Is Anger the Cure for Anxiety?

Anxiety is a funny thing. These days it gets talked about almost as if it were a virus, something that we caught coming home on the train. More and more, it has become not only normalised but treated as an incurable condition that people just have to tolerate and live with.

Well, I say NO. So can you. We don't have to be condemned to a life of anxiety at all, once we understand what it is. Put simply, anxiety is the state of physical arousal we experience when we are facing a threat or problem that we do not believe we can overcome.

To put that mathematically:

Threat + Negative Expectation = Anxiety.

Who says algebra is useless? If we believe we can deal with the threat, we may be afraid (it is a threat after all) but we will also feel confident, not anxious. We may even be excited, because one function of fear is to arouse us to take action and if we expect that action to succeed, it becomes exciting. Think going on a roller coaster. It's terrifying but you know you aren't going to die, so its thrilling too. Mathematically it looks like

Threat + Positive Expectation = Excitement

Well that sounds easy doesn't it. Just change our thinking and all our anxiety goes away, right? Sadly, no. Don't get me wrong, it can happen this way, which is why some people succeed with cognitive therapies, especially if they are paired with behavioural changes.

However, a lot of the time the negative belief exists at a deeper level than the conscious mind so changing the thought doesn't change the belief. This is where trauma comes into the picture.

Trauma is an unresolved memory of an event in which we believed we were unable to deal with a threat or problem. This gets internalised as a negative self-belief, but it is wrapped in the memory of that event and stuck in our limbic brain. A limbic brain memory carries intense emotions and is saturated with sensory information. It also has a 'here and now' quality to the experience, so as far as your body knows, this is not a memory of the past but a current or recent experience. We are not remembering it, but re-experiencing it. Even worse, this negative belief gets projected onto the the future as negative expectations. That is a rather technical way of saying that "I failed in the past so I will fail in the future too". Instant anxiety.

If that isn't bad enough, we no longer even need there to be a real threat. We start to imagine future threats, and our failure to deal with them, and then we start avoiding any situation in which those threats could occur.

I call this the anxiety spiral, though the technical term is 'negative reinforcement'. The trauma creates a negative expectation, which creates anxiety, so we avoid life's risks, which reinforces the idea that life is too dangerous and the best thing to do is avoid it, which increases our anxiety. The more avoidance we do, the deeper our anxiety gets and the less confidence we have, and the scarier life becomes. So you probably want to know how to get out of this then? Great question. I'm glad you asked. Ideally, we want to resolve the trauma, but most people don't have a handy trauma therapist sitting around in their living room. So we need to find a way to reverse the spiral, to starts climbing back up towards a positive expectation and the confidence that brings us. That's when we need our anger.

Now I know that anger gets a bad rap. It's blamed for violence, conflict and abuse. In fact, people who do these behaviours are often accused of having "anger issues". In a way, this is true, but not in the way most people think. 'Angry people' are really anxious people, trying not to be anxious. They learned that they can override and overcome their anxiety with anger. The reason for this is that this is actually anger's job. Anger is a wonderful and innately creative emotion that motivates us to defend our boundaries and pursue our goals. It has a great many gifts to give. It gives us

• Courage to overcome fear,

• Discipline to overcome boredom,

• Determination to overcome frustrations and impediments,

• Endurance to overcome fatigue

• Resilience to overcome defeat.

Anger gets us moving and keeps us moving when things get hard. The opposite of being anxious isn't being relaxed, it's being confident, and anger gives us the emotional energy to get that confidence. It empowers us to take risks, assert our needs, defend our boundaries and endure the inevitable pain of growth. Life can be hard, but anger can make us harder. What's that? You don't want to be an angry person or a hard person? Fair enough, and you don't need to be. You only need to be a person who can use their anger to achieve their goals. The real problem with 'angry people' is that they have learned to use anger to overcome anxiety, which is good, but they are also using anger to avoid vulnerability, which is bad. This is because they think that their vulnerability is making them anxious, which is wrong.

Our vulnerable emotions, which are sadness, fear and despair, are actually our greatest strength. How? because they connect us to the support of the group, and 10 human beings is 100 times as strong as 1 human being. Groups are formed on bonds of mutual vulnerability and mutual support. However, if you think vulnerability makes you weak, as so many people have been taught, then you start to believe that these emotions will disable you, which will make you anxious.

So being an angry person isn't the solution, but it is part of the solution. Being able and willing to embrace your anger and let it empower you starts you climbing back up the anxiety spiral. This leads to 'positive reinforcement', which is the technical way of saying that you gain confidence by succeeding. We can't succeed if we don't try, and we can't try if we are avoiding risk. So if anxiety is getting in the way of your life, get angry already. Stand up, say no, get angry and have a go. Whether you succeed or fail doesn't really matter because at least you didn't fail to try, and what is success anyway but the end point of repeated failures. No one succeeds without failing along the way, and learning how to do it better next time. So anxiety is a creation of the mind, a shadow of the past, a ghostly imagination of a horrible future. It has no power except the power to scare you with false beliefs and horrible stories.

I say NO.

I say get angry and claim your life back.

What say you?