Is Pandemic making you feel ANGRY all the time?

Is your Angry-Young-Man/Women mode ON for 24x7 during lockdown? 

Have you been snapping at your spouse/ mom and even your 4-year-old nephew?

Do you feel like slapping and swearing every damn person - from a random individual not wearing a mask to the govt with its baseless economic revival plan?

Well, I don’t know about you but I have been behaving this way and end up with guilt after snapping at others! I want to control but have been finding it very difficult to. As a result, I started researching and speaking to our psychologists about the reason and how I could control it! I am sharing my findings here as it might help some of you who are in the same boat as me!

Why do we feel angry?

Anger is generally a secondary emotion because we tend to resort to anger to hide other vulnerable feelings like Fear, Frustration, Humiliation, and Sadness. 

Image Source: The Eaves (UK)

Let’s see how is this relevant to my (or our) situation in current times - 

Fear

Imagine someone driving rash and cuts me off at a signal. What happens first is I feel scared - Oh damn, he would have hit me or I would have hit him. But immediately anger kicks in and I get on to Virat Kohli mode! 

Isn’t it the same for a lot of us. Well, this is where fear turns into anger.

Image Source: DNA India

In the same way, the situation we are going through in this pandemic naturally has instilled a lot of fear in us - about our health, our jobs, displacing a lot of plans we made for ourselves, etc. The same gets displaced by anger making us feel irritated and snap a lot more than we do usually.

Sadness/ Grief

I was attending a workshop on REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) last week by one of the most authoritative figures - Dr. Debbie Joffe Ellis. One thing that made a mark on me was when she compared the emotions we are going through in the current pandemic with Grief (the same emotion we experience when we lose a near/dear one). Well, as we know grief has 5 stages represented by an acronym called D.A.B.D.A - Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. This is how the sadness we feel because of job loss, deaths around us results in us covering that up with anger.

Is Feeling Angry Bad?

Feeling angry is not completely bad. It actually helps you feel powerful and indignant instead of afraid (say in the example of rash driving I gave earlier). But, the problem comes when this anger becomes chronic. Based on my understanding, I would classify an anger to become chronic in these 3 situations - 

1. Sustained Anger - when you feel angry for a long period of time
2. Displaced Anger - when anger gets displaced and results in unnatural behavior like snapping/ speaking at someone without thinking
3. Internalized Anger - when anger turns inwards rather than being expressed outside

Image Source: BP Magazine

All these three are really bad either for us - as it affects the homeostasis thereby causing increased blood pressure, heart rate, etc, or it is displaced on someone resulting in strained relationships.

This has really helped me understand my anger a lot better. So, instead of feeling guilty about it, I am trying to do two things:

Know that its OK to feel angry especially NOW

As long as you can control your anger to not reach any of the above 3 stages, its fine to feel that way!

Image Source: Speckle of faith Blog

Displace it in ways better than snapping at people

I have found rage-cleaning/ rage-gaming to be the most effective for me. So, if there is a lot of anger building up in me, either I get on to cleaning spree and take out the extra energy OR I engage in online gaming where I can shoot or curse bots and random people as a part of the game! :)

Image Source: Alter Ego (Amazon)

I hope the above knowledge would have helped some of you with similar experiences connect with it. Believe me, it's always good to understand our emotions rather than suppress them. If you still feel the need for more ways to manage your anger, you can seek help from a professional psychologist.