When I look at the kinds of articles people post on social media and the comments under them, it feels like there’s an overwhelming amount of hate and anger in the world - or at least among the people posting and commenting. (Maybe it’s just that non-angry people don’t spend much time in this kind of spaces.)
In contrast, when I think about my own life, I realize that I’m almost never angry. I feel many other negative emotions, sure, but anger isn’t one of them, and even when it arises it’s usually quite short-lived. I can’t even name a single person I hate - neither in my personal life nor in the media. I simply don’t spend time dwelling on people I’m not interested in or being angry at the world for not meeting my expectations.
This makes me wonder: is my experience rare or unusual? Or is hate and anger simply overrepresented in the media because those emotions motivate people to engage, making them seem far more widespread than they actually are?
I’m trying to understand rather than criticize. I can’t take credit for not being angry because whatever tha skill is doesn’t translate into other things like anxiety. I’m anxious about equally trivial things and I can’t help myself. I guess I’m just glad I don’t need to deal with this constant anger too.
I’d say it’s relatively rare.
The ability to feel anger, but not dwell on it, takes practice. Anger is partially chemical, hormonal. So you can’t eliminate it entirely. The best we can do is work towards a set of anger related goals.
First, there’s the skill of noticing anger in its very earliest start, so that you can prevent it from being enough to take concentration to control. That’s what stuff like mindfulness, meditation, and the like help with the most regarding anger. They give you the tools (eventually) to default to a more observant state, where you’ll notice the beginnings of anger and use mechanisms to divert it.
That makes anger management much easier because a lot of what gets people into trouble with anger is how long it takes for that rush you dissipate once it gets going. So you can apply anger management techniques to accelerate that cycle reaching its end.
That makes it more likely that you’ll resist any actions that might be spurred by anger until you can choose to make them if they’re useful and appropriate.
Pretty much all of our emotions are at least partly chemical. I’m not aware of any that aren’t, but I’m hesitant to say it’s all of them period. Some emotions are harder to resist than others, but not all of those chemicals are equal. Adrenaline, for example, is there to bypass conscious thought and control and spur us into action of some kind, even if that action is seemingly passive (like freezing up). Yeah, it’s more complicated than that, but we don’t need to cover every inch in this kind of chat.
But, and this is the key to successfully managing one’s anger, you have to be willing to recognise that feeling anger is neither uncontrollable, nor a reason to act on that anger. It’s a response to stimuli, but it also isn’t something someone else makes us feel. We can mitigate our responses when angry, and (no matter how much another person is intentionally trying to make it happen) it is an internal process.
The problem is that it’s a shit ton of work, and the learning curve is not a gentle one. It also is harder to work that curve the more reasons you have to be angry.