Anger and Sadness as a Way to Gain Resources
When was the last time you felt angry? How often do you get angry? Do you enjoy that feeling? Maybe you were just angry a few minutes ago and started reading this article to distract yourself and find ways to quickly deal with your anger?
At the root of any anger lies the emotion of rage. This is actually a very useful emotion, even though it’s associated with feelings like anger or aggression. Why? Read on.
About the Emotion of Anger
Anger can have different levels of intensity. It may start as mild irritation, then gradually or suddenly escalate into rage. From a hormonal and neurotransmitter perspective, powerful substances like norepinephrine, cortisol, and testosterone are involved in anger.
Everyone is familiar with the feeling of anger, but it’s triggered by different things for each of us. Anger is also easy to spot through facial expressions, body language, and other nonverbal cues. A person in anger often leans forward, may clench their fists unconsciously, their voice becomes louder and more dynamic, their phrases are sharp, nostrils flare, and a vertical crease appears between the eyebrows.
Anger often arises when something in our external or internal world happens that we desperately want to eliminate. Anger is an emotion of action. If you want to stop being angry and learn to manage your anger, it’s best to train yourself to channel your anger into specific actions.
Three Simple Ways to Manage Anger
- Channel Anger into Physical Activity as Soon as Possible
When you feel angry or irritated and it’s bothering you, the best thing you can do is “walk it out” or “run it out.” Any physical activity helps. The cortisol and norepinephrine involved in the biochemical process will be used up, and your anger will shift to a state of calm, close to sadness. In a way, sadness is the opposite of anger. You may recall from personal experience that after intense anger, you often feel not calm, but rather sad or guilty. - “Compulsion Explosion” Technique
This simple NLP technique helps manage anger by working with mental images. When you feel anger or irritation, ask yourself what image this feeling takes and where it’s located inside you. For example, you might perceive it as a red pulsating dot in your chest that seems to move or grow. Allow yourself to imagine this image growing and pulsating. The imagined temperature of your body may rise. The pulsating image will eventually burst like a balloon, and you’ll feel relaxed and calm. You can learn to “explode” this compulsion inside yourself in just 10–15 seconds, quickly neutralizing inappropriate anger. - “Adrenaline Barometer” Technique
This NLP method uses anchors. Ask yourself, on a scale from 1 to 10, how irritated you are right now. Then, mentally increase this number to the limit, and then mentally decrease it. This helps you gain control over the emotion.
How to Gain Resources from Anger
Now let’s look at how to direct the energy of anger toward your goals and get the most practical benefit from this feeling.
- Recognize your feelings. It’s important to clearly understand what you’re feeling and identify your anger.
- Know your goals. You need to know what you want to achieve—this year, this week, or in the next two days. Have a clear understanding of your goals as points in your future timeline.
- Work with mental images.
Here’s the process: As soon as you feel even slight irritation, ask yourself, “Where is this irritation located as an image? What does it look like?” For example, you might imagine it as a growing flame in your chest. Observe this image for a while, and at the same time, focus part of your attention on your goal and create a visual image of it. You’ll have two visual objects: the first inside you (the image of anger), and the second in front of you (the image of your goal).
Now, imagine the anger as a vector that was previously directed at a person, event, or situation, but now you’re ready to direct it at your goal. With your imagination and willpower, send the vector of anger toward your goal. Anger is a powerful, energy-filled emotion that can truly help you achieve your objectives.
Unpleasant Aspects of Anger
When the vector of anger is directed inward (at yourself) rather than outward (at external goals), this emotion can be very harmful and even destructive. That’s why it’s important to ask yourself, “Where exactly is my anger directed? Am I angry at someone outside or at myself?” You can’t just answer “at myself,” because people are made up of many different parts of their personality. Always ask which specific part of yourself you’re angry at.
Anger has a very destructive power, so it’s better to channel it into physical activity or direct it toward external goals.
About the Emotion of Sadness
Sadness, in a sense, can be seen as the opposite of anger. Very often, our spent (used up) anger turns into sadness. After getting really angry, shouting, or running, we feel empty… and sadness takes over (“Why did I do that? I shouldn’t have gotten so angry and upset,” we tell ourselves).
If anger naturally turns into sadness after being expressed, should we try to turn sadness into anger?
It’s important to remember that trying to cheer up a sad person is almost useless—it will only make them sadder. Instead, you can and should try to make them angry. As strange as it may sound, “making a sad person angry” is almost the only effective way to pull them out of their sadness.
“If someone is lying on the couch, the only way to motivate them is to set the couch on fire beneath them.”
Sadness is often motivated by anger, so these emotions can be considered opposites.
What Is the Benefit of Sadness?
One of the main benefits of sadness is that it can accompany our rest. Anger is very draining, but sadness allows us to rest comfortably. We feel relaxed, and time seems to flow differently. But moderation is key, because there’s no room for achievement or success in sadness. It’s okay to allow yourself to feel sad for a while to rest and relax—say, for an hour a day.
In moderate doses, sadness can also create comfortable conditions for the brain’s “default mode network.” This discovery by Marcus Raichle and his team shows that most of the brain becomes active when no new information is coming in and a person is relaxed. The brain enters a special mode and starts processing internal information, eventually producing solutions. That’s why it’s important to give yourself a break from reading, TV, and any other incoming information.
The downside of sadness is that you can get stuck in it for years. That’s why you need to learn to manage your sadness and always limit it in time.
Emotions as a Source of Resources
Emotions are our way of getting resources from the world. Joy—through openness to new things and satisfying our desires. Anger—through action and achievement. Sadness—through contemplation and relaxation. Even contempt and disgust give us opportunities to gain resources.
But that’s a topic for another time.
For now, we wish you to become even better friends with all your emotions—both those you consider positive and those you used to think were negative (but now know can be useful too).