Is Your Anger Hurting You?

In doing research for this paper, I poured over numerous research articles in many contexts. What stood out for me in particular was that a majority of the research articles, linked anger with depression. These are two very broad topics that deserve attention on their own merits. However, for the purpose of this paper, we will include it in our discussion of some of the negative effects of anger on individuals from a psychological health, physical health, and an environmental health perspective.

Anger is an emotion that we all come equipped with from birth. Some would have us believe that fear is the emotion that occurs before we use anger to express the fear. Research indicates that fear and anger have separate neurological pathways and that we experience these two emotions in very distinct and different ways in the brain and in the body. When we become angry we experience increases in blood flow, systolic blood pressure, heart rate, and cardiac output. The impact that these increases in cardio vascular activities have varies depending on how quickly we recover from our angry state. Those people that can become angry and then quickly resolve the anger will return to base-line or a normal level of cardio vascular functioning more efficiently than those individuals that have a difficult time letting go of the anger. Individuals that ruminate or continue to think about the situation that made them angry will stay angry longer causing them to experience these cardio vascular symptoms for an extended period of time. For these individuals, chronic rumination on angry situations can lead to the onset and progression of cardio vascular disease.

Rumination can not only lead to cardio vascular disease, but can also be a trigger for a major depressive episode. People who have difficulty with expressing their anger in an appropriate way will frequently become angry with themselves. They may become angry because they feel they didn't stick up for themselves. For instance, a boss that gives an unfair evaluation and you want to tell them you feel it's unfair but you choose to accept the unfair evaluation rather than risk upsetting your boss. Perhaps it's anger over not having any control over the situation, such as being laid off from a job or not getting a job that you may have wanted. Sometimes, anger can also be self- directed even if individuals do assert themselves. For example, if you decide to say something to your boss about your unfair evaluation and in your anger you yell at your boss and your boss fires you, you may ruminate on how the conversation could have gone differently to generate a positive rather than a negative outcome. This anger is easily turned inward blaming yourself for losing your job and may result in a major depressive episode. Many major depressive episodes have their roots in unresolved anger, self- criticism, and rumination on that anger.

Angry rumination can also impact us on an environmental level. Individuals who tend to ruminate or continue to think about why they are angry, express their anger in unsafe ways on the road. It has been established that those folks who experience road rage and engage in unsafe driving patterns are people who have unresolved anger issues. These individuals tend to drive at a higher rate of speed, take more risks while driving, and in general exhibit more aggressive driving patterns. In addition, what creates an even more dangerous situation is when these individuals encounter traffic patterns that create more anger and frustration from being on a crowded freeway. As a result, the level of frustration and anger increases and so does the aggressiveness of their driving putting everyone on the road at risk.

In short, these are only a few of the ways that anger can have a negative impact on us, our well-being, and the welfare of others. Many of the people I have worked with on anger issues, believe that they should not be experiencing anger at all. They have received these messages from friends, family, co-workers, and others. Consequently, they focus on the fact that they became angry in the first place, ruminating on the event that made them angry rather than on how to acknowledge their anger and how to express it in an appropriate way, leaving them self-critical and feeling as if they are somehow faulty. In turn, this self-critical stance only serves to increase the possibility that individuals will develop cardio vascular disease, major depression, and engage in reckless behavior on our roadways. Once individuals can acknowledge that it is okay to become angry, only then can they begin to develop the skills that will assist them in accommodating the appropriate expression of their anger.

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