritual opening. Why not clear out the heart and try fasting from anger instead?

And the diagnosis is almost absurdly plain. The Yogis said anger has a single root: unmet expectations. One source, nothing more. That sounds too tidy to be true, but think back over your own flare-ups and you may notice the pattern holding. Road rage comes because we expected the other driver to stay in his lane, or the pedestrian not to dart into traffic. We expected our husband to pick his socks up off the floor. We expected the kids to behave at the store.

Getting furious over other people's slip-ups, the Yogis taught, just hands us a load of trouble that was never ours to carry. We can decide not to answer with anger. We can stay level, as long as we keep a close watch on what we expect. People will keep doing things that scrape at our nerves, and their behavior is simply not ours to control. The one genuine choice left to us is whether to spend our days steadily irritated and inflamed, or to plant ourselves in calm. Let someone else drag you into a rage, the Yogis said, and they've won while you've gained nothing. Your inner quiet is gone, and a single outburst can spoil the rest of the day, sometimes the whole week, while straining the very relationships it drives apart.

Put the two roads side by side. On the first, someone does something, we slide from annoyed to angry, and we let anger's damage loose in our day and our life. On the second, someone does something, and the moment we feel annoyed we stop to name the expectation we'd been holding. From there we choose to deal with it calmly, what the Yogis called non-violent resistance. We make an honest effort to see the thing from the other person's angle. Then we reset our expectations for next time based on what we actually learned.

Take a friendship as an example. On the first road, you feel left out and bristle, you start trashing him in your head and winding yourself tighter, then you call him up, unload exactly what you think of him, and the friendship is finished. On the second road, you feel left out, catch yourself, and run the Rasa Sadhana. You see you'd expected him not to exclude you, because he's your friend. You wonder why he'd treat a friend that way, run through the possibilities, and land on the thought that maybe you've irritated him somehow. You call and ask, without the defensiveness, why you weren't invited, aiming for a real conversation about his reasons. Afterward you adjust. Perhaps he isn't as close a friend as you'd assumed, or perhaps he'd heard you were busy that day. You can't know until you ask, and once you do, your next move is an informed one.

Work gives another case. On the first road, you feel unappreciated and get annoyed, your drive at the job drains away, Monday mornings start to fill you with dread, your output slips, and eventually you're sitting in the boss's office for all the wrong reasons. On the second road, you feel unappreciated, stop yourself, and do the Rasa Sadhana. You realize you'd expected a promotion off the back of this project. You start asking why your boss passed you over and what you might have done differently. So you request an informal chat or send her an email, saying plainly that you'd been hoping to move up and asking why it didn't happen this time. Maybe she writes back with pointers for next time. Maybe it dawns on you that you'd be valued more somewhere else and it's time to start looking. You won't know until you ask.

That's the whole principle. Anger runs on assumption. In the grip of it, we fling ourselves into feelings and actions without the information we'd need to choose well. Pull back from the anger, even a step, and we can start to read the situation properly and pick a smarter next move. Done that way, the annoying things other people do stop being stumbling blocks and start becoming stepping stones.