There’s a Ted Talk by Ryan Martin that I found last week titled “Why we get mad – and why it’s healthy”. I plucked it out of my content slosh pile to discuss at our monthly lunch & learn yesterday.
The talk discusses some of the psychology of why we get angry and what we get angry at. So often it’s a matter of how we make sense of the inciting incident and what intentions we assign to others. For example, we might not get mad at a car driving slowly normally, but we might be furious if they’re making us late for a job interview.
Here’s the core of it: “Just as your fear alerts you to danger, your anger alerts you to injustice . . . it energizes you to confront that injustice.”
Feeling angry is an alarm that something is not how it should be. Getting angry at racism is a good thing. Getting angry at inhumane conditions for refugee children is a good thing. Your body is physically letting you know something is wrong. But it’s also a way to pay attention to the small things: what made you so angry at work? or at that friend? or at yourself?
We talked a lot in our lunch & learn about our responses to anger and how to regulate those initial emotions (the urge to scream, cry, stomp around passive aggressively) to get to the curiosity and finally the action. We can use anger as a sign to ask ourselves why we are mad and then what we should do about it.
But we should get mad. We shouldn’t try to eliminate or mask or swallow down our rage.
Martin ends his talk like this: “So the next time you feel yourself getting angry, instead of trying to turn it off, I hope you’ll listen to what that anger is telling you. And then I hope you’ll channel it into something positive and productive.”
With Love,
Natalie