I’m quite positive that figure has now skyrocketed to nearly 100% of people getting angry at least once a day. But here’s the thing. Trump isn’t the reason most people are angry right now. He’s our raison d’etre however if each of us is honest with ourselves, the anger rising up right now stems from much deeper and much older places.
I’m not saying he’s not pissing people off left and right, because he is. But many of those who feel justifiably upset are then pissing others off with name-calling, character assissination, and shaming of their once-friends-now-political-enemies.
There’s no right group or wrong group here. I’m not calling anyone out. I’m calling EVERYONE out. I’ve been guilty of it too.
Because we as a nation are angry. We as a world are angry. And we the people, each as individuals, is summarily pissed off. It’s time to get clear about why we’re angry, and what to do about it ~ without passing the buck and the blame onto others.
This is important, because the only way you’ll win on the issues you care most about is if you approach the fight with a level head. There is healthy, sacred anger, and then there’s habitual rage. Keep the former and ditch the latter. This article will show you how…
So back to this survey…
Even though it is a year old, it predicts the tide of White American aggression and the resurgence of middle America’s disgust with policies they believed were favoring everyone else: Women, immigrants, foreign interests, refugees, black and minority Americans… while ignoring them and their issues {worker’s rights, manufacturing and family/religious values}. It also predicts the tsunami of pushback and equally vehement disgust from “everyone else.”
Again, this isn’t about who’s right. It’s about the emotional and experiential divide between two groups who have immensely different lives, different needs, and therefore different political priorities.
For starters, 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? The study cited that white Americans felt disenfranchised, disappointed, and as though their expectations were not met.
But before half of my readers scream at me for calling out the white guy, let me fill you in on the group most rapidly increasing in anger: Women.
What the study discovered is that there are three factors that contribute most to habitual rage:
1.EXPECTATION: Those who expected better treatment or more money… or who felt stifled, shortchanged or screwed over… were dramatically more angry than their counterparts, even if their resulting circumstances were still better overall than that of other respondents. What this tells us is that habitual rage isn’t related so much to what you do or do not get; it’s related to what you believe you deserve in relation to what you get. 2.EMPATHY: Here’s where the women come in. According to Esquire, who published the survey {this is their conclusion, not necessarily mine}, women showed a huge uptick in anger in 2016 because they may be more likely than men to be upset about the treatment of others. Obviously this is a generalization, however biology does show us that a woman’s brain is wired to favor emotional capacity and depth moreso than a man’s brain. 3.EXPERIENCE: This is the factor most interesting to me, as it points to why we see such out-of-control rage dividing our nation into two distinct, if unintentional, groups. Esquire notes: “Seventy percent of blacks express anger about the way they are treated by society. Forty-eight percent of women are angry about the way they are treated. Even 21 percent of white men say they are angry at how they are treated in this country. People get angry when they don’t like how they and theirs are treated. People, we suppose, are funny like that.”Because women may be more likely to feel anger at the treatment of others, and many minorities might share similar experiences of mistreatment, you can begin to see how our country might find a divide between white men on one side, and women and minorities on the other. I point this out so that we can see that white men are NOT the enemy for wanting the rest of the country to focus on their issues for once. Underlying any political leaning is the simple truth that each of us will care most about what we directly experience and that which directly affects us.
Therefore, as long as we refuse to see where the other side is coming from… as long as we continue to tighten our own noose with constricting viewpoints and tunnel vision about where we get our news and who we’ll listen to with an open mind… the more impossible healing this divide will become. Because no matter what you think of President Trump, he is the consequence of our nation’s anger. Not the cause.
The Consequences of Habitual Anger
Let’s leave the political arena behind for a moment and discuss the nature of habitual anger, or rage. Stick with me here, because the techniques I’m going to teach you to transform your anger will make you more effective at battling for the issues you care about.
But first, it is worth noting the importance of looking after your self, your loved ones, and your personal health. If you burn out from anger and stress, you can’t enjoy your daily life and you can’t last long enough to fight the good fight.
So what is habitual anger or rage? Habitual rage is anger that is unable to complete or resolve in the moment it is triggered, and so gets stored or stacked within us. Researchers believe that the primary reason we do not release our anger is because we hold a story about our lives ~ a perception of the world ~ that requires anger as a continued response. Such beliefs include: “The world is not safe,” “They’re out to get me,” “If I let my guard down…” “I’ll hurt you before you hurt me,” and so forth.
As we discussed earlier, our rage stems from our emotionally charged experiences where life failed our expectations, or when we were mistreated. So it isn’t much of a surprise that such beliefs might develop for the average American.
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. This then becomes a vicious cycle: Your perception of life not meeting your desires will then trigger physical, emotional, professional {and hence financial} problems that then inspire more anger and frustration.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to be a vicious cycle. You are in charge. And you are not your emotions. The key to reaching the flip side of anger is to bring your conscious mindfulness to it.
Check out these five steps, and then afterwards I’ll explain how you can then use your transformed state to re-engage the issues that matter to you and win.
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. This doesn’t make your old story wrong. Rather it empowers you to be greater than your story, and to choose a new relationship to your past so that it stops controlling your present.
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. No matter how unimportant 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.
Back to Politics: How to Win Big
Deep rage is problematic because it cuts off your logical brain. It throttles you into reactive mode and, as we’ve all seen on social media, declarations and arguments made in anger start to look like kindergarten-quality name calling with sailor-quality swear words. No one wins those. You’ll never change someone’s mind if you call them a libtard or a heartless conservative bastard. And we as a nation can’t win if we remain so divided and hateful towards each other.
Mindfulness is an excellent tool when anger strikes so that you can take a few minutes to chill the f*ck out, transform the fires of that anger into some much-needed energy, and GET TO WORK.
WIN BIG TACTIC #1:
If it matters enough to you to argue your point on social media or at the grocery checkout counter, then it should matter enough to you to establish a proper argument supported by FACTS you locate yourself. No parroting the news outlets. If they cite a speech, law, executive order or historical event, it is your responsibility to track the original transcript, document or detail about that event yourself.
Now in an ideal world, such research would be the burden of our news journalists, but we don’t live in that world. They are strictly in the hands of their respective corporate interests and party lines and we cannot expect to get any useful or arguable facts from them. Use them as your starting point. But then do your own research.
WIN BIG TACTIC #2:
Persuasion is an art. So is seduction. When used ethically, persuasion is your ability to so completely understand and sympathize with the other person that you can truly see their point of view from where they are living. This brings us back to EXPERIENCE as one of the three primary factors of habitual rage. Those you disagree with likely have immensely different experiences than you do. Care enough to find out what those are.
From my 13 years as a top marketer and copywriter, managing multimillion dollar launch campaigns and writing sales letters that truly sell, I can tell you that before I ever tried to convince anyone of anything, I asked a crap ton of questions.
I wanted to know who my audience was, and what they wanted. What were their unmet needs and disappointments? Where were they hurting and why? If I could compassionately speak to those, they would realize, “Wow, this person gets me! They understand my pain. Maybe they also know my solution.”
Only then, when the other person feels heard by you will they trust you enough to hear you and consider your point of view.
And honestly if you’re afraid to really connect to someone else’s differing point of view, that usually points to an uncertainty within you. You have to remember there are very few, if any, absolutes in this world. You will never always be right. They will never always be wrong. And no one is all good or all bad.
Damn right, your opposition has some valid points! Damn right, they have some truth on their side. That doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your own deeply held conviction. Rather it means if you’re going to sell that conviction, i.e. make a fair argument and hopefully shift our nation’s direction in favor of what you believe to be best, then you cannot be afraid to see the logic, truth and value of the opposing point of view.
If you can do THAT better than your opposition, you will be the one who wins the argument or case. Yes, facts and precedence matter. But as we’ve seen they’re rarely clear cut. And it comes down to who can sway those in the middle to one side or the other.