All the Rage: What We Can Learn From Feeling Angry

Angry is not a good look.

That’s what we mostly think, but anger is there just the same. We all have it. And it’s multi-faceted. It can lurk ready to strike and then burst out all of a sudden in a volcanic eruption. It can also simmer on the back burner. Or linger as a persistent chill that can be felt more than seen. It is an awesome, powerful emotion. And it won’t be denied.

The problematic aspect of anger is pretty clear. Unleashed, it can be immeasurably destructive. We all know of—and likely have participated in—instances where an outburst or tirade ended a relationship, never to be repaired. When anger goes beyond the verbal, it’s the cause of untold violence and death. Anger is not to be treated lightly. It is the weapon behind every form of violent weaponry.

Because we are all capable of anger, it’s worth regular examination. If we dismiss it out of hand as a negative and destructive emotion, our attempts to eradicate it from our lives and our psyches will likely lead to suppressing and blunting the emotion, resulting in the kind of buried stress that does damage in the places we store it—knotted stomachs, clenched jaws, tight shoulders, furrowed brows.

Because we are all capable of anger, it’s worth regular examination.

Not only that, dismissing anger so readily may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As Sharon Salzberg likes to point out, what kind of a world would we have if we always told the angry person to cool it? They may be the very person willing to point out what the rest of us may be willfully ignoring. As she writes in Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom: 

If we can utilize that energy and not get lost in the anger, we can have the courage to speak out—maybe pointing out problems no one else in the room cares to notice, let alone mention. There is a lot of strength there. But if we are lost in anger with no space at all, it is likened in Buddhist psychology to a forest fire, which burns up its own support. It can destroy the host: us. It can range wildly, leaving us far from where we want to be.

We often see these two sides of anger vividly in people in their teens and early twenties especially, so often stigmatized for being too angry (think campus protesters). According to Dan Siegel, author of Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, the brain in adolescence (running roughly from 12-24) is characterized by, among other features, “emotional spark,” an increased flow of emotional energy. As a downside, this natural tendency can lead to moodiness and seemingly out-of-control tornadoes of emotion, but it also provides, as Siegel writes, “a powerful passion to live life fully, to capture life being on fire.” He makes clear that teens need that, and as a society we all need teens to have it. It’s an engine of necessary generational change. Those damn kids will run the world one day. They need a say, and they need to be passionate about it.

It is widely understood in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience that our emotions are not naughty children who need to be disciplined by our rational mind. They are adaptations—essential to our efforts to make meaning and navigate the world. As Dacher Keltner points out in Born to be Good, our displays of emotion convey important information to those we’re making a world together with: “Emotional displays provide reliable clues to others’ commitments [their intentions toward us], because they are involuntary, costly, and hard to fake.” They are the human equivalent, he says, of the peacock’s tail. It’s what we use to send key messages about what the world means to us and what we mean to do in the world. Anger just happens to be one of the most dangerous and delicate tools in the toolkit we use to make and express meaning and intention. Like a hammer, it can do a good job pounding a nail or the very bad job of bashing someone’s skull in.

When we confront injustice or tyrannical behavior, anger will emerge organically, and it can provide the energy source to seek to change the world or our own behavior.

In short, then, as with all emotion, our innate capability to be mindful can make all the difference. Anger is so easily abused and abusive when we use it simply to increase or protect our territory, warding off what we don’t want or responding with little rage-lets to every annoyance that pricks our precious irritability. In that case, we’re squandering the gift of this tremendous emotional power to make ourselves and others more miserable.

By contrast, we all know the power that can come from using anger’s spark to channel a passion that can drive change. Emotion researcher and theorist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, writes about the folly of imagining our affairs conducted free of emotion. In a court of law, judges are supposed to be rational, emotionless—the Vulcans on Star Trek—but this denies something essential to being human. She quotes US Supreme Court Justice William Brennan (who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v Wade): “Sensitivity to one’s intuitive and passionate responses, and awareness of the range of human experience, is therefore not only an inevitable but a desirable part of the judicial process, an aspect more to be nurtured than feared.”

When we confront injustice or tyrannical behavior, anger will emerge organically, and it can provide the energy source to seek to change the world or our own behavior. However, if we start fueling it—taking a joy ride on its potent energy—it will likely not only cloud our judgments as we see only red, it may do substantial and irreparable damage. In fact, demagoguery, a brand of politics that often rears its ugly head, likes to exploit the energy of anger and its close relatives fear and vengeance. It can feel “good,” but it is nothing more than addiction to an emotional high—a high that is often egged on by algorithms that reward destructive emotion.

Anger is a powerful spark to disrupt, but it is not so good at the long and tireless work of bringing about real, positive, collaborative change. Anger can open doors that need to be opened, or burst through, but it is not the frame of mind for making a good home for us all on the other side of that door. For that, we need love.