Week 16:  Anger in the body and the brain

We all feel angry at times.  It's part of being human. Anger can be a normal, healthy emotion.

There are many different reasons why we might feel angry. We may feel anger at having been treated badly or unfairly by others. Our anger may be a reaction to difficult experiences in our daily life, our past, or in the world around us. Or it may be a way to cope with other emotions. For example, we may feel anger alongside feeling attacked, powerless, embarrassed or scared. 

Sometimes anger can be a helpful emotion. But sometimes it can be difficult to manage and make our lives harder.

Learning how to recognize, express, and manage anger can make a big difference to our mental health. (Mind, 2024)

We can feel angry for many different reasons. It might be because of a difficult situation we're experiencing. Or something that happened to us in the past. Sometimes, we might feel anger because of how we interpret and react to certain situations.

People can interpret situations differently. Something that makes you feel very angry may not make someone else feel angry at all. But just because we can interpret things differently, it doesn't mean that you're interpreting things 'wrong' if you get angry. (Mind, 2024)

How and when we feel angry, and how we react to anger, can depend on lots of factors in our life, including our:

• Childhood and upbringing

• Past experiences

• Current circumstances

• Health & well-being

Whether our anger is about something that happened in the past or something happening now, thinking about how and why we interpret and react to situations can help.  We can learn how to cope with our emotions better and find ways to manage our anger. 

Certain Circumstances

We might feel angry about things that are going on in our lives right now. Or our current circumstances might make it harder to cope with or manage our emotions. There may be situations that make us feel angry, and we struggle to express or resolve your anger at the time. We may find that we express our anger at other times. (Mind, 2024)

A few experiences that may be difficult include:

·         Stress. If you're dealing with a lot of other problems in your life right now, you might find yourself feeling angry more easily than usual. Or you might get angry at unrelated things.

·         Bereavement. Anger can be a part of grief. If you've lost someone important to you, it can be hugely difficult to cope with all the conflicting things you might be feeling.

·         Unfair Treatment. Discrimination, injustice, being cheated, and so forth can make us feel angry. Particularly if you're being treated unfairly and you feel powerless to do anything about it, or if people around you don't understand.

·         Upsetting Events. We might feel angry about things that are happening in the world right now. We may see things going on which we know aren't right and that we feel powerless to stop. Or we may feel angry at the decisions made by people in power, or by the attitudes of others about issues that matter to us. COVID may be an example.

Feeling angry can sometimes be useful. (Mind, 2024)

For example, feeling angry about something can:

·         Help us identify problems

·         Help protect us from things that are hurting us

·         Help us feel more alert, energized, or focused on a task

·         Motivate us to push for changes in the world or to help others who are being treated badly

·         Help us to challenge and stand against injustice or discrimination

·         Help us stay safe and defend ourselves in dangerous situations by giving us a burst of energy as part of our body's natural response to threats

Anger can be a difficult emotion with which to cope. (Mind, 2024)

Sometimes, anger can:

·         Distract us from what we need to do

·         Make us say or do things we regret

·         Make it harder for us to express ourselves clearly or calmly

·         Lead to arguments or conflict with others

·         Make us feel guilty and ashamed

·         Stop us from recognizing or dealing with other emotions

·         Make it harder for us to take care of ourselves

·         Impact our self-esteem

·         Have a negative effect on our bodies, for example, impacting our sleep

·         Manifest or support health challenges

·         Lead to people making negative judgements about us

We can all struggle to manage our anger at times. (Mind, 2024)

Signs that it may be becoming a problem include:

·         You feel like you can't control your anger, or that it controls your life

·         You express your anger through unhelpful or destructive behavior, such as violence or self-harm

·         You're worried your behavior may become abusive

·         Your anger is having a negative effect on your relationships, work, studies, or hobbies

·         Your anger is often hurting, frightening, or upsetting the people around you

·         You feel unable to get on with your daily life because of your anger

·         You find yourself thinking about your anger all the time

·         You're often doing or saying things that you regret afterwards

·         Your anger is having a negative impact on your overall mental, social, physical, and spiritual health

·         Anger is becoming your go-to emotion, blocking out your ability to feel other emotions

·         Your anger regularly makes you feel worse about yourself or your life

·         You can't remember things you do or say when you're angry

·         You're using alcohol or drugs to cope with your anger

Everyone feels anger. Traffic snarls, unsympathetic colleagues, playground bullies; we all have our triggers. The problems start when anger boils over into hostility and aggression, behaviors that cause harm.

According to research by Martin Teicher, an associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital, verbal abuse from parents and peers causes changes in developing brains tantamount to scarring that lasts into adulthood.

In 2005, Teicher found that verbal abuse had deleterious effects on par with witnessing domestic violence and other seemingly more violent forms of maltreatment. In 2009 he used diffusion, tensor magnetic resonance imaging, to build an accurate map of the neural connections in the white matter of brains of adults who had experienced parental verbal abuse, but no other forms of abuse, as children. (Dougherty, 2011)

He found three neural pathways that were disturbed in these adults: the arcuate fasciculus, involved in language processing; part of the cingulum bundle, altered in patients with post–traumatic stress disorder and associated with depression and dissociation; and part of the fornix, linked to anxiety. “The damage,” Teicher says, “was on par with that found in the brains of people who had experienced nonfamilial sexual abuse.”

More recently, Teicher found that peer verbal abuse, whether teasing, belittling, or disparaging words, can cause similar damage. “Kids often hear many negative things from their peers,” he says.

Teicher’s latest research suggests that parental and peer verbal abuse may affect children differently throughout development. When experienced during early childhood, verbal abuse can lead to somatization, the translation of emotions into physical illness. During middle school, it can increase the likelihood of drug abuse, anxiety, and depression. In high school, it can lead to increased anger and hostility.

“The expression of a lot of anger can be pathogenic,” Teicher says. “Children especially suffer when anger is vented. Openly expressed negative, raw, and intense emotion is hard for many people to witness and can leave scars.” That is, children’s brains seem to turn down the volume on abusive words, images, and even pain. The result is diminished integrity in these sensory pathways. (Dougherty, 2011)

We often use volcanic words to describe anger.  Flares, flashes, outbursts, and eruptions are a few examples. 

When an angry feeling coincides with aggressive or hostile behavior, it activates the amygdala, an almond shaped part of the brain associated with emotions, particularly fear, anxiety, and anger. (Dougherty, 2011)

Darin Dougherty, an associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, studies why anger attacks occur in patients with major depressive disorder. Some of these patients experience angry flare–ups that are inappropriate to the situation and out of character for the individual. “People will yell or throw things,” says Dougherty. “We wanted to investigate the mechanisms behind those reactions.”

For these patients, angry outbursts usually stop when the depression ends.

Dougherty began in 1999 by investigating healthy people with no signs of depression and no history of angry episodes. He employed positron emission tomography imaging to examine which regions of the brain engage during angry moments. Subjects simulated angry moments by recalling the moments in their lives when they felt rage.

During angry recollections, the amygdala fired. At the same time, a part of the orbital frontal cortex, just above the eyes, also engaged, putting the brakes on emotion. “Healthy people experience anger,” says Dougherty, “but they can suppress it before acting on it.” (Dougherty, 2011)

In depressed people who are prone to anger attacks, this neurological brake fails to engage. In another study, Dougherty found that in people who experience major depressive disorder and anger attacks, the orbital frontal cortex did not activate. Rather, activity in the amygdala increased and angry outbursts ensued.

Edward Kravitz studied what drives this innate aggressive behavior. Kravitz saw similar unlearned, unpracticed fighting instincts in lobsters, making the question about hardwired anger even more curious. He selected flies as a model for teasing out the genetics, though, because flies can be bred rapidly and raised in complete isolation.

Kravitz has found that flies show aggressive behaviors when they face competition for resources, such as food or a mate. At first, they all fight the same way, but over time, winners and losers emerge. “Losing flies develop a loser mentality,” says Kravitz. They fight less aggressively against opponents they’ve lost to before and, even though they approach new foes with gusto, they tend to keep losing. (Dougherty, 2011)

Even bullies, the victors who keep picking fights and winning, will lose their competitive advantage after just one loss.

In recent work, Kravitz bred flies with “tunable” aggression. In these transgenic flies he can selectively turn on and off neurons that contain serotonin and dopamine to determine what roles these neurons play in aggression, fight intensity, and the creation of pecking orders.

Serotonin, he found, is crucial for fight intensity. Without it, flies will not do battle with gusto. Dopamine appears to inhibit aggression. In its absence, flies fight at higher intensity levels. 

hile it’s tempting to relate such findings to humans and their mood disorders, Kravitz avoids such equations. “We are after general principles of how these neural circuits work, and some of the chemicals are the same across species,” he says. “But the details of the circuitry are going to be completely different.” (Dougherty, 2011)

Jerry Deffenbacher, PhD, a psychologist who specializes in anger management, believes that some people really are more “hotheaded” than others are. They get angry more easily and more intensely than the average person does. There are also those who don’t show their anger in loud spectacular ways but are chronically irritable and grumpy. Easily angered people don’t always curse and throw things. Sometimes they withdraw socially, sulk, or get physically ill. (American Psychological Association, 2023)

Regardless of the type of angry people we may be, the American Psychological Association (2023) suggests some strategies to help us avoid, and manage, our anger:

Problem Solving

Sometimes, our anger and frustration are caused by very real and inescapable problems in our lives. Not all anger is misplaced, and often it’s a healthy, natural response to these difficulties. There is also a cultural belief that every problem has a solution, and it adds to our frustration to find out that this isn’t always the case. Perhaps the best attitude to bring to such a situation, then, is not to focus on finding the solution, but rather on how you handle and face the problem.

Using Humor to Take Yourself Less Seriously

“Silly humor” can help defuse rage in a number of ways. The underlying message of highly angry people, Dr. Deffenbacher says, is “things oughta go my way!” Angry people tend to feel that they are morally right, that any blocking or changing of their plans is an unbearable indignity and that they should NOT have to suffer this way. Maybe other people do, but not them!

When you feel that urge, picture yourself as a god or goddess, a supreme ruler, who owns the streets and stores and office space, striding alone and having your way in all situations while others defer to you. The more detail you can get into your imaginary scenes, the more chances you have to realize that maybe you are being unreasonable and at least a little ridiculous.