Defending Anger: Why Being Angry is Good!

Are you ANGRY? You should be!

Negative Emotions Are Good

This pandemic helped me dive into the science of negative emotions more than ever before. I always believed in and spoke about the positive side of negative emotions, both in our personal and professional lives, but I often felt that I needed to go deeper into the subject. The lockdown provided me with the necessary time and motivation (coming, of course, from negative emotions mostly) to finally do it.

The big learning here is that developing a constructive mindset during crises and beyond, starts by embracing, even welcoming, negative emotions! Because negative emotions are good for us.

Negative Emotions Have a Bad Name

Unfortunately, the phrase “negative emotions” includes the word “negative” which for most people simply means “bad for me”. But that is not what negative emotions are. Negative emotions exist for valuable evolutionary reasons. If you remove your negative emotions, you become a non-functional member of society. For example, people with an underperforming amygdala (the alarm/arousal center of the brain) can reveal their credit card pin number to a stranger without any doubt or they would not decode an aggressive facial expression of someone in front of them as threatening. Their brain cannot register risks and thus it trusts others indiscreetly. It is the absence of negative emotions that is bad for us!

So, “negative” concerning emotions does not mean “bad for you”.

Consider physics. Positive is a force that when applied to a moving object it adds to its energy and helps it move along its direction. Negative is a force that has the opposite effect, making the initial energy to decrease or disappear. There is nothing inherently good or bad in positive or negative work in the universe! It’s all about perspective. Same with mathematics: a negative number is not at all inherently bad. It depends on the context.

As the absence of negative emotions can (and will) harm you, too much of negative emotions can (and will) equally harm you too. Same with positive emotions. This is because our brains were not made/evolved to be continuously happy but to keep us moving. Negative emotions are many times crucial in moving us towards the right direction or steering us away from the wrong one.

One more thing before we move into anger. We live in the era of promised bliss: we are constantly told to be happy, excited, super satisfied and full of joy. Advertising, and not only, tries to convince us that its not cool to feel negative emotions and that we deserve to be in a perceptual state of euphoria. Consequently, a Buddha Pill approach has taken over the world where experiencing normal doses of negativity during a day (some social anxiety, stress, fear or anger) makes people panic, seeking refuge in mostly Eastern practices of mental relaxation and transcendence. Doing so when it is not needed (not driven by a real mental health issue), can take away the wonderful opportunities of utilizing the evolutionary advantages of your powerful negative emotions!

Enter Anger!

Let's see what Aristotle, Metallica and modern psychology have to say about anger.

"Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way- that is not within everybody's power and is not easy" (Aristotle).

Aristotle, the world’s first well-rounded scientist and definitely one of the greatest thinkers of all times, supports anger when it is directed to specific people, with specific intensity, for specific reasons and with specific behavioral outcomes. This is indeed difficult. It is also necessary. For Aristotle, the question is not about being angry or not but more about context and content: WHEN are you being angry and HOW are you being angry. As with numbers in mathematics or energy in physics, anger is not bad or good in itself. It is a basic human emotion and it is here to help us. It's on us to sense when to let it drive or when to hit the brakes.

And I want my anger to be healthy

And I want my anger just for me

And I need my anger not to control

And I want my anger to be me

And I need to set my anger free

Set it free! (St. Anger, Metallica)

I belong to a lonely minority of metalheads that love Metallica’s 2003 St. Anger album. The title song is about the benefits of anger, and especially St. Anger to whom no one seems to pay respect. The phrase “You flush it out!” is repeated throughout the song, highlighting the cathartic nature of expressing your anger in order for it not to destroy you from the inside. The video for the song is fittingly shot in a detention facility.

"Anger is neither good nor bad; it's what you do with it that matters. Research suggests that only 10% of angry episodes actually lead to some form of violence, which is evidence that anger does not exactly equal aggression. Anger usually arises because we believe we've been treated unfairly, or that something is blocking our ability to accomplish meaningful goals" (Kashdan & Biswas-Diener, 2015)

And here is modern science’s take on anger. In their seminal book The Power of Negative Emotions, psychologists Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, confirm what evolutionary biologists, primatologists, anthropologists and other scientists have been argued already: anger is a powerful and beneficial emotion that sometimes, as with all other emotions both positive and negative, can move us in the wrong direction with dire consequences. Most of the times though, and often without us being fully aware of this, anger works for us... not against us.  

Anger In the Brain

Anger is unique between negative emotions in that it exists mainly in the left hemisphere of our brains. The left brain hemisphere has been associated traditionally with positive valence, or positive emotions, while the right brain hemisphere with negative valence, or negative emotions. However, anger seems to be the only emotion to escape this categorization. This is because anger is a primarily an approach emotion: it motivates our body to move towards a situation. All other negative emotions are avoidance/withdrawal emotions existing in the right brain hemisphere. It is the left hemisphere that contains the approach motivational networks in our brains. So, anger is a negative in nature emotion that co-exists with joy in the left hemisphere since both are approach-inducing emotions.

Anger makes us move forward and engage!

And this can be both good and bad. Anyone remotely proficient in digital marketing and social media knows this very well. It's online content that provokes anger which leads to more screen time, and this is why such platforms are “Angry by Design". On the good side, it's also such fierce online engagement that often provides vital support to powerful social movements aiming to decrease inequalities and make our world fairer for all.

What happens in our brans does not remain there. It’s transmitted with signals throughout the body and creates changes. One of the most notable change is our facial expressions. Regardless of the beating that the study of emotional facial expressions has received recently (I am afraid, some of it, for rather non-scientific reasons), it still goes strong, re-confirmed by recent research. Paul Ekman, the most famous facial expression expert and advocate, has released the following photo of the facial expression of anger. This is literally the face of anger (photo credit: Paul Ekman Group):

Anger, as a basic emotion, has both a more mellow state and a stronger state. According to Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, the more mellow expression of anger is annoyance and the stronger one is rage.

Also, as can be seen on the wheel, the opposite basic emotion to anger is… fear. Fascinating isn’t it? Anger plus disgust create contempt, and anger plus anticipation create aggressiveness. For a latest reincarnation of Plutchik’s wheel, including many relevant feelings for each basic emotion, take a look at this.   

What to Do with Anger

Anger can go wrong. It can go crazy far too often impairing our ability to function effectively as members of our society. Anger management, as anyone that watched the Charlie Sheen TV series of the same name can attest, is not the answer! In fact:

"Anger management techniques are great and work terrific… as long as you are not really angry!”

Talking about emotions, especially when they cause harm, does not work. Trauma expert and celebrated psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk, author of the book The Body Keeps the Score, emphasizes that although therapists often try to help people to manage their behavioral responses through understanding and insight, this rarely works. Most psychological problems originate deeper inside the brain, significantly altering our attention and perception. And these deeper brain regions do not listen to trauma discussions, emotional revelations and personal histories.

A crucial point in changing brain circuitry is made by British psychologist and writer Kevin Dutton who, using a house wiring analogy, claims that it’s not really about the neural wiring of the brain itself; this will develop/change naturally anyhow. It’s about discovering who does the wiring. Which means, who is helping to shape these neural networks: is it a shady actor with bad intentions (with the wiring ending up being destructive) or a transparent actor with noble intentions (with the wiring ending up being constructive)? In order to side or not with our anger we should always ask the question: who shaped the conditions that made me angry? And with what purpose? A discussion about social media and our brains is needed here again!

A surprising fact about creative thinking is that it is often motivated by frustration. In our book Advanced Marketing Management, we highlight and explain the insight that frustration, and not happiness, seems to be the dominating factor boosting creativity in the business world. Although frustration and anger are not exactly the same thing, anger being a first-response basic emotion and frustration being a more complex and long-term evolving feeling, they are deeply interlinked. Actually, this interlink might provide an answer to the puzzle of creativity. Since light-bulb creativity is an approach response why does it mainly exist in the right brain, where we already saw that avoidance/withdrawal responses are? Maybe because frustration creates more anger, which is in the left hemisphere, fueling in return more creativity, which is in the right hemisphere. Bottom-line: embrace the angry element of your frustration to boost your innovation output!

An Angry Conclusion

It is so frustrating that some people are afraid of anger. What’s wrong with these people! Anger is great! It motivates us to approach and change things. Just use it constructively even when it's very strong- which it should be sometimes- by following the advice from all people mentioned above. Especially from Metallica! Yes, listen to more Metallica, despite the fact they propose we are ultimately… Hardwired to Self-destruct!