How Anger Can Affect Your Life And Health
Feelings are intangible nevertheless powerful enough to sweep our lives with the force of a hurricane. Who is in charge of your life, you or your feelings?
Anger is one of those very powerful feelings that we have to keep an eye on all times. Anger can dominate and slowly destroy your relationship with family and friends, sabotage your professional life and jeopardise your ability to connect with people in general. Anger can also cause physical illness. A study made by psychologist Stephen Bruehl, Ph.D. showed that chronic pain is associated with expressed and repressed anger. So no matter if we expressed or repressed it we will get the consequences. The American Academy of Neurology Journal published that people who had strokes experienced anger at least 2 hours before the stroke.
Learning and understanding the functioning of a certain feeling can help us to keep it in control and free us from addiction. Yes, that’s right addiction. Do you know that we can get addicted to certain feelings the same way we can get addicted to drugs? Every time we experience anger strong chemicals called peptides are released into our brain and they literally dock in our receptor cells. This process causes an intense avalanche of biochemical actions. As a result we became addicted to this discharge of chemicals meaning that we at some level feel a morbid pleasure to these reactions.
Once addicted and UNAWARE of the whole process behind it we have no choice but to repeat it over and over again until it gets to a point of exhaustion. At this point we can’t change or control our anger because we are trapped in the vicious cycle of stimuli and responses.
Once we are AWARE of what is happening we can regain control of the situation using the power of observation. Through observation you can start looking closely into your anger patterns and start changing your behaviour radically and consistently until it is permanent without effort. If we can’t do it by ourselves let’s seek help before it is too late.
Ask yourself this question: Can I control my anger? If not, you are addicted. You can ask this same question to check all other feelings and find out if you are addicted to any of them.
Richard Gross in his book ‘Psychology The Science of Mind and Behaviour’ says: “Mr Spock in Star Trek often points out to Captain Kirk how much energy human beings waste through reacting emotionally to things, when a more logical and rational approach would be more productive. But would we be human at all if we didn’t react this way?”
Emotions and Feelings | Carmen Beese November 13, 2008
