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Jul 03
Love2

If You Want to Think Clearly and Perform Exceptionally…

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

 

Today I want to talk about the positive state that we want to aim for most of the time – which will connect us with the emotional resources and clear thinking we need to make our best decisions.

Researchers like Steven Porges call it our social engagement system.

When we feel safe, and trusting, and relaxed, our heart rate and blood pressure lowers, and our heart rate variability increases – our heart rate rises a little on the inhale, and lowers on the exhale, and the difference between these is our heart rate variability. Higher heart rate variability is a good thing. This is all very beneficial for our immune system, our cardio-vascular system, our organs, and our overall health.

We’re also more connected with our higher brain functions, and the part of our vagus nerve that connects the organs of our body with our brain. This is counter to being in the protect mode of fight or flight, so it lowers our stress levels, and makes it easier to think and create with complexity.

When we’re in fight or flight – or the freezing that can happen when we’re in the throes of trauma – we’re not able to distinguish changes in facial expression or vocal tones in others. Which means that it’s nearly impossible to feel connected and attuned to another person.

It’s best if we can stay out of our fight or flight system most of the time, but there are exceptions of course. Athletes tap into the energy of the fight system without getting lost in rage (most of the time – but when athletes “lose it,” they also lose the capacity to think clearly and connect with teammates and opponents, so they also usually lose the competition).

As with athletes, those of us who work in dangerous professions, or who live in threatening environments, may learn to tap into this protective system just enough to keep us appropriately vigilant, but not so much that we’re lost in it completely. Learning to ride this edge is part of the training and skill needed to master such circumstances.

When we’re in an emergency situation, we pop into the fight/flight part of our nervous system automatically in as little as one tenth of a second, and it’s a good thing we do – when there’s an actual emergency.

But with our complex brains and complex histories, many of us can pop into that system – just as automatically and quickly – when there is no actual emergency. This is the cause of much anxiety as well as other psychological symptoms. When that’s the case, it’s even more important to learn how to deliberately move into our social engagement system.

So how do we do that?

One very simple action we can take is to slow and deepen our breathing (not too deep, maybe 20% more) to about 4-6 breaths per minute. We want to also drop our breath from our chest into our diaphragm so that our belly extends a bit on the inhale. If we can do that for even just 2-3 minutes, that alone can sometimes calm us, lower anxiety, and bring us toward our social engagement system.

Another thing that can help is to notice our physical sensations: bringing our awareness to our skin, any tension in our muscles, movement, gut feelings – and noticing the more subtle details of that part of our sensory system.

This is something we’re often not taught to do, but it’s as important as any of the other senses. There are three parts to this:

  • Proprioception: awareness of our motion through space and in relation to gravity
  • Kinesthesia: awareness of degrees of tension in our muscles
  • Visceral sensation: our gut feelings; the perceptions of our internal needs and longings

If you’re not very familiar with these sensations, it can be well worth practicing. Imagine your sense of hearing had been muffled for many years and you were able to hear clearly again. It would take some time and practice tuning into the different sounds around you to really get comfortable with hearing.

Think of your physical sensations in the same way. Give yourself time to practice tuning into the physical sensations of your body each day, allowing yourself to settle into more subtle sensations over time.

Our thoughts and emotions can exist anywhere in space or time. We can get lost in memories or imagination and that can sometimes bring us to troubled places. When we feel anxious, shifting from mental worry or fear into our physical sensations can bring us into the present, and sometimes that alone can dissipate a considerable amount of anxiety.

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Jun 26
Love1

Excellence Takes More than Time

By Habits and Strategies

We can learn a lot about gaining our own expertise from seeing how the great masters gained theirs.

Back in the 19th century, Sir Francis Galton in his book “Hereditary Genius,” argued that performance of skills for mature adults improves rapidly at first, but then at some point “Maximal performance becomes a rigidly determinate quantity.” What limits any significant improvement beyond that, in Galton’s view, was whatever nature endowed us with.

Other researchers – as far back as 1899 – added to this that it may take over 10 years to become an expert. The idea that this is a relatively orderly process, moving from novice to intermediate to expert, led to the belief that we can judge expertise through someone’s social reputation, education, accumulated knowledge, and length of experience.

There’s truth to this, of course, but it’s missing something important.

Because it turns out that people’s level of training and experience don’t always predict high performance. From psychologists to software designers, to wine experts, to decision makers and forecasters on investing, research has shown that the amount of time spent in the field is not a reliable measure of performance.

Something else is essential, which K. Anders Erickson and his co-editors map out in their tome, “Expertise and Expert Performance.”

What makes the difference between a Mozart or a Beethoven and somebody who can play quite well? What makes the difference between a Michael Jordan and a good overall basketball player?

There is a role for raw talent, of course. You have to be capable of accomplishing such feats as these incredible masters to begin with. There is a role for genius and natural ability. There is also the role played by parents and mentors from an early age, which is usually significant.

But there are plenty of people with loads of talent and ability who never, ever come near their potential. There are a lot of people with very high IQs who never really challenge their mental capacities.

Everybody knows that we have to practice something to get good at it. But there are plenty of people who spend years and years at their instrument or profession or sport, but who reach a level of basic competence and go no farther. The now famous 10,000-hour rule, or ten years of experience, doesn’t apply when we just go through the motions doing what we already know.

The one element that is most crucial for developing and maintaining an exceptional level of performance is deliberate, conscious, and concentrated practice.

Deliberate practice involves actively, purposely focusing on each precise skill of our endeavor, paying attention to the details, and consciously adjusting and modifying what we do so that we are bringing out the very best outcome that we possibly can.

This is hard work, and it can be emotionally challenging to consistently open ourselves to the kind of feedback and criticism that it sometimes takes to keep our skills growing.

With most everyday skills like typing, driving a car, or learning how to play a game like tennis well enough to have fun with it, there is an initial learning period, which involves intensive focus and attention to detail.

But the goal for most of these skills is not excellence, but the ability to perform them easily and nearly automatically. This usually takes no more than about 50 hours to get to the point where mistakes become rare, and the performance is relatively smooth and competent.

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Jun 19
Love1

Your Long-Term Goals Have to Matter to You

By Habits and Strategies

Where do we find the energy to achieve big, long-term goals?

How can we persevere over time and through adversity to create something that requires a commitment of several years?

Simple. It has to matter to you.

Not just a little bit. It has to matter enough that you’ll see it through.

When someone calls me for coaching, once we’ve established the goals that they want to accomplish, one of the first questions I ask is “Why is it important for you to reach these goals?”

If the reason is something like “My parents want me to…” or “My boss wants me to…” or “I’m supposed to…” I know we have some work to do before we get to the nuts and bolts.

Somebody else wanting us to do something is rarely a strong enough motivation to make changes in our lives.

And reaching big goals usually requires making big changes.

Changing behavior, learning new skills, overcoming personal limitations – all take consciousness, time and willpower.

Habits are powerful forces; we can change them but not lightly.

Frankly, we have to have a darned good reason to change.

And we have to have an even better reason to maintain these new habits through adversity. Read More

Jun 12
Love1

What Happens When We Expect a Catastrophe

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

I write sometimes in these columns about thinking biases that can affect our decision making. Today I want to talk about a way of thinking that can undermine our resilience during hardship, as well as our ability to flourish and succeed.

Catastrophes happen in life. Natural disasters, tragic accidents, terrible illnesses, heart-rending betrayals, economic calamities, war, famine… Human history has been filled with these, and most of us have been at least touched by something catastrophic.

But a catastrophe is not usually the most likely scenario – if they were common, we wouldn’t think of them as catastrophes; they’d just be the kind of normal troubles we expect in life. There can be disappointments, hardships, struggles, and losses that hurt badly, requiring us to step up to challenges we would rather not have to step up to. These are not uncommon.

But a true catastrophe is rarely likely. When we expect catastrophe as a likely scenario, that expectation creates its own troubles, and they can run deep.

Yet our current media and political culture thrives on creating and maintaining an atmosphere of impending catastrophe. This is true across the political spectrum, and throughout much of the common space we share through internet, TV, movies, print media… The conversation that is mediated by every kind of media is filled with visions of catastrophe.

The very way that these threats are framed do not encourage us to think clearly, investigate deeply, or to search for practical solutions.

The way they are framed encourages us to feel terrified, enraged, and helpless. And this can undermine our capacity for success, happiness and well-being across every aspect of our lives.

This orientation is guaranteed to activate our primitive reactions of fight, flight, and freeze – reactions that are designed to give us a last-ditch possibility of surviving the mortal attack of a predator.

While these parts of our nervous system serve an essential survival function when needed, they are very rarely actually needed. They also undermine our capacity to think clearly, our desire and ability to seek understanding, empathy, and compassion for others, and our internal sense of well-being and basic trust.

Catastrophic thinking can undermine resilience, and increase our risk for anxiety, depression, and PTSD. It can also undermine our capacity for success: those who tend to not engage in catastrophic thinking also tend to be the ones who excel.

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Jun 05
Love1

Mastering Emotions, Moods and Reactions

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

(This is from the introduction to my book, Mastering Emotions, Moods, and Reactions)

Mastering our emotions, moods and reactions begins with understanding our fundamental nature as living, growing organisms. Our biological processes are full of rhythms, pulsations, flowing liquid and moving breath. Nature’s forces are powerful and enduring. If we try to fight against a powerful wind, we can be quickly overcome by it. But if we can accept, study, and harness those same forces, we can power a sailboat or a windmill. By stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of our own internal nature, we can more easily understand our own patterns and rhythms; and if we begin by accepting these as they are, we can use their power and direct them in ways that work better for us, rather than fighting against ourselves; against our own nature.

We begin our exploration with orienting to our biological nature.

From this perspective we can begin to make sense of our flowing emotions, our changing moods, and our sudden and intense reactions.

Distinguishing these three qualities from one another can help us learn what to do with each, with much more clarity than when they’re all thrown together as one experience.

Our emotions are more recent, connected with language, and useful primarily for self-reflection and growth. We’ll explore how to use our emotions in ways that allow us to learn from experiences that anger, hurt, frighten, or delight us so that we can function better in the future.

Our moods are more primitive and move more slowly. They have more to do with energy – raising our mood to meet a challenge or seize an opportunity, or lowering our mood when we suffer a loss, feel stuck, or take on goals that are impossible to achieve. We’ll learn to pay attention to the things that raise and lower our moods, and how to manage the natural ebbs and flows so we can stay connected and engaged through life’s ups and downs.

Our reaction of flight is at the heart of anxiety and panic, and is essentially designed to get us away from serious physical danger quickly. We’ll learn ways of calming and managing anxiety, and finding the actions we can take to strengthen and empower ourselves.

Our reaction of fight is the source of our explosive anger or rage, and is designed to provide us with an extreme intensity of energy and power, to fight against a physical threat from which we cannot escape. We’ll look at how to manage the often destructive reaction of rage, and how to distinguish it from the more useful emotion of anger.

Our reaction of freezing is our most primitive reaction, and is a last ditch effort to save our lives – by immobilizing us and anaesthetizing us when we’re trapped and terrified in the face of mortal danger. We’ll learn ways to come back into our body, and expand our sense of safety and well being.

Our emotions, moods and reactions, are affected – for better or worse – by our beliefs, our memories, and the stories we’ve created for ourselves. We’ll find ways of more consciously evaluating our beliefs, understanding our memories, and bringing our beliefs and stories more in line with our deepest values.

The state of our nervous system that we most want to cultivate is called our social engagement system, This involves our higher brain function, and the myelinated portion of our vagus nerve, which communicates between the organs of our viscera, heart and lungs and our brain. This is where we live when we feel safe, trusting and calm. We’ll see how expanding our sense of curiosity can help us to spend more time in this healthier state within ourselves, and help us to connect with others with more warmth and joy.

This isn’t just information, this workbook is designed to give you a different understanding and sense of yourself as a biological being, and I will ask you to join me in imagining different scenarios so you can sense the possibilities within yourself. Because of the nature of the material, it will be many times more useful if you can allow yourself to be fully absorbed.

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May 30
Love1

What Happens When We Try To Change Somebody

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

One of the most common questions I get in my coaching practice goes something like this:

“My (husband, wife, son, daughter, friend, neighbor, etc.) has this behavior, or belief, or way of doing things… How can I get them to change it?”

Now, if it’s a very specific behavior, and changing it would make a big difference in your relationship, it’s always worth just simply asking, for example, “When you talk with your mouth full it really bothers me, could you please do your best to not talk while you’re chewing?”

But often what we want the other person to change is much bigger and more abstract than that.

Of course, we’ve all felt this at some time or other – “If only this person we care about would just stop being so negative, or change this one belief… then they’d be so much better off.” (It’s always something that seems so obvious and simple… to us.)

The big problem with this is that it’s hard enough to change a big habit or belief within ourselves, when we want to. Trying to get somebody else to change a habit or belief, that maybe they don’t want to change, is really a long-shot.

I’ve been working with people to – in part – help them change their beliefs and habits for over 40 years. It’s something I enjoy very much, and have a lot of success with. But it’s not easy. It takes time and energy – and often a good deal of courage – to face our troubling behaviors, and the fears that sometimes accompany them.

When we nag, lecture, cajole, or manipulate those we love to be more the way we think they should be, in that moment we’re not really in relationship with them. In that moment we’re not seeing them as a human being, with all the complexity and unique internal experience that we each live within. We’re seeing them as a thing to make different. In order for them to live up to our expectations of them.

I don’t mean to say that we don’t generally love or understand them, but when we go into that particular mode of “teaching,” and what we’re teaching is the lesson we think this person needs to learn… in that moment, we’re disconnected from that person.

When was the last time you changed somebody else’s behavior by nagging or lecturing them? Or better yet: When was the last time you changed your behavior from somebody else nagging or lecturing you?

We can frighten or intimidate someone to do certain actions, but that’s not helping them to become a better person; that’s just forcing them to act in certain ways… when we’re looking.

The truth is, we’re powerless to change and control people. We’re helpless to make somebody else be just the way we want them to be. We’re not machines to be programmed or fixed; we’re living, thinking, feeling human beings; each with our own hopes, aspirations, and visions for ourselves. And those hopes, aspirations, and visions are going to conflict – often – with other people’s hopes, aspirations, and visions. None of us are going to just toss all that aside because somebody else wants us to be different.

Each one of us is a world, and understanding and honoring that – and being curious about each other’s worlds – is essential for a successful relationship.

Here’s the good news, though: We do influence one another; and we influence one another in a big way.

But that influence isn’t linear, and it’s not something we can direct in such a way that we guarantee any particular outcome.

We have the most influence on the people with whom we have good relationships. That means less nagging and lecturing, and more listening, kindness, playfulness, and curiosity.

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May 22
Love1

Love and Playfulness

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

Most couples wait six years or more from the beginning of trouble to when they seek help with a counselor, even though prevention is much easier and more effective than repair.

Working as a marriage and family therapist and coach, it’s heartbreaking when a couple seeks my help after they’ve become enemies, having long ago crossed the point of no return.

Once trouble starts, if a couple ignores it or just “lets things work out on their own,” that bond can degenerate quickly, and two people who were once deeply in love can find themselves in an agonizing cycle of criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling (silent brooding) – what relationship researcher and therapist John Gottman calls “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

The problem isn’t conflict. Successful marriages have plenty of conflict. The problem isn’t even unresolved conflict. Successful marriages also have plenty of unresolved conflict.

Conflict is where our differences meet; in many ways, our conflicts help us to get to know one another. A marriage without conflict is also likely a marriage without much intimacy.

It’s how we treat each other when there’s conflict that is the essential difference between a happy marriage and a miserable – or a finished – one.

A marriage is not a game; it’s not a trophy to win or a position to battle for. A marriage is a connection between two people who love each other, trust each other, respect each other and enjoy being with each other. It’s not about winning something over the other person; it’s about achieving something together, with the other person.

A happy, committed relationship is a collaboration between two people creating a life together, sharing a common direction, common values, common dreams. A marriage is a team of two committed, devoted allies.

The heart of a relationship comes through small, daily encounters that create an atmosphere, through a reputation between two people for what they can expect together and through what Gottman calls “rituals of connection” – the things we do regularly that bring us closer.

In a marriage, this can mean that we regularly take time in the morning to find out what each other’s day will be and in the evening to see what each other’s day has been.

It can mean building regular habits of sexuality and physical intimacy, scheduling weekly date nights and predictable time away together, and nurturing shared interests and activities.

And one of the most overlooked qualities of happy, successful relationships is playfulness.

Play, laughter and humor are extremely powerful. We know that when we sleep, our dreams rejuvenate us, establish neural connections in our brains, and even wash away some of the toxins that build up over the course of a day.

Play is the waking equivalent of dreaming. It rejuvenates us, connects us with each other and helps to clear out some of the negative emotions that can become stuck or stagnant when we take things too seriously.

Play and humor – not sarcasm or biting, hurtful jokes, but benevolent play; playing with each other, as teammates and friends – is a creative process. A successful marriage doesn’t happen automatically by instinct; it takes consciousness, kindness and creativity.

When there’s trouble, we need to find a way back to being allies. That can be a tall order sometimes. It takes a clear decision that regaining the friendship, the trust, and the allegiance with each other, is the most important thing – more important than being right, more important than teaching a lesson, more important than making our partner “better” or fixing them…

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May 15
Love1

Consciously Creating Relationships

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

An acquaintance the other day asked me what I do, and I told her that I’m a Marriage and Family Counselor, as well as a Life Coach. Then she asked an interesting question: “Is compromise the key to a happy marriage?”

At first I was tempted to say yes. Compromise is certainly one part of two different people sharing a life together. We can’t do everything we want whenever we want it; we have to find ways of adapting to each other’s needs and inclinations.

But thinking about it a little more closely, I instead said an emphatic, “no.” Compromise is not really the key. Compromise is kind of like when one person wants a room painted yellow, the other wants it painted blue, and we compromise and get green – but neither of us may even like green. Compromise is sometimes win/win, sometimes not. There are certainly times when we compromise, but it isn’t the driving force of a great relationship.

What is the driving force of a great relationship? A winning premise; a conception of what our relationship is all about that includes a shared vision of the two of us together.

A relationship is a creative process between two people. The two of you create what the two of you choose to create – whether you do that consciously or based on unexplored habits and beliefs is what can make the big difference between a happy, successful relationship, or a less happy, less successful one.

A great relationship is founded on the premise that you and your partner are allies; that you are a team together.

As an example: Imagine you’re on a great basketball team, you have the ball, and you’re on a fast break down the court. You see your teammate up ahead with a great position, so you pass him the ball so that he can shoot. You could have taken the ball all the way down the court and maybe taken the shot yourself, but you passed it to your teammate instead.

Is that a compromise?

Not at all. As a team, we are working toward the same goal: we want to win the game. To win the game we have to play together as effectively as we possibly can. We have to know our teammates extremely well. We have to pay attention to where they are and what they’re doing. We have to be focused on the goal, and committed to playing together at the highest level possible.

This is not compromise; it is a conscious understanding of goals, priorities and strategy. There is nothing so disappointing in a sports team as a bunch of phenomenal players who each think that they are the star, and whose focus is primarily on their own personal glory.

To win as a team requires that everybody see himself as part of that team, and to think in terms of the team’s success and glory. The level of commitment to achieve this is total. It can’t be 99%. We can’t have part of ourselves thinking, “Gosh, maybe I don’t want to be doing this, maybe there could be another option…”

The difference between a 99% commitment and a 100% commitment is huge.

In a marriage, when we commit to curiosity about our partner’s internal world, to getting to know them extremely well, to wanting to keep learning what matters to them, what their dreams and hopes are, what their vision is for our marriage, we are getting to know our teammate. We will come to understand how they respond to different kinds of communication, how to ask for what we want in ways that they are likely to hear, the different moods and events and timings of activities that work and don’t work.

This is something that we both need to do as allies with the same vision for our marriage.

When the two of us spend time together clarifying and refining our vision for our life together, we’re setting the stage for success toward that vision. We are defining the shared direction toward which we both want to head, and we are consciously creating the kind of relationship we want to live together in.

This will be a different direction than we would be heading if we were single. Alone, we would of course have a different vision. But we also could not create the same kind of life as we can together. It might be a great life, but it would be a different kind of life.

Just imagine one superstar basketball player facing off against a full squad of players. He couldn’t do much, because that game is about the relationship between great players.

A marriage is about the relationship between two great people.

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May 08
Love1

Psychological Challenges are More Interesting than You Think

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies, Happiness

When we approach any problem, how we approach it begins with an idea, a belief, a story about what that problem is, and what needs to be done about it.

To considerable extent, we can choose the fundamental belief or premise from which we approach any problem… and how we frame a problem can be the very key to success or failure.

In the movie Apollo 13, when the spacecraft was in grave peril, and people at Mission Control were freaking out expecting disaster, Gene Krantz (played by Fred Harris) stopped them and said, “What do we got on the spacecraft that works?”

With that one powerful question, he reframed the situation from helpless disaster to solvable problem. Everyone immediately shifted from disaster mode to focusing on the strengths and resources available to bring the astronauts home safely – which they did. The story would probably have ended much differently – and tragically – had they stayed in disaster mode.

How we approach our psychological challenges also begins with an idea, a premise, a story.

Currently, the widely accepted premise is that psychological problems – depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addictions et al – are abnormal phenomena.

They don’t belong here. They were brought to us by some unfortunate circumstances – an unhappy childhood, a personal weakness, a society that’s sick. They’re polluting the system, like a harmful bacteria or virus, and we want all trace of them eliminated immediately.

But what if that premise is wrong?

I’ve been working with people as a teacher, a marriage and family therapist, and a life coach for well over 40 years now. I started with that premise of problems as aberrations – the “disease model” of psychology. I don’t buy it anymore.

Let’s explore a different premise and see where it takes us.  The exploration starts with asking certain questions:

  • What if the underlying tendencies of these trouble are naturally occurring variations in human experience? What if they are not aberrations or pollutants, but challenges to overcome?  What if their severity can be intensified or minimized depending on our experiences, thoughts and actions?
  • What if depression is largely a natural response to feelings of helplessness, too much passive activity, or an unnatural lack of physical activity?
  • What if a certain percentage of us come into the world with a tendency toward depression, and part of our challenge is to master that tendency – just like any of us has to master other physical and intellectual strengths and weaknesses?

We might find that the most effective interventions for depression involve more exercise, identifying effective actions to take, and discovering, in a very personal way, what sort of thoughts and behavior help us move away from feelings of depression.

This is exactly what researchers have found. In fact, physical exercise is the most effective treatment for depression – 2 ½ times as effective as medication (currently the most popular treatment).

We also know from Martin Seligman’s work that depression is often a symptom of helplessness, and that actively changing how we think and what we do can move us strongly out of depression.

Even something as simple as regularly thinking of three good things at the end of each day can move some people out of the depressed range.

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May 01
Love1

Pressing the Pause Button

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

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

It’s easy to get caught up in emotions, to follow the flow and intensity of our impulses. It’s natural… animal… primal. And without intervening with our consciousness, it can be dangerous. This is how we operated throughout much of human history… which is why most of human history was so terribly, horribly violent.

But it’s not how most of us today usually operate, because we have a choice. Over time, particularly through the Enlightenment, we’ve culturally refined our ability to choose – and that ability is central to what makes us human.

When we feel like reacting with anger, fear or hurt feelings – anything that feels like it’s an automatic, purely emotional response – we can react without thinking, blindly following the tides of our emotions.

Or we can choose to do something different.

Stephen Covey talks about this ability to choose as being a “pause button.” A moment between stimulus and response, that transforms that response from an automatic, rote behavior to a conscious, human one.

When we feel like reacting to a situation, instead of going right into the reaction, we can “press the pause button” and consider what we genuinely – from our consciously chosen values and priorities – want to do.

During the ‘60s, ‘70s and well into the ‘80s, the idea that we should “let our feelings out” was a common message in psychology that found its way into popular culture.

This had a positive side. Our emotions are where we live. Awareness of our feelings deepens our experience, and can help us understand one another and even think more clearly. Love, joy, excitement, elation, satisfaction, peace, warmth… as well as fear, pain, grief, anger, and sadness… These all bring us essential information about how people and events are affecting us.

Our emotions are how we experience the meaning of life. To be more in touch with our emotions is to be more in touch with ourselves. To be able to easily and appropriately express our emotions allows us to live a rich, full life with satisfying connections with others.

“Appropriately” is an important qualifier here, though. There can be a downside to emotional expression, in two ways:

  1. It can be harmful over time to practice “releasing” anger. Because anger – particularly intense anger or rage – is fueled by the fight branch of our sympathetic nervous system, it’s often less of an emotion and more what I call a reaction: a more primitive protective response. Because of this, anger doesn’t actually release, it just intensifies. It becomes a well-worn path; a stronger habit.
  2. Emotions are useful if we integrate them with our conscious awareness. Without conscious awareness, our emotions can guide us all over the place. Maybe some good places, maybe some bad places, but almost never the places we consciously want to go.

When we practice venting our anger, we get very good at venting our anger, with all of the interpersonal and health problems this can bring.

The fight branch of our sympathetic nervous system gives us a burst of power and focus to fuel a last ditch effort to fend off and escape a predator. That’s what it’s for. That’s the level of intensity that flows into our system. These days, a powerful expression of anger is almost like our appendix: a vestigial remnant of a bygone function. There is very little use for a full-blown blast of anger for most people most of the time.

The pure emotion of anger may have served a stronger purpose long ago when the world was a much more violent place (the world or our ancestors was, taken as a whole, far more violent than it is today. See Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature and Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization).

As an emotion, anger is often a response to a sense that a boundary has been violated in some way. The difference between an emotion and a reaction is that a reaction includes a full burst of energy to escape a threatening situation (or with a freeze reaction, a drop in energy to endure and survive it); whereas an emotion is more about learning how to respond better next time. (I go into much more detail about this, with references and skills to practice, in my Mastering Emotions, Moods and Reactions Workbook).

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