You ever just feel angry and you're not even sure why? Today at Live On Purpose TV,
how to stop feeling angry all the time. I'm Dr. Paul.
As human beings,
we experience a broad range of emotions, feelings, things that sometimes seem so
automatically just hit us without any particular warning. I get the question
all the time, "How do I stop being angry so much?"
Let's take on anger today.
Anger is a secondary emotion. That's something maybe you've heard before.
What does that mean?
If there are primary emotions and secondary emotions, secondary just means
that it follows something else or that it comes as a replacement for something
that might be more primary.
My experience with anger is that, a lot of times,
we'll experience sadness or frustration or disappointment, some kind of a sense of
loss. These things often lead to anger which replaces that other emotion and
gives us something that we can actually wrap our our head around.
Anger is such an active emotion.
You know what to do with anger, okay? You know what to do
or think, you're going to *grunts* you're going to react, you're gonna blow up,
you're going to attack someone.
That's active. What are you going to do with disappointment?
See, that hits you internally. It's not as obvious what to do with that or sadness
or loss. Harder to know what to do with that because it's not such an active
emotion. So one of the reasons that we substitute anger is because it's easier
to come up with some plan and it's usually just a reactive explosive kind
of an acting out sort of a thing. So I'm just trying to help establish why it's a
secondary emotion and how we use anger to cover up some of the more primary
emotions. Obviously, one of the things that we can do if we want to feel less
anger or experience less consequences for our anger is to get focused on what
those primary emotions are, get real about that. What is it that's at the
source of that anger and that insight often will help us to to reduce the
amount of anger that we're experiencing but I have to give a little warning,
It's not fun to connect with those primary emotions, a lot of them are so difficult
or painful. There's reasons why we're avoiding it in the first place, so you
might need a little help with this one and please hire a coach, see a therapist,
do some personal insight work to get to the bottom of what are those primary
emotions that I'm feeling and that's not something, obviously, that we're going to
handle on this video today. Sometimes you need to consult with someone who can
help you to get a little different perspective or to look into what are
those primary emotions that I'm feeling and there's a lot of good self-help
books out there and other things that you can do along those lines but do what
you can to connect with the primary emotions.
Let's talk about what anger is
from a physiological perspective for a moment. Different parts of your brain do
different things and so you've got this division of labor where a part of your
brain is designated as, let's just call it, the anger center, alright?
To simplify it, it's really a collection of structures in your brain, collectively
known as the limbic system. Sometimes we refer to it as the fight-or-flight
response which is naturally built into our brain and into our body to protect
us from threat. Some of those threats are not real threats, they're just perceived
threats but it still triggers the same reaction in our brain which incidentally,
is a chemical response that prepares our body to
fight anger. Could be simplified as the fight version of the
fight-or-flight response. Does that make sense? So your brain is gearing you up to
have a fight, there's a lot of things that we can do psychologically to manage
that fight-or-flight response and probably the main thing that we need to
look at is our perceptions. So to start with the perception conversation,
let's return to an idea that we've talked about in some other videos and that is
metacognition, that's a $10 word but all it means, if you break it down,
cognition means thinking, metacognition is a higher level,
it's thinking about thinking.
Notice that you can do this as you think about your own thinking, you can start to
analyze where the threat is coming from. Usually, it's some form of dialogue or
self-talk that's going on inside of our own mind and we create stories all the
time. It's the stories that drive our perceptions and that drive our reactions,
so here's a common story that might trigger anger. Just see where this
connects with you. Things are not the way they should be.
Alright, have you heard
that story before? Has that one popped into your mind before? It's just a story.
It's just a story. Here's another one.. Oh I'm just so far behind!
Okay, that might not trigger anger as much as it might trigger anxiety or desperateness.
Still a story. Think about that for just a minute. I'm behind, okay.
You've got some
project going on or you've got some life plans or whatever it is and you're
feeling like you're behind schedule, right? Do you know? Do you know for sure
like you've got some cosmic connection to the grand calendar of all things.
Do you know for sure that you're not on schedule? No, you don't.
Well do you know for sure like you've got some cosmic connection to the grand
calendar of all things that you are on schedule? No, you don't. Pick a position
and I'm thinking pick a position that serves you well since you don't know.
How about you pick a position that serves you well? Try this for a minute, just try this.
Say to yourself right now and say it out loud if you're in a position
where you can do this, say to yourself, oh and you have to have a little lilt to
your voice, raise your eyebrows just a little bit, okay? Say to yourself,
I'm right on schedule.
Just try that. How does that feel?
How would it feel if you believed it?
If you believed that you're right on schedule. Here's another one, things are
exactly as they should be. And again, notice you don't know whether they are
or they're not but you've got an opinion about that and your opinion is causing
and driving the feelings that you're having including anger. So notice that
you've taken a position already.
I have some clients who tell me, "Oh, but Dr. Paul,
I'm just lying to myself." Yes, you are. Knock it off to realize it's not just
that you're pretending that things are right on schedule, you're pretending that
things are exactly the way they should be, you're taking that position on
purpose because it serves you better and you don't know. So you got to pick a
position, just notice that you already have and maybe you are lying to yourself.
How do you know things are not the way they should be? That's a position.
So let's get real about this in a way that allows us to pick a position that serves
us better. As we take that position, we feel differently and then we can be more
authentic about how we really feel, those primary emotions. Instead of always
covering it up with the anger that is really quite prideful when it comes down
to it because you're insisting that things are not the way that
be. My feeling is, you don't know, you don't know so notice that you're taking
a position about that. That's huge, that's potentially life-changing when you
realize that your position about it is what drives your behavior and how you're
showing up in the world. Can you stop being angry all the time? Yes, you can.
pick a position that's going to support that for you
and for the people around you who love you and are waiting for you to pull this
off. Okay so, I've got a little bonus brain hack for you and I've done this
with many clients. It's a bet. What if I were to make a bet with you,
okay, I'm not a betting man but I like to pretend sometimes, what if we made a bet
and I'm betting you $500 that you can't go three days without losing your cool,
without becoming angry. Would you take that bet now? You might be thinking,
"Oh yeah, I got that. I'm going to take that Dr. Paul. I'll take his 500 bucks, that'll be easy."
Alright, so let's say that the bet is on and that I know a few things about
you because we've worked together before and we're friends right and so I know
that this particular person has been irritating and annoying you and that's
where you're having your anger problems and I get on my cell phone and I call up
that person and I say, "Hey" cause I'm friends with them too, I've got a little
bet going on, I'm wondering if you'd like to be in on and they're like,
"I'm interested. What do you got in mind?" I said, "I'll pay you $100 if you can just
get that person to lose their cool, if they can get you to lose your cool,
I'll pay you 100 bucks, do you think he could do that?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, that
would be totally easy, I know exactly what to do." "Oh really, what would you do?"
And they tell me and I'm like, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, that's totally gonna work, oh you
wouldn't, you would? Oh man this is gonna be easy now. Thank you." And I hang up,
now who's gonna win the bet? Okay so, that's not fair
right? But think about what happens. They are working their hardest to get you to
lose your cool. Why? Because they get a hundred bucks for me, where am I gonna
get that hundred bucks? Oh yeah, I got a bet with you. So you lose your
cool, you pay me 500 bucks, I turn around give them 100, put 400 in my own pocket,
everybody's happy, except for you, the only person in the whole equation who
has any control over whether you get angry or not. If you knew that I put them
up to it, would that change it for you? Yeah it would, wouldn't it? Yeah, think
about that, it's just a little brain hack that might help you to take a little
higher level of control over your own response.
Hopefully you're feeling better
after that. I hope that those ideas help. There's other ideas that hopefully will
help people that you love and care about, consider sharing Live on Purpose TV.
Glad you're here.