“Anger is nothing more than a strategy for finding happiness in the midst of a challenging world, but it’s not a very effective strategy. Mindfulness and compassion work much, much better.” – Bodhipaksa
The Buddha once said that “holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” In other words, anger is usually more harmful to ourselves than to the source of our anger.
Reflect for a moment on the last time you became angry at another driver for cutting you off in traffic. Did you respond like most people with anger? Did that anger actually have any impact, at all, on the other driver? Usually not. Did it have any impact on you? Perhaps upsetting you and causing you to drive in an aggressive manner toward the other driver. Did that actually do any good or did it just put you at increased risk of an accident? Did the anger carry over beyond the actual incident and affect your driving afterward and your actions and mood later in the day? Now, reflect for a moment on the last time you became angry at your significant other. Was it effective? How did that person respond? Did it actually hurt the one you care about? Did it harm your relationship? Most times, anger is not only counterproductive, but destructive.
Anger not only produces changes in our behavior and mood, it also produces changes in our physiology. It activates the “fight or flight” system in the body, sympathetic nervous, and releases activating hormones. The net result is an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate, sweating, especially the palms, feeling hot in the neck/face, shaking or trembling, and decreased heart rate variability. These physical effects can be used to objectively measure anger responses. They are also stressful and if prolonged can be damaging to the individual’s health.
If we can control our anger, we will generally be a happier person. But, at times, it is very difficult to do so. Mindfulness and meditation can help. It has been shown to improve our ability to regulate our emotions including anger (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/emotions/). Mindfulness appears to improve our ability not to suppress our emotions, but to fully experience them and yet be better able to respond to them constructively and adaptively.
In today’s Research News article “A single session of meditation reduces of physiological indices of anger in both experienced and novice meditators”
Fennell and colleagues investigated the effect of a single 20-minute meditation on anger responses in experienced and naïve meditators. They induced anger by having participants vividly recall a recent incident where they became angry and to briefly write about it. In the naïve meditators, this produced a significant increase in self-reported anger and increased blood pressure, respiration rate, and decreased heart rate variability. But, the experienced meditators had no physiological response to the induction. They then had their participants meditate for 20 minutes and induced anger a second time. After meditation, the anger induction had very little effect with no significant changes in self-reported anger or blood pressure and decreased heart and respiration rates. This blunting of the anger response after meditation occurred for both the experienced and naïve meditators.
These results are remarkable. Even a single brief meditation is capable of producing a significant reduction in both subjective and physiological responses to anger, actually making it look more like relaxation than anger. This response appears to be learned with repeated meditation as experienced meditators appear to have this blunted response even without meditation while naïve meditators require the meditation. Hence, meditation lowers immediate anger responses and experience with meditation makes this chronic, allowing for lower anger responsivity all of the time.
These results suggest that meditation is an antidote to anger. This control of anger may be responsible for many of meditation’s beneficial effects, cooling off the “hot coal” and preventing the individual from getting “burned.”
So, manage anger with meditation.
“Once we have recognized our anger, we embrace it. This is the second function of mindfulness and it is a very pleasant practice. Instead of fighting, we are taking good care of our emotion. If you know how to embrace your anger, something will change.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies