How To Get Rid Of Anger: 3 New Secrets From Neuroscience - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Suppressing feelings works but it makes them stronger. When you suppress, your ability to experience positive feelings decreases while your stress soars as the amygdala (a part of the brain associated with emotions) starts working overtime.

“Correlational studies support these laboratory findings. Individuals who typically use suppression report avoiding close relationships and having less positive relations with others; this dovetails with peers’ reports that suppressors have relationships with others that are less emotionally close.”

English, John, & Gross, 2013; Gross & John, 2003; Srivastava, Tamir, McGonigal, John, & Gross, 2009

Suppressing your feelings uses our limited supply of willpower, meaning you’re more likely to do things you regret after you’re angry.

Meanwhile, neither sadness nor neutral arousal results in destructive risk-taking.

Venting your anger intensifies emotion. Meanwhile, sharing this feeling constructively or distracting yourself are good ideas.

“…focusing on a negative emotion will likely intensify the experience of that emotion further and thus make down-regulation more difficult, leading to lower adjustment and well-being.”

Handbook of Emotion Regulation

Distracting yourself allocates your brain’s limited resources on something else, leaving it less power to dwell on the bad.

Research suggests cognitive and emotional tasks use the same limited mental resources, so engaging in a cognitive activity, things that require thinking impairs your brain’s ability to remain angry.

Scientific evidence suggests that when someone goes off on you, simply thinking: “It’s not about me. They must be having a bad day,” can soothe anger. 

Shifting your beliefs about a situation makes your brain calm down the amygdala, changing the emotions you feel.

The same works for anxiety, by reappraising stress as excitement you reduce the former.

“Our emotional responses ultimately flow out of our appraisals of the world, and if we can shift those appraisals, we shift our emotional responses.”

Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“Reappraisal, by contrast, has no detectable adverse consequences for social affiliation in a laboratory context. Correlational studies support these findings: Individuals who typically use reappraisal are more likely to share their emotions— both positive and negative— and report having closer relationships with friends, which matches their peers’ reports of greater liking."

Handbook of Emotion Regulation

When you get angry and you think “people are out to get you” you are reappraising, too. You’re telling yourself a story that’s even worse than reality. And your anger soars. So don’t do that.

“… if people can change how they mentally represent a stimulus, they can exert self-control and escape from being victims of the hot stimuli that have come to control their behavior."

Walter Mischel 

1. Suppress rarely. You’ll feel worse inside and hurt the relationship.
2. Don’t vent. It increases anger. Distract yourself, instead.
3. Reappraisal is often the best option. Think: “It’s not about me. They must be having a bad day.”

Sometimes suppression is the only thing you can do to avoid an escalation. And sometimes reappraisal can cause you to tolerate bad situations.

Telling yourself a more compassionate story about what’s going on inside the other person’s head is usually the best way to go. 

Forgive. Research indicates that forgiveness makes you less angry and more healthy.