How to make your anger work for you
vox.com
vox.com
Now, when planning public safety, this would be a bad response even for strictly selfish reasons of not wanting to suffer crimes. If tough policing is proven to reduce crime, do tough policing, you don't want to become San Francisco. If giving opportunities or education in jails helps, do that rather than sacrificing your own safety to indulge your understandable anger. And so on. There is even space for empathy with people who have never been given a chance.
In civilized situations there are superior ways to motivate change - justice, snapping out of complacency, enlightened self interest, striving for success. Your boss may be an asshole, but rage quitting could jeopardize your visa or chances of an internal transfer. You need to calm your caveman brain and call upon values instilled upon you by centuries of civilization to get to a good outcome for yourself and others. Unless again, civilization has already failed you, then old ways may be necessary.
this strategy carried over to many non tech things and i find i trust my anger to tell me when something is bad, but i also now pay attention and think what i want to do with such situations and what i actually want as an outcome and try to work towards that, or even consider “why am i so upset at it? is it really that bad?”. it just forces a more rational reaction in the service of my anger, and the anger is satisfied even if i find i’m upset over nothing; i still understand my feelings way better
I wonder, how do the HN parents here theorise around that? I really don’t want to be an angry parent, as I’ve learned it can wreak havoc on a child’s feeling of psychological safety, but I know that’s easy to say and less easy to do. In my head, one should only ever rely on anger when there is a genuine threat to the child’s life. Really curious of others’ thoughts.
I'm naturally prone to anger, so were my parents, in my experience with my parents, and my kids, the line is how you react once angry.
But seriously, it's important to be able to have, and use, an authoritative voice without becoming angry. I didn't realize how loud I can be (without screaming or yelling) before having children.
They can't read your mind and I think most people get angry with others when there is some fundamental miscommunication or missed expectation.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/6855333...
Previous threads with about this article: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Becoming parents is a process. Most of this process is great and it enriches your life, but parts of it may be so hard, that you can't explain it to anyone without kids. The first child was kind of ok-ish in my memory :-) But:
Imagine you have 2 little kids, both are sick, because one of them brought it in. They are not able to express their feelings by telling you what the problem is, they just cry the whole day and night. You and your partner are also getting sick, not as bad as your children, but you don't feel well. You can't ask for help, because there is a probability of infecting these persons. You don't sleep much for days and can't really rest. You are worried all the time, because your kids are really sick and you have to care about them, if it gets worse.
In a situation like this, minor daily tasks will be major efforts and at some point you just break down.
Not everything is as hard as this example, but usually having a toddler is energy-sapping all the time. At the same time it's a totally great experience.
It just does not help to punish or shout at your child in any way, in fact it makes things worse. However, in situations like I described above, it also helps to be more forgiving about your own behaviour, as long as you try your best to prevent these "breakdowns" and most important APOLOGIZE instead of just being ashamed. Nobody stays calm all the time.
Having two children 7 years apart (with a chance to improve significantly as a parent remaining), I now really understand the wisdom of what you shared here, and try to remind myself of this every day. Love doesn’t always mean pleasant moments. Being firm when called for and establishing rules/consequences makes things easier in the long run, and helps avoid blow up moments.
ps: nice tips, thanks
P.s. this routine has been built step by step with time, not everything in one go P.p.s. I hope the meaning of the word 'post' was clear. the post is the limit, the fence.
thanks again
If a child isn’t behaving the way I expect, I start with the assumption that the full picture has not been explained to them of why they’re behavior doesn’t fit with what I/others expect.
Kids don’t start knowing everything, they need it explained.
Many parents show their kids a behavior is not ok by getting angry.
The big thing is aligning your own expectations with what small children can or can't do. It's hard to get mad if you have already prepared in your mind format the reality is likely to be like (a miserable mess).
Although I wonder if expecting this misery and culturing apathy towards large parts of life to avoid anger had negatively affected my job. After all, dealing with the bureaucracy is a lot like dealing with an irrational toddler. My performance has greatly suffered since becoming a parent, so much that I'm concerned about my future ability to support the family.
Often it’ll not even be your kids you’re angry at, it’ll be you reacting to stressful situations. If you’re prone to anger under stress, it’ll probably be a good idea for you to simply do things much earlier than you’d otherwise like. I know my wife is bad at handling situations where we have to leave the house for longer trips, so I typically pack everything possible beforehand, sometimes the night before. I’ve also “taught” her to do things like making the children’s lunches the night before instead of during the morning when she has to get the kids out the door in a timely manner.
Another thing we’ve done is to create graphical depictions of the tasks our children have to do each morning. We did this with our children and had them mostly tell us which steps they needed to perform and only helping them with the order and if they forgot something. This way my wife can point to the drawing and sequence of tasks that are their “responsibility”. Which has helped immensely.
Part of being assertive is also sticking to what you say. When I say something it gets done that way. At least 95% of the time. If I can feel a change is extremely important to one of my children, we’ll change it, but usually how I outline things is how they are going to happen. I don’t do this with anger, but with patience, but the magical thing about it is that my kids know and usually don’t fight it because they know it’s useless to fight it.
It is also better to “trick” your kids than to yell at them or enforce strict anger responses. Instead of fighting young children about getting dressed or whatever, you can tell them that you’re going to get your shoes on first. Similar when you’re eating, and they refuse to eat anything, you can tell them that they can’t have any because it’s “adult” food only, or say something like “I really hope noobe eats this delicious food on my fork” and look away and then pretend to be surprised and blame everyone including the pet for taking it.
You’re also going to have to accept that things take time, that they are hard and that your children will go through different phases. It’s often helpful to remember that most of the time they aren’t being “disobedient” on purpose, sometimes they may not even know why they are fighting you or whatever it is that they are fighting. You need to remember that they are learning emotions and that it’s ok for them to feel whatever they feel. You also need to remember that your patience is infinite while theirs isn’t.
My biggest issue is usually not to laugh at their “stupidity”. Like when my daughter gets really, really, angry and trash some of her toys. Like… how is that supposed to hurt me? I do try to disarm the situation by telling her that if her toys break she will be sorry later and that usually helps. If she’s violent toward us I stop it, not in an angry manner by very assertive.
Finally you have to remember that while your children are riled up it’s very hard to talk to them. It’s always better to distract them and then talk about it later when they calm down.
Oh and don’t worry about what other people are thinking about you carrying a screaming child through a store after you refuse to buy them a toy or candy or whatever. Any parent won’t be judging you, they’ll be emphatic with you because we’ve all been there. If you stick your ground and follow through on your denial it’ll eventually stop. If you cave, you’re in for a life of hell.
And anger should not be looked in isolation. Passive avoidance, passive aggression, dismissiveness or manipulative mind-bending tricks are lightyears worse than an occasional anger outburst - even if these patterns are not as apparent.
As to the original post, seems dubious at best. Succumbing to anger is simply punishing yourself for others' mistakes. Anger is a natural and even healthy emotion, but trying to harness it perpetuates it. I do not know about you, but who wants to be angry all the time to stay motivated? Surely there are better ways?
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/6855333...
On those occasions where you're not successful, you come back to your child later and share that you're sorry you behaved the way you did, that you wished you'd handled it differently, and that you commit to trying to do better in the future.
Of course this assumes the child is of an age where this conversation makes some semblance of sense to them. I'd argue that age is younger than most people give kids credit for.
Part of it is that I think she and I have opposite problems. She really doesn't express anger with our child very much at all, and I tend to get overly angry at times. Both lead to their own significant problems.
Maybe to your second point, part of the dynamic that results is that there's something that needs to be corrected or diverted early on, mildly, and my wife doesn't do that, doesn't establish boundaries or express any anger, and then something escalates from our child. By the time it gets to that point, I feel the need to correct it, which has already gotten out of control, and then I don't know what to do and probably get more angry than I should.
I really don't believe that complete inexpression of anger is good. As the article points out, people do get angry, and everyone does things that make others angry sometimes. Children need to know that and understand that. And I see the consequences of this with my wife and child: even when I have nothing to do with the situation, and don't get angry and stay out of it completely, I see how frustrated and hurt my wife gets by adopting that approach, and the problems that causes.
I think the trick is — and this is where you're kind of threading the needle — is to communicate anger but in a way that's not hurtful or threatening. You want to model being angry but also constructively responding to that anger, like the article is saying, proportionate anger, and so forth.
Parenting is difficult because every child is different and no one is perfect. So advice you hear might not work at all with a particular child, and it's often easier to say than do consistently 100% of the time. On the other hand, I think children are their own beings, and can learn from your mistakes at times as well. I don't mean that dismissively, more as something to keep in mind when you're feeling hard on yourself as a parent.
Let's say my kid is throwing a tantrum in a restaurant, and I get angry at them. Am I angry because I want to be the kind of parent whose kids behave? And now all these people in the restaurant think I'm not that kind of parent? And I'm angry because they now think less of me?
That anger is wrong. I'm mad, not because my kid is doing something wrong per se, but because they're ruining my self-image. When I have that kind of anger, the problem is me - not my kid having a tantrum, but me. I'm not angry about my kid making a scene in the restaurant; I'm angry about my kid making a mess of my ego. The real problem is my ego and my selfishness.
So when you're angry with your child, check yourself. See if that kind of thing is why you're angry. To the degree it is, you need to grow - not your child, but you. (Your child may also need to grow, but that's a separate issue.)
And for what it's worth, those of us in the restaurant - at least those of us who have kids - aren't condemning your because your child is causing a scene. We've all been there. You have our sympathy and understanding, not our condemnation.
Anger is your primitive brain stem prodding you into doing something, anything... because what you are dealing with at the moment just isn't working.
Being angry is never the problem -- it's your body's way of telling you it's time to change something. Usually way past time to change things. That's a good thing.
Now... What you do about being angry -- well that's the rub isn't it? Punching someone may not be the best option, maybe channel the anger into something else, something more constructive. In any case, a change must be made.
Listen to your emotions -- they're telling you what you need to be focusing on.
Misplaced anger is common.
My point still holds, something is wrong, some boundary is violated, you need to do something.
Even if the anger is misplaced, you're not simply angry about "nothing" -- find out what the root is and fix it. The anger isn't the problem. Anger will give you the energy to do the work.
And, as I said, what you do in response may or may not be constructive/helpful. Yes I understand misplaced anger can cause you to focus on the symptoms rather than the problem. In other news, throwing fists usually doesn't help. There are a bunch of things you can do when angry that aren't helpful.
But the anger isn't the problem, it's the symptom of a problem that needs to be addressed.
In the majority of cases anger is not a primal emotion, but a derived one. It is a byproduct of a narrative you have in your mind (i.e. the narrative comes first, then the anger). As such, in most cases, you are in control of your anger.
jamiek88 says pretty much the same thing below.
If you properly address anger, it goes away. If you don't, it stays or comes back. So what you do in response to anger gives you control over whether the anger returns.
Maybe put another way: You are in control of what you do when angry, and those choices impact whether or not the problem is actually resolved. You are in control over whether the problem gets resolved or not -- you are in control of whether or not the anger returns.
I side with your point if pressed to put your perspectives on different ends of a scale. But that's not even needed, as you correctly point out.
journaling and video games helped me personally
" How to deal with anger in a healthy way "
differs from the article's working title
" How to make your anger work for you "
which differs from the URL title
" use-anger-productively-motivation-problem-solving "
My workout buddy says he can see it on my face when I’m in the cold fury.
I find lifting moderates my mood more than anything, it's hard to be angry when you've thrown all that emotional energy into a set.
For some values of "root"?
I've seen people angry at animals, and anger at even inanimate objects is common enough to be a film trope (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E_SDwUM4kM ).
(the sentence is ambiguous, but taking the other branch, it's easy enough to find vertebrates angry at each other; as for invertebrates, although we say wasps get angry, it's not so clear)
Wasps get aggressive but personally I think calling it anger is anthropomorphising a bit :-)
The only way for 100% is to "embrace the suck". Keep going on bad days, too. Even if it's only a little.
This is key, I think. Do a little of a project most days, just even a few minutes. I find this useful to keep the momentum going on creative projects, including programming and 3D rendering. There are quite often little things that need doing, which keep you in touch with the project, but which can be completed quickly if you aren't in the mood for sustained effort.
By "get rid of" I don't mean suppress or somehow hide it, but change your worldview (internal narrative) in a way that makes it disappear.
How to do that? Given that anger is the emotional expression of an opinion (narrative), that some rule that's important to you has been violated (an injustice happened), you change that narrative to weaken the assumption that the injustice mustn't/can't happen.
An important thing is that it doesn't mean that you don't react to the injustice, quite the opposite--there's a whole part of Stoicism for that called "discipline of action". It's just that you act on it out of principles and not driven by emotions.
Here an overview of Seneca's "On anger": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Ira
What I will say is that, for me, the most effective decision for my life has been to just move away from sources of anger. To not do anything out of anger, even positive actions, even in cold blood. Call it complacency, but I think if you only do something because you're angry about it, it's not something you should be doing in the first place. Find a better reason, one that makes sense without emotion being the driver.
It took me well into my thirties to realize the most common metaphor for suppressing anger was wrong. People say you're bottling up your anger if you don't express it, or at least use it. The idea is that it'll explode eventually if you don't vent it. But a better metaphor would be a fire, which you want to keep contained and starved of oxygen, and if you don't contain it it'll just grow and grow and take on its own life.
When you feel yourself getting angry, just ask yourself “does this issue REALLY matter”.
If it really matters then by god get angry. If it doesn’t matter then why bother?
I rarely if ever got angry again after I started asking myself this, cause not much actually matters.
Sometimes it's actually frustration that things aren't going the way you want (and the next question is why is my way really better than the other?).
Sometimes it's someone else's mistake (and the next question is have I ever made a mistake?)
Then someone cuts in front of you in line and it could really matter (time pressure or opportunities missed) and that behaviour could be something you would never do to others. In that situation believe it's healthier to speak up, but there is much less risk of escalation, and a good chance of gaining allies around you if the message is delivered calmly rather than with anger.
A friend of mine says he just pulls an index finger and mutters under his breath "red turtle," but even then he felt a little bad for envisioning knocking the car off the road, so I invented the purple turtle.
The purple turtle does not blow the offender up. It does not knock the car off the road. It merely teleports car and driver safely to a drive-in movie theater playing the relevant section of driver's education, and they have to sit there in timeout until they understand why what they just did was dangerous and/or stupid. It even has a sound effect.
So now I just make the sound effect, as loudly as I can when I'm by myself, because it's a silly noise and hard to make loudly without laughing, and it helps relieve the tension!
This got me thinking: philosophy and psychology are in part ways to understand ourselves and the world around us. Are there any ways in which more and better _understanding_ does not necessarily lead to a better, more fulfilling life? How important do you think understanding ourselves and the world around us is, for that matter?
Not recommended. Root causing the source of stress and amending lifestyle (if possible) to limit those exogenous sources is my old man advice. I don't think focusing my inner rage Hulk is healthy for me.
Thought that was a pretty weak example of selfless… couldn’t be something happening in front of you?
Although, I’ve found that anger can be an effective way of dealing with certain angry people (not most!). Some people get calm when others are angry but don’t notice it in themselves. It’s frustrating though, because I hate getting angry. I very rarely get angry at my kids and I usually signal (“I don’t want to get angry… I’m starting to get angry”). So even when anger is functional for me, I really don’t like how it cognitively disrupts me.
Anger is, at least where I live, not a socially acceptable emotion to express. This belief is the core of the article, and I imagine that a lot of folks reading this are thinking, "That's right it's not," "There's always a reason not to be angry," &c. However, anger is also a completely valid emotion - we've all experienced anger.
My point is that we have no socially acceptable outlets for anger. We have to mask, sublimate, redirect, suppress, or simply not be angry for basically our entire lives. This article is a product of that belief.
I run a sporadic event with a group of friends called "Scream at the Moon Night". On a full moon we go out to an open field and I run through a list of prompts that all ask for a screaming response. We scream out all that pent up anger and once we're done we take a seat and just talk. It's cathartic. I've had moms take their kids and scream about bullies. People have screamed about work, ex's, life struggles, everything.
It's great, but the take away is that this is so outside the social norms that I wouldn't blame you if you thought it was weird.
There isn't space to do this socially, I had to make it.
i think as u get older u learn the value of silence.
delaying your response (if ever) to a more strategic time.
Absolute garbage.
My mother brought me up this way and it’s one of the most damaging things she could have done.
DONT get mad. Regulate your emotions. Be a kind person. Communicate with people.
Anger destroys relationships fast. If you want to dispose of your relationships like they’re worth nothing then sure, get angry.
Angry people aren’t aware of it, but they are behaving like dickheads.
Anger is a mechanism for controlling other people through emotional verbal violence implying the threat of physical violence.
If someone gets angry with you, laugh at them and tell them you are immune to their attempt to control you with anger.
Getting angry can be healthy, because it shows you care about something that is going wrong, in your opinion. It's the way you channel the anger that can be productive or destructive.
I think a lot of problems spiral out of control because people _don't_ get angry when they actually should. And being kind has little to do with not being angry. The most unkind people I've met don't get angry; they just let things slide, because they don't care about you, or about things being right in general. They are usually cunning people who smile and are agreeable for expediency.
Yep, this was how it was at my home. My mom would get angry at everything, and then I was the one who had to regulate her emotions. And if I failed, she'd be even more mad.
If people in a society are constantly engaging in angry outbursts, it means they feel the need to engage in some kind of threat display, which in turn indicates they're living in fear. If you walk into an organization and discover all the bosses are constantly screaming at their obsequious underlings, who are in turn screaming at their underlings and so on down the line, it probably means everyone's afraid of losing their jobs, and it's a good idea to turn around and walk out the door, if that's an option.
People who deliberately get angry (or sad) in order to get others to do what they want are engaging in emotional manipulation practices, which should be treated as a huge red flag. Such behavior is a common side effect of growing up with manipulative, unhinged and/or abusive parents, and it can be overcome, if the person wants to - but some people get addicted to their emotional highs and lows.
Fundamentally, making good decisions under stress requires a calm rational mind not given to emotional breakdowns and outbursts, and people who don't have that capability should never be placed in positions of responsibility.
It begins:
"ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for."
.. Can recommend reading the rest (poem and book).
Anger can be power
Do you know that you can use it?
-- The Clash
But ultimately, the cognitive component in all Kubler-Ross emotional stages is the same: a negative comparison of reality versus expectation, on some perceptual timeline. It takes small amounts of dopamine and adrenaline to make changes that affect reality, and serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins etc to accept and ignore reality. Those are really the only choices: do something, or stop caring.
But what happens when you mix them incorrectly?
And this is now more editorial, but I think the problems occur when a brain is constantly hitting the cocktail of accept and ignore to mask the effects of a desire for change. Eventually the inhibitory ligands fail to control the overwhelming buildup, and you get this flood of “do something” mixing in with the “don’t care” cocktail. So that cocktail says, “do something big, and don’t care about the result”.
That might explain a lot of risky human behavior: thrill seeking, promiscuity, gambling, substance abuse, etc. Do something big, and don’t care about the result. It seems completely illogical and stupid, but it’s exactly how we’ve been training our brains since birth.
The “don’t care” cocktail is how we get along and be nice to everybody. And yet we are never good enough, and under threat of losing everything, so we must “do something”, even when there’s not much logical connection between action and desired result.
For instance, the connection between the desire to have a nice family and the action of grinding leetcode is incredibly weak and uncertain, but you have to muster the dopamine for it anyway. And then after years of thankless toil, you finally have a job, but it’s layoff season and you have to accept all sorts of terrible deceit as everybody you’ve been so nice and giving for is stealing credit and shifting blame.
And if you’ve gotten this far, I’ll give you a little story. Things can get crazy when layoffs are announced. One time, this guy was yelling at me about how they didn’t need a data scientist (me), and then he opened up his vest and pulled a gun on me. Real-deal loaded Beretta M9. Pointed straight at me and then slammed on the table. That one messed me up for a while. I know it sounds crazy, but I didn’t associate the things going on in my head with that incident and didn’t say anything, but I was really not feeling well. I was maniacally focused on proving my value, stopped sleeping, and did some relatively groundbreaking work. Eventually I requested two weeks of leave at the worst possible time. While away, I received notification of a prestigious award, and a layoff.