Did you know that the average American gets pissed off at least once per day? Yep, a recent survey on American rage showed that half of all Americans are angrier than they were last year and that a whopping 68% — that’s two of every three people — get angry at least once a day.
Here’s where it gets particularly interesting though. The study identified two key causes of anger that help us glimpse how to reach the flip side of anger:
Those who get angry at least once a day are usually angered by something they see or hear on the news. The study identified that white Americans were far angrier than non-white Americans, even though non-whites reported having a far harder time making ends meet.
The reason? White Americans felt disenfranchised, disappointed, and as though their expectations were not met.
Ignoring the political and cultural implications of this study, what I want to focus on here is the deeper thread woven through its results: people everywhere are hurting and angry because, according to this survey:
That last point is worth considering. We’re not talking about immediate anger caused by direct confrontations or challenges, but about habitual rage that seethes below the surface to be triggered at the slightest shakeup.
That kind of anger is kept locked up within us due to our perception. We are imprisoning ourselves in rage with our stories about our life, rather than due to our actual life circumstances.
The Consequences of Habitual Anger
Scientists and medical researchers now know that daily episodes of anger produce unhealthy chronic stress that damages the body, impairs your brain, immunity and metabolism, and can strain your career while alienating those you care about.
It becomes a vicious cycle: Our perception of life not meeting our desires triggers physical, emotional, professional (and hence financial) problems that then inspire more anger and frustration.
The key to reaching the flip side of anger though is to bring your conscious mindfulness to it.
How to Transform Anger in Five Mindfulness Steps:
It can be easy to discount your simple awareness and conscious thinking. It’s one of the few tools that is always yours and always at your disposal. Yet scientists are now encouraging mindfulness techniques like cognitive reappraisal to shift negative emotions. Because they’re finding that the very process of looking inward and naming your emotions actually calms down and inhibits the stress response.
Here are five mindfulness steps you can use to transform and shift your anger to step into more compassion and a sense of peace:
1. Say hello to your anger and categorize it.
Because anger hijacks our rationality, it helps to wrest back control by constructively distance yourself from it. The fastest way to do this is to literally say “hello” to your anger as if it is a separate entity from you. Energetically it is a separate entity from you.
The moment you do this, you stop identifying as angry and instead move into simply observing the anger as an object of your attention. This right here is the essence of mindfulness. Simple, yet so effective.
Mindfulness coach Donald Altman M.A., LPC also suggests rating your anger in these three categories:
- Small anger, irritation, or annoyance that’s quickly forgotten, like standing in a slow-moving line.
- Medium-size anger that makes you really mad or upset. For example, when a coworker repeats a behavior that infuriates you and affects your work.
- Super-sized anger that prompts you to lose control, such as shouting, cursing, or throwing something across the room.
2. Breathe and relax your body.
Now that you’ve gained a little distance from your anger, allow the sensations of rage or stress in your body to drain away. Because our bodies are so attuned to our emotions, we can use this relationship as a two way street: we can affect our emotions through what we do with our bodies.
To begin, take a moment to just breathe big and full, in and out, blowing the breath out fast on the exhale. This helps your lungs to open up if you tend to be a shallow breather.
Then, with your back straight, sitting on a chair or cross-legged on the floor or couch, take a nice, steady deep breath through the nose. If you’re having trouble getting a deep, expansive breath that you can feel down in your torso and lightly pressing against your ribs and back, then try clasping your hands behind your back or behind your head to open up the chest.
Once you’ve inhaled fully, hold the breath for three or four seconds before exhaling slowly through the mouth. Notice whether your hands, jaw or stomach might clenched. Let them relax and reach your arms up to the sky in a nice stretching position.
Keep breathing in this way, and let your awareness meander over various parts of your body. Feel your neck and shoulders and allow any tension to melt away on the exhale. Connect to your torso, hips and legs and again, release any tension on the exhale.
Continue until you feel your body relax.
3. Get curious about the anger you’re feeling.
Chances are you already know your story about why you’re angry. Story is no less true, however it has to do primarily with our perception of what has happened, which is colored by our expectations, past experiences, and – especially with anger – a level of irrationality!
So take a moment to look at the anger you’re experiencing with new eyes. Step into beginner’s mind, as though you’re witnessing this strange new feeling for the first time. Then ask yourself: What just happened that made you angry? Who, or what, triggered the rage or pissed you off?
Rather than tell yourself the story that justifies your anger, approach it from another angle that isn’t so familiar to you. Consider what lays behind or beneath the anger. Often anger is repressed grief, or a sense of helplessness or hopelessness that lashes out in order to protect you from witnessing the debilitating sadness.
Anger is active (reactive) and so we often choose it because it means we can do something, take some action, say something, so that we don’t have to sit with our fear that we are not in control, or that we can’t fix the situation or have what we deeply need or desire. Once we allow these deeper feelings beneath the anger to rise, however, we can begin to glimpse that there is in fact a solution.
The key is to first get past the anger and allow all that kinetic energy to transmute into a healing compassion.
4. Topple the Jenga Tower of Anger.
I used to love playing Jenga as a teenager. And looking back, I realize there’s something cathartic about stacking things and no matter how arbitrary the stack is, we’ll go to great lengths to keep it from toppling.
Negative emotion works the same way. You’ve been stacking emotional pain upon emotional pain, into a gigantic tower of anger… grief… jealousy… or resentment… and even though all these stacked emotions are literally imprisoning you within their constructed tower – you’ll do whatever you can to keep the tower from toppling. {Because holy crap, if it topples, what’s to keep it from squashing me beneath it?!}
It won’t squash you though. Fear and Anger are good friends. They are always high-fiving each other every time one of them convinces you to keep the other one around. So let’s bring your awareness to a deeper mindful truth about the anger in your life right now:
Reflect on when this anger first showed up in your life. Is this old anger? Is this anger even yours, or was it learned? You’d be surprised to find that much of the emotional energy that gets stuck in our bodies and energy fields was never even ours to begin with. We adopt it from our family, or those we spend a lot of time with. And once an energy enters your field, if it remains there for more than 72 hours, your body has assumed it now belongs to you, and integrates it into your energy system. The originating energy was not yours, but it becomes yours – the kind of stolen baggage no one wants, but somehow they believe they deserve.
5. Direct the energy elsewhere.
Now that you’ve released the felt anger from your body, gained some distance and brought your thinking brain back to the party, it’s time to actually experience the flip side of anger.
As intense as our emotions are, they really are just energy. That doesn’t lessen how much they mean to us or the very real ways we suffer them… however it does mean that when we bring our mindfulness to negative emotions like habitual anger, we can work with the energy, transmute it, and direct it elsewhere.
Earlier, we talked about how anger is active (or reactive). The idea is that it’s a very kinetic, fiery energy. What are some positive energies and emotions you can think of that are also active, fiery or kinetic? Some that instantly come to my mind are creativity, vitality, willpower, and passion. And while many might think that compassion is a quieter, less active energy, active compassion is great for this exercise.
To transmute your anger into one of these energies, use the above strategies to release the emotional, felt sense of anger and just focus on the underlying energy – that need to feel met by life and fulfilled by your experiences and relationships. Connect to the roiling energy that courses through your body, or the heat right at your sternum or radiating from your head. Feel the need in your body to meet this intense, kinetic energy with strength and certainty.
When you feel the pure energy rather than get stuck in the story of the anger, you notice that it is an energy that propels you forward. When it feels uncontrollable, it’s asking your body to respond with confident strength. This is why exercise is so cathartic for anger. If you don’t like exercise, focus on the deeper truth: your body needs to experience its grounded strength. It’s ability to stand with this intense energy, rather than get burned up by it or whisked away in the storm.
Then funnel that energy into something equally kinetic and fiery: do something creative, dance or move… throw your willpower into something you want. Make something. Keep it playful too. Commit to a number of reps of a certain exercise for 10 days… or have a fun contest with friends or co-workers to see who can walk the most steps in a 30-day period. Take a class, go after a certification, or learn a new skill.
Tiny triumphs build towards big success. The more you train yourself to expect that you can achieve what you set out to do, the more your perception will naturally shift to assume you will succeed (rather than expect to fail). And that’s when the perceived disenchantment underlying most habitual anger truly transforms into empowering compassion and achievement.