There is no greater obstacle to the presence of the spirit in us than anger. St. John of the Ladder
Anger hides inside devastating our attitude and love.
Anger explodes causing hurt, embarrassment, division, separation.
On the other hand, sometimes anger expressed clears the air leading to fruitful reconciliation. Sometimes anger motivates us to correct a wrong in the world around us.
Understand your anger. Manage it. Deal with it.
My parents taught me no social skills. Sometimes I reflect on my youth and cringe. Now I am an old man and getting better.
Unfortunately, or fortunately in terms of my growth as a human, I’ve placed myself into a variety of leadership and professional roles where some amount of social skills are required.
I’m wrestling with a problem right now that involves several people with widely different views. I need to bring people together to end misunderstandings and focus on our purpose. This problem has consumed far too many emotional and intellectual cycles.
This is hard for an introverted nerd to do. How do I bring out empathy within my thinking and feeling such that I can feel for all sides?
That question leads to the understanding of just how important a skill that is for us living today. We are as polarized as ever not only in the US but also worldwide. Resistance weight training is a proven tool for improving health and prolonging a better life.
We need resistance training for our empathy muscle. Of course we are right in everything we think and do…right? Well, maybe others could be right? Maybe when we all come together the melding of ideas leads to better ideas. Maybe when I facilitate bringing people together goals are achieved.
Fifty years ago as a new manager in the department my boss told me, “Your biggest problems will not be technical problems. They will be people problems.” He was so right. If I am going to proclaim my core values as peace and justice, then it must begin with flexing the empathy muscle and bringing people together.
Flashbacks of exploding in anger sometimes visit my conscious self. It’s embarrassing now. How frustrations or deep hurts overflowed into words and actions.
I could say that we live in an age of the angry young man where everyone is like that. Politicians around the world seem to be tapping into that anger. Except that angry young men have been around for decades—millennia even. Billy Joel released a song in 1976 described as a sardonic look at “the angry young man who will go to his grave as an angry old man.”
Maybe I lost the edge of that anger when I became 25 or so and my brain finished growing (biological fact, in case you missed that in class). Or maybe years of meditation. Or maybe the times, especially in business, where I was metaphorically stabbed in the back by colleagues or friends, and I realized in the bigger picture, I was better off gone from that environment.
Looking at that bigger picture, would you like the vision of yourself as one of those angry old men (or women)? No one around you? Doing nothing for the family or community? Probably taking years from your life?
I can’t imagine that a person exists who doesn’t experience something sometime that lights a torch inside. A mark of maturity and growing spiritual awareness is revealed when we can let it go. Quickly. Before we say or do something foolish. Hitting that internal pause button before we hit the keyboard return button that will send that email or publish to social media.
How about if we go to our graves known as kind and compassionate rather than angry and bitter? We can do that. It does take work. And time.
The man who shot many people in Maine last week was described as having had mental illness. Media outlets throw that term about too loosely and in a manner meant to be pejorative. After all, media does not exist to enhance our mental health but to provoke our emotions so that we’ll read or listen more.
Just like my usual advice of reducing news consumption from these sources to a minimum, beware labels these journalists apply.
We all have issues. Sometimes we can deal with them through music or a jacuzzi. Or simply getting outside for a run or walk through nature. Sometimes they become more painful, and we need to talk to someone. Sometimes they are overwhelming enough where a professional counsellor will help us through. Sometimes even further there exist chemical imbalances within us where the only corrective help comes through appropriate pharmaceuticals.
Simply applying a label of mental health or lack thereof is not helpful.
We all need to strive for optimum mental/emotional health. I offer this podcast from Andrew Huberman, PhD. His is in my top three or four that I listen to every week. Sometimes they are interviews, and sometimes he researches and does a deep dive into a topic. In this episode he, well, let Andrew explain it:
In this episode, I provide science-based tools and protocols to improve mood and mental health. These tools represent key takeaways from several recently published research studies, as well as from former Huberman Lab guests Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., an expert in the science of emotions, and Paul Conti, M.D., a psychiatrist with vast clinical expertise in helping people overcome mental health challenges. I explain the first principles of self-care, which include the “Big 6” core pillars for mood and mental health. Those ensure our physiology is primed for our overall feelings of well-being. Then, I explain science-based tools to directly increase confidence, build a stronger concept of self, better understand our unconscious mind, manage stress and improve our emotional tone and processing. I also explain ways to better process negative emotions and traumas. This episode ought to be of interest to anyone wishing to improve their relationship with themselves and others, elevate their mood and mental health, and better contribute to the world in meaningful ways.
The “Big 6” Pillars
Among my favorite podcasts is Huberman Lab from Professor Andrew Huberman, PhD, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Despite this impressive resume, he takes deep dives into topics and conducts interviews in a manner approachable to all of us.
The last episode featured Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett discussing “How to Understand Emotions.” She discusses her research over her career explaining what emotions are and how the brain represents and integrates signals from our body and the environment around us to create our unique emotional states.
From the show notes, “We also discuss actionable tools for how to regulate feelings of uncertainty and tools to better understand the emotional states of others.”
They come together on some practical disciplines that I teach wherever I can:
They conclude with two more essential ingredients for a good life that seem to be in short supply these days. Perhaps we can work these into our daily life practices.
Another excellent podcaster, Tim Ferriss,, has begun concluding his podcast interviews with this phrase:
Be just a little kinder than necessary today.
Excellent advice for life.
Arthur C. Brooks teaches a happiness class at Harvard Business School. Students line up to take the class. Probably because the place is filled with people looking for happiness in all the wrong places (to paraphrase a song).
Oprah Winfrey read his bestseller, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, contacted him and invited to her home in California. They hit it off and agreed to collaborate on this book just out this month, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier.
This book is readable and practical. Much of this I know and practice. Many will not have heard of this research and story. This will help you and/or someone you love.
Let’s begin with “Happiness is not the goal, and unhappiness is not the enemy.”
Philosophers from ancient times have known that happiness is a byproduct of living, not the goal of living. Yet, each generation must learn the lesson anew.
The first chapters discuss managing our emotions.
The four pillars are discussed in detail in the remainder of the book:
I leave you with two takeaways.
Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine) gave a student three pieces of advice.
The first part is humility; the second, humility; the third, humility; and this I would continue to repeat as often as you might ask direction.
Another takeaway.
We need to detach ourselves and become free of sticky cravings. We honestly examine our attachments. What are yours? Money, power, pleasure, prestige—the distractions we sought to be free of with greater emotional self-management? Dig deeper. Just maybe they are your opinions. The Buddha himself named this attachment and its terrible effects more than twenty-four hundred years ago when he is believed to have said, “This who grasp at perceptions and views go about butting their heads in the world.” More recently the Vietnamese Buddhist sage Thich Naht Hanh wrote in his book Being Peace, “Humankind suffers very much from attachment to views.”
I may have mentioned before that I’ve been receiving the Pump newsletter from Arnold Schwarzenegger. He sucked me in with the phrase “a positive corner of the Internet.” Don’t know about you, but I could use more positivity.
People who study these things have told us that anger often comes from insecurities and fear. Hate, also, has deep roots within our own emotional construction. Here is a story from Arnold from a recent event.
Last week, I had an event at the Schwarzenegger Institute at USC on fighting the rising hate we’ve seen all over the world. We had a panel about how to communicate to pull people away from a path of hate, and a former neo-Nazi who now helps other extremists out of their movements shared his perspective. Something he shared stuck with me, and I wanted to share it with all of you. Because it is wisdom that can help anyone — not just people who are consumed by hate. He said that the further he got away from his old beliefs, the more he realized that in the days when he carried that hateful flag and shouted racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, the person he really hated was himself. He believes he was projecting that hate onto other groups because it was a lot harder to turn inward and work on his own insecurities.
Many of us meditate hoping for experiences and visions of the divine. The meditative experience that most influenced me was when I was shown every form of evil and sin revealing that these are all buried within me. The realization that I was capable of all sin (see the first chapters of Paul’s Letter to the Romans for example) provided insights and tools for dealing with that. And the empathy for others who also struggle with that same whether they know it or not. It, by the way, is a life-long struggle. Just like the realization of this man quoted above.
There are wonderful pictures in the Proverbs:
Better to meet a she-bear robbed of its cubs than to confront a fool immersed in folly. (Chapter 17)
You are scanning your social media feed. As unlikely as this sounds, you see a post from someone that is completely wrong. Using emotion-laden language, they describe an event totally made up. You feel a surge of righteous emotion, even anger. “I’ll set this right” you say to yourself as you begin to type.
Maybe you’ve forgotten about the she-bear. Maybe you remember what the writer of the Proverbs says shortly thereafter:
The beginning of strife is like letting out water; so stop before the quarrel breaks out.
TS Eliot wrote about the point, the still point, where the dance is. He didn’t mean this, exactly, but it fits. There is a moment between typing the response or speaking to the friend and clicking send or giving voice to the thought.
It is that moment that we must become sensitive to. That still point. There, we must become observers of ourselves. Recognizing that we are about to meet folly with folly, we stop.
We cannot control the genesis of our emotions. We must control the response. That is where awareness and tranquility of mind becomes the most important thing. At that moment, we breathe, we see, we become tranquil and quiet. Let it pass.
When people raise the volume of their voice, one of two emotions are in play. Uncertainty or lying.
People telling the truth speak softly. People with assurance also speak softly.
Perhaps we should tune our ears to ourselves for immediate feedback. We can catch ourselves before being foolish.
Marcus Aurelius, “How much more harmful are the consequences of anger…than the circumstances that aroused them in us.”
Anger erupted from within me usually when I felt threatened. The source was fear of loss of something–job, status, relationship.
Vitaliy Katsenelsen says in his book Soul in the Game, “The venom generated by anger, when allowed to spill into others, is always followed by regret.”
And yes, even to this day I have deep regret for some outbursts from anger.
John Climacus the abbot of St. Catherine’s at the foot of Mt. Sinai writing in the early 600s said that “anger is an indication of concealed hatred, of grievance nursed. Anger is the wish to harm someone who has provoked you.”
John counsels, “The fist step toward freedom from anger is to keep the lips silent when the heart is stirred; the next, to keep thoughts silent when the soul is upset; the last, to be totally calm when unclean winds are blowing.”
It’s that moment between thought and action when you have an opportunity to take a breath, perhaps count 3, 7, 10, 100. That pause is the freedom–the freedom to choose our best response. It is in breath that silence and calm have the opportunity to prevail.
I have learned this the hard way.
Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 