Never Get Angry Again

by David J. Lieberman

  The previous two chapters discussed methods of visualization, breathing, and meditation. Here we incorporate these practices with two techniques to help us break free from even decades-old resentment—encased anger that encrusts us long after the situation has passed.

  It’s normal to think about a painful experience long after it has passed—to process it, to work through it, and perhaps to gain some insight, meaning, or message. The question researchers sought to explain is why it works sometimes—and we feel better—while other times, we become stuck and the negativity becomes more intensely ingrained. They write, “Although engaging in this meaning-making process leads people to feel better at times, it frequently breaks down, leading people to ruminate and feel worse. This raises the question: What factors determine whether people’s attempts to ‘work through’ their negative feelings succeed or fail?”1

  The answer to this question is concisely summarized by psychologist Guy Winch, who explains that we tend to think about painful experiences from a first-person, ego-oriented perspective—just as we experienced it, unfolding through our own eyes. However, replaying the emotionally painful memories from a third-person perspective—where we are a witness to the scene, watching ourselves, as it were, from the perspective of an outside observer, produces a profound effect. He writes, “Participants reported feeling significantly less emotional pain when they envisioned the memory using a third-person perspective than when using a first-person perspective. Further, utilizing a psychologically distant vantage point also allowed them to reconstruct their understanding of their experiences and reach new insights and feelings of closure.”2

  The findings dovetail with the essence of our discussion: The more “I” we bring into an unpleasant event, the more pain we feel. Likewise, we sink more deeply into the negativity when we remember it from our own—the first person—perspective. It is, as we know, not the situation or event that make us angry, but the degree to which we take it personally. This technique (credited to the science of neurolinguistic programming) engages the power of visualization to depersonalize the impact, producing a permanent shift in our feelings toward any situation.

  THE PERCEPTUAL POSITIONS EXERCISE

  1. Find a quiet place where you can relax undisturbed. Close your eyes and get comfortable.

  2. Recall an experience that you feel anger about.

  3. This is where you consider the situation from your own perspective, through your own eyes, as if you were looking at the other person and/or scene. How are you behaving? How are you feeling? What do you see? What do you believe about the situation? Feel the effects on your body: the tightness, the physical tension, and the accompanying feelings—and simply observe.

  4. Next, zoom out and view the situation as if you were an observer, replaying the scene once more. Talk to yourself and think about why “this person” is so angry. As we know, anger is rooted in the themes of fear and control. Ask yourself: What exactly am I afraid of? What is the underlying fear behind the anger? What need of mine is not being met? Spend as much time as you’d like examining your behavior and underlying motivation.

  5. Now we will integrate a brief relaxation exercise to help us own our revised feelings. Feel your body and breathe (bring in the two exercises in the previous chapter on deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation).

  6. Come back into yourself and spend a few moments appreciating your choice to do something about the anger—to release it rather than to let it define you and confine you. Smile.

  The following NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) exercise is an enhanced spin-off of the previous technique and changes our internal representation by stripping away the intensity of the associated emotions. It accomplishes this through a dual psychological and physiological mechanism, which is explained afterward.

  THE MOVIE EXERCISE

  1. Find a quiet place where you can relax undisturbed. Close your eyes and get comfortable.

  2. Picture yourself sitting alone, inside of a movie theater, front row and center. The screen is frozen on the first frame of the movie and it is in black and white. The first frame is a picture of you in a situation where you were previously angry. You are about to relive this moment with two (visual and auditory) differences: (1) from another vantage point and (2) with an incongruent, amusing soundtrack.

  3. Imagine that you’re floating out of your body and into the projection booth, so that you can see yourself (from the back) inside of the cinema and watching the screen ahead. Take a moment to take in the scene—how you’re sitting, the clothes that you’re wearing.

  4. Now replay the memory on the screen ahead while listening to an amusing soundtrack, such as a cartoon theme or of some comedic melody. Pay attention to not only the screen, but to yourself watching the screen.

  5. When you get past what is the worst of this experience, freeze the film. Float inside the movie and view everything through your own eyes, replaying it as above with the incongruent soundtrack. Afterward, run the movie at high speed, then again backward, in color, with you experiencing it in the first person. You will see everything happening in reverse; people and things will walk, talk, and move backward. The same soundtrack will play backward at top speed and the whole movie will be over quickly. Replay the scene again, and this time more quickly; and then again with the last replay taking no more than five seconds.

  6. When you reach the beginning of the movie, black out the screen.

  7. Repeat steps 5–8 once or twice more, until you feel little or no anger toward the person or the experience.

  This technique works by disrupting our internal representation of the event, inhibiting the intensity of emotion and neutralizing the negative association. Research finds that our memories are highly malleable and possibly never completely solidify—which means that we can strengthen or weaken them at any time. When we experience a trauma, our feelings of terror and vulnerability intensify, stimulating output of adrenaline. It is the adrenaline that keeps these memories strong and intense, even days, months, or years after the event. Scientists have experimented with the drug propranolol, a beta-blocker usually used to treat heart or circulatory conditions and shown to block the production of adrenaline in nerve cells of the amygdala. Findings showed that people who received this adrenaline-blocking drug while recalling a past trauma could form a new association to the event and release themselves from the emotional pain.3 The above-described technique is used to achieve similar results by stripping away the negative charge of any anger or fear-inducing experience.

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  In the Heat of the Moment

  Anger-management techniques often fail because they are the first line of defense—we simply get worn down and worn out too easily. As the saying goes, “the best defense is a good offense,” which is why our focus has been on how to avoid the need to manage our anger. With perspective, we do not have to force ourselves to remain calm when, for instance, faced with insult, because there is no pain. One does not have to fight against that which he knows to be irrelevant, much less false. Then, regardless of how low our state and how large our ego becomes in the heat of the moment, we will not succumb to anger. What does not exist cannot grow.

  In the previous chapters, we explained how the brain can change, rewiring itself to establish new neural pathways, through the process called self-directed neuroplasticity.1 Via visualization, we get the proverbial ball rolling, and as we enter the real world, the following protocol will reinforce this new wiring because to become anger free as quickly as possible, we want to limit reanimating the neurons in the anger-response pathway.

  LET’S BE SMART

  First, we want to identify when we’re most at risk of going off course. When we know our triggers, we can limit the number of times we wind up facing anger-provoking scenarios. Some critical junctures—times when we’re most vulnerable to falling into familiar patterns—are situation-specific, time-specific, and people-specific. If we take a detour to avoid confronting temptation,
our route might be slightly longer, but we’ll have a better chance of arriving safely at our destination anger free.

  We should acknowledge our limitations to prevent ourselves from slipping too close to these danger zones. When we’re not in the right frame of mind or don’t have emotional energy to expend, it’s prudent to avoid potentially confrontational conversations and situations. Moreover, it’s foolish to unnecessarily drain our emotional resources. Controlling anger requires willpower, and willpower is not an infinite resource; we temporarily deplete it each time we act with restraint.2 For example, studies found that if we resist a persuasive message, this decreases our ability to exercise self-control right afterward, and this depletion increases our vulnerability to persuasion.3 Research concludes that people who most successfully exercise self-control usually set up their lives to minimize temptations during the day.4

  PROTOCOL: LEVEL 1

  When our ability to think clearly, or at all, is compromised, we too easily default to autopilot and fall into familiar, self-defeating, emotionally charged patterns. Setting up a protocol in advance—a prearranged course of action to follow—lets us react responsibly when we can’t think and process a proper response. This is effective even when our willpower reserves are drained, because we don’t have to think about what to do. In other words, our visceral reaction can be primed so that our response is thoughtful, even though it is instinctive.

  The protocol in Level 1 consists of two intertwining layers, which we’ll outline and then flesh out. First, we interrupt the anger-producing pattern to stop the stimulus–response cycle from becoming more ingrained. The interruption also moves us further away from reacting angrily, because, physiologically, it sends a biochemical signal to the nervous system to disengage the fight-or-flight response. Second, the best thing about this level is that this type of interruption relies on muscle memory—no brains necessary! In the following pages, we will discuss this concept more fully, but for now, consider muscle memory as the key behind near-flawless and near-automated performance, such as typing by an experienced typist or driving a stick shift by a seasoned driver.

  Pattern Interrupt

  When our emotions veer onto the anger track, we want to derail our train of thought as quickly as possible, by whatever reasonable means possible. A pattern interrupt does just this; it quickly jolts our focus to keep the locomotive from picking up steam toward an unproductive reaction. (A pattern interrupt can be any incongruent thought or gesture—snapping one’s fingers, visualizing the person we’re speaking to shrinking, counting backward in threes, and so on. However, we will see that one type of pattern interrupt is superior to all.) Interruptions also dampen the intensity of the original stimulus, thereby neutralizing the damage.

  The Automated Muscle Memory Response

  There are four levels to every type of action: (1) unconscious incompetence is when a person is unaware that he is not performing correctly; (2) conscious incompetence is when the person is aware of not having the skill set necessary to be as effective and successful as he would like to be; (3) conscious competence is when the person knows but must pay attention to what he needs to do in order to be effective; and (4) unconscious competence is when the person can perform correctly and as necessary without full, or even partial, attention. Learning to drive a stick shift effectively illustrates the four levels. At first it feels completely foreign, but the driver eventually has the skill to shift gears without consciously focusing on what he is doing; the process is now integrated into muscle memory and can be instinctually performed. Muscle memory is related to procedural memory, which is a type of unconscious, long-term memory that helps us perform specific tasks with minimal attention; and we can automatically access procedural memories without conscious awareness.

  Putting it All Together

  Although many traditional tools of anger management don’t work, one of them remains irrefutable. The principle of terror management reminds us that fear impedes our ability to think. Therefore, a powerful weapon in our willpower arsenal is simply to pause and calm ourselves by breathing deeply. This is effective for two reasons: Physiologically, willpower has a biological basis, and slow, deep breathing activates the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain. Law enforcement and military professionals combat stress with tactical breathing, which helps control the sympathetic nervous system. During a life-and-death situation, several successive deep breaths help them to think more clearly and engage more effectively.5

  The second reason is the previously mentioned facial feedback hypothesis, the very act of smiling (we’ll explain this in a moment) and breathing deeply sends the message to the brain that the situation is nonthreatening, and that it’s not only safe to relax, but that we are already relaxed. An incongruous expression or response compels the “thinking brain” to reengage, to make sense of the conflicting emotions. Because the “external awakens the internal,” our feelings will align with our behavior, instead of the opposite.

  Now we’ll fold in all the psychological and physiological processes into one simple protocol. Whether you are thinking about a situation, or you’re in a situation that is anger or fear provoking, simultaneously smile, take a long, deep breath, and move your attention to your breath. Unclench your jaw, drop your shoulders, and just focus on your breathing. That’s it. (You need only smile ever so faintly—particularly if you’re in the actual situation—as you don’t want others to think you’re being smug or disrespectful.) When a person is anxious or angry, he may force a smile or breathe to calm himself, but doing both—smiling and breathing—gives us more than the physiological benefits of both. Together they do something almost magical: accessing memories of simultaneous smiling and (deep) breathing which are calming and pleasant, and anchoring us into this emotional state.

  It is important to emphasize that our attention is on our breath, becoming mindful of how it fills our lungs and then is released gently and slowly. Typically, an anger-provoking thought or situation narrows our focus to the source of discontent. Bringing awareness to our breath instantly grounds us and interrupts the escalation of emotions. Doing this will take some practice at first, but soon enough your response will be automated, and the moment an unwelcomed thought pops up, or you find yourself in an emotionally precarious situation, your physiology will take over and free you from the grip of anger.

  When all is said and done (or better, when all is not said and not done), after the initial moment has passed and we have risen above the urge to get angry, we want to take pleasure in our success. Isn’t it beautiful that I don’t need to get angry anymore? Feel the joy when you choose to remain calm (or at least in control of yourself). This isn’t about taking a victory lap. Joy infuses a positive emotional charge into the action of self-control, energizing our success and animating the new and improved neural network.

  PROTOCOL: LEVEL 2: IF YOU CAN THINK: WHAT TO SAY WHEN YOU TALK TO YOURSELF

  Be real. Be honest. What you say to yourself in the heat of the moment tilts your emotional state and subsequent response. You must stay in the world of truth because any lie divides your energy and moves you into the world of falsehood, the home of the ego. You cannot, therefore, force yourself to think, I am calm, and I don’t care. All you are doing is lying to yourself. This is one shortcoming of affirmations. Although they can certainly be powerful tools, reciting positive affirmations can be counterproductive while we’re in a negative state because we charge the lie with energy. We are not whole when we suppress how we feel and deny the pain. If we feel angry, we must own that—but which part of us is angry? The ego or the soul? We feel angry, but it’s not the real us. Rather, the false self feels angry. To maintain our authenticity while separating ourselves from the negative feeling, we instead acknowledge, My ego is hurt. My ego is scared. Don’t ignore the pain, but rather take a moment to remind yourself that you—the soul—is not in pain, your false self is. Then ask yourself honestly and lovingly: (1) What need of mine is not being met? Or perhaps,
What am I afraid of? Anger and fear are interlaced, so if you’re able to identify the underlying fear, you begin to gain control over your feelings. Remember that anger often serves as a mask for emotions the ego deems too painful to acknowledge: guilt, insecurity, envy, jealousy, embarrassment, anxiety, unworthiness, emptiness … the list goes on.… Then, continue to talk to yourself. (2) What is my objective right now? (3) What can I control right now? (4) What can I say or do to find a solution or to better the situation? Even when self-examination yields no new insight, the process is useful because fear begins to dissipate the moment we begin to examine it.

  HANG ON, HELP IS ON THE WAY!

  Research shows that even in high-stress situations, we need no more than ninety seconds for our system to process any anger or fear-based emotion. This means we can clear out physiological influences and regain our full rational status in the most trying of circumstances. In My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor writes:

  Although there are certain limbic system (“emotional”) programs that can be triggered automatically, it takes less than 90 seconds for one of these programs to be triggered, surge through our body, and then be completely flushed out of our bloodstream. My anger response, for example, is a programmed response that can be set off automatically. Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a physiological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over. If, however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run. Moment by moment, I make the choice to either hook into my neurocircuitry or move back into the present moment, allowing that reaction to melt away as fleeting physiology.6

  No matter how visceral our initial response is, the emotion can roll right through our nervous system in just ninety seconds. We feed it only through cognitive reinforcement: selling ourselves on an impossible lie: that we can regain control by losing control.