The Stoic Edge in 30 Days

Day #11: Anger is Your Enemy

We live in a time when it's very easy to get consumed with anger. Our phones are programmed to make us mad, and the steady drip of news alerts and social media posts are designed to keep us in a constant state of aggravation. Don't think so? Try putting your phone down for 12 hours and see how much better you feel.

I write openly in The Stoic Edge about my own struggles with anger. For many years I carried a lot of unhealed childhood trauma around. Before I became a parent it manifested itself occasionally, but I was able to control it most of the time. But after I had my son that changed. Many of my unprocessed issues in my own childhood would return, and I found myself often triggered into reactions that were loud and angry.

One of the most important realizations for me is that when you get angry you give away your power. This may seem counterintuitive, because your anger is designed to project your power in the face of adversity or threat. But in the end it actually does the opposite. The Stoics instinctively knew this. As Marcus Aurelius put it:

"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it?"

True power comes in the form of being able to control your emotions and think clearly. When you get enraged and lash out, your reaction becomes scary and potentially destructive.

Your reaction becomes the problem that everyone is focused on! “Why are you so mad about this? What’s your problem?” You may have been perfectly in your rights to be mad about something that happened, but your anger will always undermine your position when it’s not under control.

In fact, Epictetus recognized that just allowing others to anger you is a sign of weakness. As a slave, he was particularly focused on maintaining every bit of personal control and agency that he could. He literally had a “master” and didn’t want to give him any more power:

"Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him."

Anger is ultimately a choice. Even if you are triggered by your past, you have the power to decide how you will react. Much of anger management focuses on techniques to lessen the potency of your initial reaction to the things that make you mad. The Stoics believed that the sooner you catch yourself feeling anger coming on the better, for once the fire gets going it’s very difficult to stop. As Seneca wrote:

"The best plan is to reject straightway the first incentives to anger, to resist its very beginnings, and to take care not to be betrayed into it: for if once it begins to carry us away, it is hard to get back again into a healthy condition, because reason goes for nothing when once passion has been admitted to the mind."

So stop, pause, breathe, think. Don’t let your anger take you over and squander your power!