Bus stop, 8:16am, sunny and 20 degrees. Road sounds, chatter and laughter all around. Way too much laughter for a Tuesday, in my opinion. Bus was supposed to be there at 8:00, school starts at 8:30, and I am the only one getting angry. Why was I the only one getting angry? My heart still pounds thinking about it.
Setting aside the unlikely possibility that maybe I was the only one at risk of being late, it seemed like people around me simply had an easy time accepting that sometimes things don’t go their way. While I will never know if they were indeed calm inside or were just really good at hiding negative emotions, this juxtaposition still makes me wonder: what determines our emotional reactions to vicious events? Why are mine so strong and is there a way I can blame it on forces beyond my control? Welcome to my quick guide on avoiding responsibility.
The warrior gene
According to behavioural and genetic studies, approximately half of the individual variation in aggressiveness is inherited. Oof, I feel better already. One of the best genetic predictors of anger is the monoamine oxidase A gene. People with a low-functioning version of it are more likely to be violent, even in studies where the subject were mentally healthy university students. What is perhaps more relevant for our purposes is that brains that are affected by this gene exhibit less efficiency in emotional control.
Genetics: a perfect blame carrier. It is not your fault, and it is not your parents’ fault either – you both simply got served some bad cards. And these cards were not so bad in the past: according to anthropological research angry hunter-gatherer men who committed acts of homicide were more likely to survive and thus have more children, possibly one of your ancestors included. Sounds like we can blame it all on evolution and call it a day.
Family Matters
We already got half of the blame out of the way; let’s try to assign the rest. According to the author of extremely well-received “The body keeps the score”, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, reactions of children to painful events are largely determined by how calm or stressed their parents are. Hence, even if not through genes, we do in fact inherit a lot of emotional regulation from our parents. Furthermore, our childhood environment directly impacts how our brain develops. If you feel safe and loved your brain becomes specialized in exploration, creativity and emotional control, if you are frightened it specializes in managing fear and puts less focus on how not to be bothered by the small failures of the universe. Additionally, according to psychologist Bernard Golden, some people with anger issues seem to hold onto them as if doing so reflects a sense of loyalty to the angry parent. Perhaps, sometimes being angry together with your family is less scary than being calm and alone.
Dr. Van der Kolk also emphasizes that after traumatic events, body’s stress hormones do not, in fact, return to baseline after the threat has passed. Traumatised individuals spend most of their lives on edge, detecting danger everywhere, which results in extreme emotional reactions, including anger. Annoyed and unable to ignore someone’s whistling? Could be a sign of trauma too: people with PTSD are on constant sensory overload.
As it turns out, we can attribute quite a lot of personal issues to the environments we grew up in, which is no surprise to anyone familiar with “social media therapists.” So, let’s say that we assigned 75% of the blame to genetics and bad childhoods. Hell, let’s say we assigned all of it, fifty-fifty. So what? We still must function in society and take responsibility for our actions. Answering the question of anger’s origins will most likely not make it disappear. Is there something that will?
Love and other drugs
If you reached that far into the article, you have probably tried all the standard methods already: yoga, meditation, sleep, better diet? But perhaps to let go of our anger, we need to expect a little less from the universe. Some might say that we only get angry about the bus that is late if we have expected it to be on time in the first place. Sometimes it’s hope making us angry. Hope that the planet is actually full of buses that are on time, children that don’t scream, and rain that only comes down when you’re in bed. Maybe if we gave our world a little less credit to begin with, our disappointments would be less painful.
Maybe anger can be mitigated with kindness to ourselves. It can be infuriating when bad things happen that are beyond our control, especially when we suspect someone else is actually in charge of our misery. At an airport you might find yourself thinking “I put so much into my work every day. If only airline pilots did that too, instead of oversleeping for work, then my flight would be on time”. I found the only way to let go of that is to forgive yourself the next time you oversleep. Once you stop being so hard on yourself for your failures, you get better with other peoples’ failures too.
Ultimately, we can’t get rid of anger forever. And we probably shouldn’t – anger is an important tool our brains use to help us recognize unfairness, cruelty and traffic jams. At the same time, we could all probably get a little bit better at recognizing things worth being angry about.
Anna Halewska
Sources :
“The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma”, Bessel Van der Kolk, Viking Press, 2014.
Temper trap: the genetics of aggression and self-control
Anger Issues: Nature vs Nurture–Why Does it Matter?
Image :
Similar articles:
Trop de chiffres, moins d’émotions : l’anesthésie par les nombres
Soft Skills Matter #3 – Intrapersonal skills
