The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to be Angry Better

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

Anger is a powerful signal that you or someone you value is in danger. But in our normal lives the sensations of rage we experience are false alarms - we aren't in real peril and we don't need to resort to extreme survival behaviors, such as violence.Therapist Faith Harper (author of Unfuck Your Anger) explains why our bodies evolved this anger response, and how we can ride out the initial wave of rage and reduce the negative effects of anger on us and our relationships. She also shows that anger has its place in pushing us to find constructive ways to challenge bad things in the world around us.WARNING: This episode contains some strong language.You can find Faith's books at the link below.https://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/artist/faith-g-harper Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Imagine that right now you're driving a car, which if you actually are driving a car is probably an easy thing to conceptualize. But imagine you're in your car and you're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Your lane is ending soon, so you turn on your turn signal and try to merge. But car after car pretends just not to see you. And that's when the drivers behind you start honking their horns at you, like it's somehow your fault that no one will let you in. Now, I'd like to think that during a moment like this, I'd think back to my years of training as a happiness expert, that I'd embrace a bit of compassion for the other drivers,

or just remember to take a deep breath. But no, instead, I usually undergo an immediate Hulk-like transformation from a friendly everyday commuter into a full-on, profanity-shouting, road-rage masshole. My car may be at a standstill, but my emotions, and specifically my rage, has gone from zero to 60 in what feels like less than a millisecond. The science shows that bursts of anger like these don't really help us out in the long run. Unlike a green superhero, our human fury can be much more under control than we think,

if we have the right strategies. It's such an uncomfortable feeling, right? I mean, everybody has had this experience of anger, or you've gotten really, really good at not paying attention to your own feelings and you're dissociated all the time. But it doesn't feel good, and there's a physiological reason for it. Our body is pushing us to do something. It's a very protective mechanism, and the body is determined to force us into action in order to protect us, which is why it's so incredibly uncomfortable to feel angry and to want to do something about it as soon as possible. This is Faith Harper. She's a therapist based in San Antonio, Texas, who's written several books designed to make neuroscience more understandable to the general public, including one that's taught me a lot about strategies I can use when my mass whole self wants to bust out. But I'll warn you, Faith's book has a distinctly not-safe-for-work

title. It's called Unfuck Your Anger, Using Science to Understand Frustration, Rage, and Forgiveness. And the colorful title really fits, because as Faith puts it at the start of her book, nothing pisses her off more than being angry. But sometimes she just can't help it. I got angry last night because I'm trying to pull into a parking spot and somebody opens their car door and then leaves it open while they're digging around in their truck. I don't know what they're doing.

Move! I'm trying to park. I'm trying to go grocery shopping. It just feels like there's this idea of how things should be. And when people break the contract, we get mad. Anything that doesn't align with how we expect the world to work can create these feelings of distress, but this need for movement to create change. And the change that I created was rather than yell at the lady digging in her trunk as I went to another parking spot. And so why don't you give me like a quick definition of anger? Because, you know, it differs from some of these other negative emotions that we've talked about in this season of the podcast.

You know, how would you define it? It comes from the Latin root meaning to out move. It's creating energy to propel action. It's the nervous system getting wound up enough to do something. So anger is your body directing you to create change. And I think that's a good neutral definition because we have these ideas about anger being very negative and something that we shouldn't have versus paying attention to my body is wanting me to make some kind of correction and protect itself. We talked in this season a lot about different negative emotions, things like sadness and anxiety. And with all these emotions, there's this kind of urge to ignore them or run away, right? Because they don't feel good. But with anger, you know, we have that urge, but I think the reason is different. I think with anger, there's a real worry that if we acknowledge it and act on it, we could hurt someone, hurt ourselves, right? Which sure happens too, right? I mean, so talk about why even though, you know, there's the potential for harm with this emotion,

we shouldn't ignore it. That's not really the right response. Yeah, any emotion that we ignore, I call it holding the beach ball underwater. You can spend all of your time and attention doing that. And for those of us who grew up splashing around in the pool and have done that, you know, you can push it under

and you can do nothing but that. But eventually you're going to need to do something else. Your attention span is going to wander somewhere else and that beach ball is going to pop up. It's going to hit you in the face. Things are going to go flying everywhere. You're going to have to deal with it at some point. So ignoring any complicated emotion doesn't make it go away. It actually festers and makes it worse. And that's true of all the uncomfortable emotions that you're talking about in the series. Anger is no different. So when people are worried, like, well, I don't want to react from anger, ignoring it is just going to have it pop up in some weird way. Instead of having a conversation with a coworker that needs to be had, you're going to go home and yell at

your partner. And maybe not even that day, maybe a month later as things build up. And so I think this is a really important way to think about anger, right? Because again, you know, we can sometimes think these emotions, they're just uncomfortable, right? But you've argued that sometimes anger is normative. It's helpful. You know, talk about what you mean there. Yeah. Yeah. I should say, first of all, that I was that kid, even at a very young age. My dad, especially like that's too many battles. You can't put every battle in your pocket. You have to pick two or three at a time, put some down. I was always that person that was mad about injustice and mad about how other people treated and wanted to punch the sun at a very young age. And my parents were probably like, I don't know what to do with this person. Obviously,

I became a therapist interested in social justice issues. The story that I tell in the book is about Rosa Parks. Most people know who Rosa Parks is, but they don't know the story of how she became Rosa Parks, right? She was not politically active and engaged. Her brother had served in World War II, was an incredibly decorated hero, and came back and was treated like shit because he was a Black man in a structurally racist society. And that pissed her off. And so she could have yelled and screamed about it, but she decided to get involved. She became involved with her local chapter of NAACP. She became the secretary of that local chapter. And when the bus boycott was determined to be a good nonviolent course of action, the idea was that she was going to replicate something else

that had already happened in Birmingham. There had been a young unwed pregnant woman who had been told not to sit down and move. And they said, well, let's replicate this action with somebody who will not be torn up needlessly or can at least take it if it happens. So the action happened. And it wasn't that Rosa Parks got on the bus and she was tired and she said, screw y'all, I'm not getting up. And then they papered all of the historically Black neighborhoods with flyers about the protest. And so rather than just reacting, she became very, very involved and strategic about creating change. And so that's anger being used. Your body's telling you something's wrong. And there was like no lies detected. There was something incredibly wrong there. But by handling in this more measured and thoughtful way,

so much more tends to get done than just beating the crap out of somebody. So I love these stories about these cases where anger is normative. But of course, the problem is that anger can also stick with us. We can kind of get caught in these cycles of anger where our emotions kind of blow up on a hair trigger. So talk about why that's not great either. Well, and I think that's when we feed it. There used to be this primal scream kind of therapy, which was a big thing in the 70s, that you can just go in and kind of vomit. And you do like you feel better for a minute because you're like, yeah, I'm mad and everything sucks. And my therapist now agrees. And this group, we're sitting naked in the woods and everybody agrees or whatever.

And then we found, Candice Pert's research found that that's not true. That that process of just having this vomit where we're not doing anything with it becomes something, I hate to use the word addiction because it's not an addiction, but it becomes a very out of control behavior. It's this thing that we want to engage in and that we need it to feel better, but it just becomes this loop that we go in and we scream about stuff, but we're not doing anything with it. Just like any uncomfortable emotion is like, okay, so our body's telling us to pay attention to something. What do we need to pay attention to? Are we listening to an old tape? And we need to remind ourselves that, you know, that's an uncomfortable association because of past traumas and it's not reality based or is it reality based? And so if so, how, we should try to be good about regulating our anger, maybe being kinder and more patient.

Why? Right. Well, we get more done. You know, anger can be scary for the people around us. It can be scary and uncomfortable for ourselves. It feels very much like a lack of control for physiological reasons. So recognizing it, let's try to manage the beach ball without shoving it underwater is far more helpful and efficacious for getting anything done. And I have clients that will come in and they're mad and they're screaming. And I'll go ahead and give them some rope to do that because I'm curious what their pattern is around that. And this is a safe place to do it. And I'm like, okay, so I don't feel unsafe with you. I understand where this is coming from. You've got a lot of pain here that's being expressed in this way. But you know, you're kind of a big dude, and you're

pretty loud. And I'm wondering how other people are responding to this in your life. Are people hearing what you're saying when it's expressed in this way? And that's the point. Like we're trying to create change is what are the mechanisms of change? And screaming and raging doesn't get people real far, even though social media is full of it. That's not how action is created. If we want to channel our anger productively rather than chaotically, we need to figure out where our anger goes wrong and how to respond with a bit more chill. But doing that requires figuring out how anger works in the first place. When we get back from the break, we'll take a deep dive into the biology of anger. We'll see that understanding the purpose of this ancient emotion

can give us some hints about how to use our anger in more effective ways. The Happiness Lab will be right back. To really understand an emotion, it's often helpful to learn more about how that emotion first originates and how it interacts with the rest of our neural circuitry. Therapist Faith Harper has argued that we can understand anger better once we realize that this emotion starts with perception. Well, the body is perceiving something. And a lot of times we don't even really know what

it is. We are getting so much information that it's sort of downloading and we can pay attention to a few pieces of it at the prefrontal cortex level and the rest of it is kind of souping around in there. And so sometimes I have people like I was angry and I didn't know why. Your body was paying attention. It read something as a threat. You were in the store and you smelled somebody's cologne and it was the same cologne that was worn by somebody you really don't like. That kind of stuff happens all the time. So getting really curious is important because people listening to this, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I have no idea like why I'm pissed all the time. And that's okay. A lot of it's precognitive or it's body-based. Most of our messaging is afferent, is coming from the body. We're having like this vagal tone experience

that our brain then interprets as A, B, piss. So when we decide an emotion is negative or positive is when we get into trouble versus an emotion just exists. And when we get curious about, hey, I'm really grumpy and upset right now. I wonder what that's about. Or I'm irritated and I'm not quite sure why. People that are just huge empaths are having a lot of that right now because everybody is so tight and exhausted and frustrated. We're a year and a half into pandemic and we're having these big societal upheavals. And sometimes we're just picking up on other people's shit, right? So getting curious of like, hmm, I wonder what that's about. I wonder what's going on takes the internalized stigma and the externalized stigma out of it. And so rather than like, oh, I'm mad and I shouldn't be,

or that's a bad emotion to have, something's wrong. It's just like, hmm, I wonder what that's about. I wonder what's going on. My body picked up on something, but it's obviously not something I need to pay attention to right now. But you're telling body like, I got you. I paid attention, but I don't see anything. So I think we're good. And then you're no longer trying to shove something away. And the body's like, are you sure? Like, you can continue to watch, but I think we're fine. Let's just go ahead and go to the grocery store. And then we're having a negotiation rather than trying to wrestle control away from the amygdala, which never works. And so let's talk about how anger manifests in the body. You know, give me kind of sympathetic nervous system 101.

You know, how does anger really start physiologically speaking? Yeah, we think that the brain is controlling the body like there's, you know, somebody up there with a joystick, and the body's really controlling the brain. The vagus nerve is sending up this information. There are four pathways up and only one down. 80% of the messaging is body to brain, not brain to body. You know, a lot of us have heard of fight flight and we actually have fight flight freeze. And what that is, is the nervous system, specifically the vagus nerve, the 10th cranial nerve, which connects to pretty much everywhere in our body, all of our organs is reacting. We're built for connection.

We're wired for connection. And if something challenges that, then the body's job is survival. And so we're having this very physiological, animalistic response. And then people get really embarrassed that their bodies are doing what their bodies are supposed to do,

which goes back to paying attention to those early warning signs is the best way through a vagal event. And then if you get over-activated, even just going like, this is what's going on. I just need to let this rush of hormones get through me. And then I'm going to feel a little nauseous. And then I'll have something a little sugar. And I'll feel like I'm recognizing like this is just something that I have to now work through because my body is doing its job is really helpful. I mean, I'm a yoga teacher, so just ignore me. So that's why things like yoga and Qigong and Tai Chi

and very mindful movement can be incredibly beneficial because we're bringing the brain and body back together. And the mechanism of that is the vagus nerve. And this isn't really new information. That's our new word for it. But acupuncturists 3,000 years ago called it the do channel. Same thing. So we've always known about the mind-body connection. We get really good at forgetting. And we also get really good at thinking that

other people's science may not be correct because of the words that they used, or they didn't have an fMRI to understand what was going on. But we've had thousands of years of understanding that this is what bodies do. This isn't brand, brand new. One thing you noted in the book, which I thought was really important is that, you know, we sometimes think of anger as like an on-off switch. I'm angry or I'm not. Talk about why that's not necessarily always the case. So we think we have three emotions, mad, sad, glad. There's actually a huge spectrum of emotions. And even with the anger, it can be frustrated. It can be irritated. It can be going back to parking lot lady.

Was I angry? Was I pissed off? No, I was irritated. But it'd be very easy for me to continue to feed that and it turn into a rage-a-thon. So I'm always trying to get my clients and people who read my book to recognize what are those early signs of like, oh, my jaw gets tight, my shoulders go up, really trying to pay attention to it somatically so we can attend to what needs to be attended to before it gets into a full-blown rage fit. Because anybody who has tried to calm themselves down in a full-blown rage fit or a two-year-old in a full-blown rage fit knows that it's nigh impossible and you just kind of have to let it wear itself out. You know, there's multiple layers to any strong emotion. We can be content or we can be completely blissed out, right?

And the same is true with anchor. I think it's so cool to recognize the biology of this stuff because, you know, this isn't the body trying to get us into trouble or get us fired from work or get us in a fight in a parking lot. This is the body's way to survive. This is a system that's built to keep us safe, right? Yeah. And the second thing I think that's kind of cool is that when you think about the evolutionary reason for this, you really learn that this is why anger works so fast, right? If the job is to get us away from some tiger, it couldn't think and dither of like, is this the right appropriate context to kind of scream at someone? The brain's just kind of doing its job really fast. Yeah, right. Like if you touch a hot

stove, you don't want to sit there and go, oh, my goodness, this is hot. This may burn. I may have consequences from that. Is my insurance activated? No, you want to move your hand. It's the same thing. And society has evolved so much faster than human bodies have. Our bodies are really not meant to be in this room doing a Zoom session right now, right? All of these things are meant for, like you say, being chased by a tiger, not dealing with somebody, not being aware of their surroundings in the parking lot and leaving their door open. And so this is why researchers who study aggression really try to look into the evolutionary aspects of these triggers, which can sometimes give us some

insight. And so in your book, you review some work by R. Douglas Fields, who talks about these nine rage triggers. Fields has this acronym he calls Life Mort. So the L is life or death. I mean, that kind of makes evolutionary sense, right? Like if you're going to die, you need a fast response. But another one which is cool is this idea of insult. So talk about how a lot of our anger triggers are about this notion of what's insulting us. Well, and I think a lot of that goes back in the fact that we are hardwired for connection and we are hardwired to be protective of our people. And so insult to that or disrespect of that is a threat, right?

We're having to resettle of like, no, I am to be respected and you're not, and we're going to have a problem is what the body is doing. And that's where the anger is coming from. Another set of triggers that are part of the life morts model are cases where who is under threat, right? And so he has a couple of cases that make tons of evolutionary sense. So F is for family, M is for mate, T is for tribe. You're talking about this idea that some of our fast anger response might be a protection device for the people we should care about, evolutionarily speaking. Right. Very few people are completely an island. You know, there was that guy that they found who was living alone in the woods for many, many years and like just kind of stealing what he

needs. But that's weird. Human beings do need other human beings and our survival depends on it, which is why our relaxed state is tend and befriend and connection. I'm a relationally trained therapist. Relational cultural theory is what I work from. And in the 70s, it was this idea that we're hardwired for connection. And now we have the science that bears that out, that we really do need that forced survival. And so those early ideas about psychology is we need to move to self-actualization and you don't need anybody are patently false. And then those early ideas about psychology is we need to move to self-actualization and you don't need anybody are patently false. And then we can also see now the evolutionary psychology is like, why would we defend somebody that we don't need? It's not just like, well,

I love my husband and I want you to leave him alone. No, I need my husband. He's part of my people and we need each other. I mean, nobody else is going to do the dishes in my house if something happens to my husband and I don't want to do them. So we're going to have to fight. Yeah. So part of it is about the people that are being affected, but part of it is about the stuff in our life that's being affected. You know, he talks about the E is for environment, and the R is for this idea of resources. Yeah. You know, so talk about how the space can kind of be part of the context for these triggers. I mean, we're really seeing that. And we have been for a couple of years now, this idea of resources being limited.

And we really saw it in full Technicolor last year with all the shortages. And it's about caring for ourselves and caring for the people around. So it's not like I just want all the stuff. But where is this idea that I need all the stuff coming from is this mechanism of caring for my family, my mate, my kids, my tribe, is I want to make sure that everybody has food and toilet paper and all these other things. If you look on it, you're like, we're being protective of our fast fashion clothing. No, we're being protective of resources, again, to keep us alive and the people that we love alive, I don't freak out. But if somebody cuts me off on I-95, I'm filled with this incredibly fast, deeply evolved rage. We're going to scrap. Yes.

Yes, exactly. I'm glad I'm not the only one here. But so talk about why understanding these triggers can help explain that sort of strange context of road rage and why we just don't get nearly as pissed off in other contexts. The expectation is if we're walking down the street, we're all sharing this space. And even though we're really doing the same thing on the road, the car is property. And that feels like somebody invading our home if they cut us out. And also, I mean, I think it feels more threatening. It's far more dangerous. If somebody bumps into your car, there's far more consequences for that than if somebody bumps into your car, there's far more consequences for that than

if somebody bumps into your body with their backpack in the store. That's irritating, but there's not going to be thousands of dollars of damage and great physical injury and possible death from that. So I think that's also part of what's playing with all the information that's downloading for us. And that takes a lot of the self-stigma out of it of like, okay, I'm just working with the process of a human body and recognizing I'm more upset about this in my car because I think of my car as my property, my space.

And if you've got my kid in the car, okay, now it's on. Now that we have a better sense of how anger works biologically, why it feels so fast, and why it's not a bad response per se, we can start to understand that even though rage doesn't feel great, it's really a feeling that's there to try to help us. But biological good intentions are not. We often react pretty badly to our anger. Think seething, yelling, middle fingers raised with strangers on the highway. These responses,

not so good. So how can we react to these frustrations better? Well, here's some of Faith's strategies for working positively with our anger when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. So far, therapist and anger expert Faith Harper has explained that rage is our body's way of saying, hey, something is wrong in our environment and we need to change it, ASAP. It's an important alert system that we need to listen to in order to be happier. But listening to that alert doesn't necessarily require flipping off complete strangers. Some ways of reacting to our anger are more helpful than others.

This is something Faith has seen firsthand in her therapy practice. When anger becomes a mechanism of controlling others, that's obviously problematic. And in fact, one of the first things that I look at is, do they calm down when they get what they want? If a kid is having a complete meltdown and you're like, fine, here's the cookie and they're still melting down, then the anger is very physiological, not something they're doing to manipulate. So I always look with people like the weaponizing anger and they're completely in control,

but they're punching walls to show you what they're physically capable of or whatever. And then they get what they want and they're fine and they are sweet as pie. That's a different thing, right? That's not a physiological evolutionary anger response. It's somebody weaponizing their body against somebody else. But if they get what they want and they're still activated, if their nervous system is still jangled and like the problem's resolved and the other person who bumped into them backs off or whatever, but they're still like this, that's an evolutionary physiological response. That's what we look at to parse out

where is it coming from? Is this purely behavioral or is this physiological? So one of the techniques you've used is this acronym AHN. Can you walk me through what the acronym is? Sure. So the A stands for anger. And the idea is it comes from one, two, or three of the following variables, which is H, hurt, E, expectations not met, or N, needs not met, or any combination thereof. And so unpacking it very simply, were your feelings hurt? Are you angry at your partner because they were supposed to be home for dinner and you had planned a nice dinner and then they had gone out drinking after work and whoopsie daisy. But you're hurt. Your anger is coming from being very hurt by somebody and your body reacting in

a way to express that. Did you have an expectation for them to show up? Yeah. You know, it's a really good and simple tool for parsing out what's the underlying emotion. That helps us figure out our patterns of responses. And then you get those aha moments of, oh, this really kind of connects to my trauma history, that I had a lot of emotional neglect in my household, and I'm feeling that same being misheard or misunderstood. So we start recognizing these patterns. And so we go, oh, there it is.

Okay, got it. That helps us work with it in a different way. And that helps us then figure out those early signals of like, oh, yeah, this is a big trigger for me. So I need to pay attention to this. My jaw is getting tight. I know what that means about myself. I need to do something with that.

And I've had a lot of people who have had, you know, decades of being in one pattern. And they're looking at me like I'm nuts. And like, I'm never going to be able to do that. And, you know, within a year, they're like, oh, yeah, my jaw's tight and I was really frustrated by this and I handled it just fine. Because the whole point of therapy is not to just like have to sit in my office and cry. The point is to be able to learn new skills so you're managing your own life without me. And so with things like anger, it's like, here, let me help you from this place of perspective of noticing patterns and going, oh, but that's also kind of like what you said

about your mom, you know, and then it gives you other ways to work with it. And so that's why AHAIN is so good because it really simplifies what's going on underneath this big response that I'm having. And we also, we have some cultural narrative issues around anger. Anger is considered appropriate. It's considered powerful. It's considered effective. It's very masculine emotion and energy. We really struggle socially to let men have a wide range of emotional experiences. Men aren't supposed to cry.

Men aren't supposed to be sad or hurt or disappointed or depressed. They're allowed to be angry. That's macho. So a lot of time, the anger is masking all that other stuff. We're not allowing this free range of expression of emotions and being able to work with them and have them be validated and understood. You're allowed to be angry or you can be a pussy, basically. I mean, we could talk about testosterone and differences and gender birth assignment and the like, but a lot of it is also cultural and what's acceptable and what's not. And so one of the strategies you've talked about in the book is this idea that if we can kind of use this 90 second rule, we can ride the wave. So walk through the strategy

of what it would look like to ride the wave of anger. It comes from neuroscience, but this is one of those things like we've known this for thousands of years. Buddhists have practiced this, is this idea that an emotion is meant to give us information. And when we either hold on to it or we try and shove it away, which is just another version of holding on to it, that's when it gets stuck and becomes this longer term mood. Because people are like, I'm not angry for 90 seconds. I've been angry for 10 years. That's a mood. And there's something going on to this making that very sticky for you. The 90 second rule is this idea that we're having this rush. We're getting all this messaging. It's being interpreted with this emotionality and the amygdala. Our thoughts are based on that.

And if we go, oh, okay, curious. I wonder what that's about. I wonder if I can figure that out. Something's going on. I'm having a big reaction to that. Okay. And then it dissipates because we're paying attention to it, which is all the body wants. The body just wants us to pay attention. Like, I am trying to help you out, sis, is what the body is saying. And if we're ignoring it, it's going to throw down and the body's going to win. So once we start paying attention and negotiating,

then the anger doesn't last nearly as long because it flushes out because we're attending to what's going on. We're making the movement that the body wants to make. And so that's where the 92nd rule comes from. It's just going, oh, okay. Breathing through it, sitting with it, not reacting from it. Because we're not talking about somebody coming with us a knife, you know, behind a dumpster on a Saturday night. We're talking about, I'm mad at my partner because they didn't do the dishes. What's up with that? Why am I having a strong response to a small

problem kind of thing? So that's a case where we can kind of sit with the emotion and let it dissipate on its own. Sometimes it feels so striking that it's really hard to do that. And in that case, you have other techniques that we can use to hack our physiology. You know, this idea that because the vagus nerve is what's going on, we can actually maybe even use our breath to deal with that. Talk about some of these. The idea is there are multiple ways that we can access our vagus nerve externally. We can do things to calm our bodies. I've had people tell me that they're really embarrassed that when they're upset, they kind of pull into the fetal position or rock. And I'm like, well, what you're

doing is actually you're soothing your vagus nerve. And that makes entire sense. And that's not just a weird thing that you only see in movies where people are in the psychiatric hospital. That's actually an accurate portrayal, but accurate for a reason. And so that when the bending over, the soothing the vagus nerve, anytime we extend our out breath, that's parasympathetic. If your out breath is longer than your in breath, because the in breath is sympathetic, that's getting your body ready. And the out breath is parasympathetic, that's the calming breath. So if that one's longer, you're also going to change your vagal tone.

And breathing is free. It's worth trying. I tell clients all the time, like, this is an experiment. If it doesn't work, that's fine. And they're like, okay, it felt really dumb, but it kind of helped. You know, I talk with clients about that we're not responsible for that first emotion. That first emotion is physiological. It's tied to our histories.

It's tied to things that our amygdala has held on to to keep us safe. And there's nothing wrong with any emotion that you're having. It's really important information. It's what we do with that. That's the important part, right? So I say, you're not responsible for your first thought. You're responsible for your second thought and your first behavior.

So as long as we're looking at the first thought and not reacting from that and going, oh, I'm angry. I should scream at this woman who won't close her car door is not an appropriate response, even though it would have been a satisfying one because what was she doing?

So the second thought is, or I could just go work somewhere else and let this go. And then my behavior was to do something different. This is not an acceptable way to be in society. It's a scream at strangers. So let's do something else. Like neural pathways don't go away, but if we keep working on not going down them and building new ones, it becomes easier to go down the new one and have a new, a different response. And the old one gets weeded over, you know together, wires together. So what has wired to create these consistent anger patterns? And let's create these new ways of managing it. I'm going to use the uncomfortable breathing

techniques that dumb Dr. Faith wants me to use. And I don't like them and it's uncomfortable, but okay, they kind of help. And just like one salad doesn't make you healthy. This is all practice. We're having to unfuck years or decades of managing things one way that served at one point that no longer serve. And now we're having to learn to manage them another way. And so do you think that really understanding our emotion and really committing to acknowledging anger can help us live a life that's flourishing where we can use our anger productively, but not kind of have it control us?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm a therapist. That's my jam, right? That's what we're here trying to do is have people recognize you're having this embodied experience of life. And we're not perfect. Expecting ourselves to be perfect is setting ourselves up for failure. I mean, so much of it is like, oh, that's why I do that. That makes sense. That's a little crazy. Or, oh, yeah, that's about all that stuff that happened why I do that. That makes sense. That's a little crazy. Or, oh yeah, that's about all that stuff that happened when I was done. That makes sense. Okay, cool.

And then we're working with it in a completely different way. Clients hear from me all the time. I'm like, I don't know that we get better so much as we get better at it. And that's also recovery, right? One of my former interns said, sane people just know that they're crazy.

Like everybody crazy. And if you're sane, you know, and you're working on it and you know where it is and you know, you know what you have to do with it versus just out there being a chaos monster. And I love that analogy of recognizing like nobody has this down. We're all works in process. I love Faith's description of anger, that it's our body's way of giving us the energy to get out of a difficult situation. I'm going to remember this when I start to feel frustrated and try to appreciate my anger signals a bit more than I usually would. But I'm also going to recognize that the energy boost I get from feeling annoyed doesn't mean I need to let my experience of rage run wild. I can listen to what my ire is saying without blowing my top. I'm also going to commit to paying attention to the circumstances that get my blood boiling. If I can recognize the patterns that cause my frustration ahead of time, I'll have a better chance of changing my circumstances in ways that will boost my well-being even more broadly. And if all that fails, I now have some

new breathing techniques I can use to chill out my fight or flight system the next time I'm stuck in traffic. I hope my conversation with Faith has given you some helpful tips that you can use to deal with your own anger a bit more productively. And I also hope that you'll return soon when we tackle how to deal with other negative emotions. There seemed to be no bandwidth there to say, actually, maybe we're not supposed to be happy right now. Maybe sadness is what we're supposed to feel when we experience loss or disappointment. There is this real reluctance to be sad. And I wondered how we could be living

in a happier way ultimately by embracing our sadness too. On the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Dr. Laurie Santos. sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. Pushkin Plus is available on the show page and Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz,

Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan, Grant Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.