Pandemic-induced anger is spreading faster than the coronavirus itself

The pandemic has done a lot of damage. We’re tracking the infection fatality rate and the crude mortality rate, and other core disease-related metrics, but who is tracking the spike in pandemic-induced anger? It is spreading faster than the coronavirus disease itself.

The public – fearing for the lives of themselves and their loved ones – submitted to the lockdown imposed by their governments. They did the right thing. However, as weeks turned into months, patience turned into anger.

Being forced to stay at home has indeed changed the lives of people. For the most part, it has made the mundane even more dull. Shopping, whether for groceries or for clothes, is done online. Food, even from their favorite restaurants, is ordered online. Work, whether in banking, IT, or even fitness, is done online too. That’s months of living online, with little to no human, face to face interaction, depending on whether you live with family/roommates or alone.

What many of us evaluating the difficulties caused by the pandemic don’t realize is that the lockdown has also put a lot of strain and stress on relationships. People are away from loved ones, stranded in foreign lands, because flights were cancelled, and borders were closed suddenly. Young couples, constantly living with each other, have been forced to deal with the irregularities of their relationship, sparking uncomfortable conversations -– and divorces.

These circumstances are causing a whirlpool inside people’s heads, springing up and spiraling negative feelings of all kinds. The Oxford English dictionary attributes anger to the Greek root ‘ankhone’ which literally means ‘strangling’ – summing up quite perfectly how most adults feel today, irrespective of class, religion, and even geography.

Emerson often said, “[…] for every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.” Given the challenges we face today, it is important to make an effort to better understand anger.

Personally, I find Dr. Judith M. Siegel’s work in this space quite fascinating. The retired UCLA Fielding School of Public Health professor took an interest in understanding the construct of anger. Inspired by her findings, IDR Labs created a test which is available online for free (try it out for yourself here). It evaluates people on five facets – anger arousal, anger spectrum, hostile outlook, external anger, and internal anger – and provides a total score which is compared against a population average.

While detailed explanations about each of the five facets are provided after taking the test, ‘hostile outlook’ is something I feel has been directly and significantly impacted by the pandemic. IDR Labs says that people who score high on hostile outlook view the world in a cynical, suspicious and mistrustful way. What’s worrisome is that the lab emphasizes that people who are characterized by a hostile outlook usually experience a wide range of anger cognitions (mental action of anger), but not necessarily anger emotions (without feeling anger).

Below is a screenshot of my results for those curious to know. According to IDR Labs, I’m 17.2 percent more susceptible to anger than the average person.

Even if we don’t realize it, many of us have become more cynical and impatient causing us to bottle up, or release inappropriately, a lot of anger. For my own part, see that three of the five facets – hostile outlook, external anger, and anger spectrum are higher than the population average. The mere benefit of the doing the test is that it has made more self-aware to recognize the thoughts that make me experience anger.

Whether overly optimistic or pessimistic in nature, we are all being forced to deal with so much uncertainty today because of the lockdown and the way that the pandemic is changing our way of life. It is natural for us to experience lows at different times of the day. Being comfortable with this reality is not everyone’s cup of tea; this discomfort in terms of background static is making society angrier.

Truth be told, the reality is that people cling for hope, especially when things get tough(er). Unfortunately, every time the number of cases rise, the light at the end of the tunnel seems to get dimmer. I know I’m a little angry right now, at this moment in time, with the way things are going. What about you? Take the test to find out.