7 Side-effects of Anger

With our society being more and more demanding, one’s emotions might get out of control and take control over our lives, making us feel hopeless and destroy confidence entirely. I would like to talk today about how anger might impact us more than we think, analyzing the most important aspects of this emotion that we experience throughout our lifetime.

Stressful events such as a job, car driving, anxiety, bipolar disorders might induce anger naturally each day for many of us, without being able to control it. Furthermore, small actions like “a friend gossiped something about you” , “my Pc broke when i started it today morning” , “i don’t have enough self confidence to talk to X or Y” induce anger naturally as well.

Subjectively, anger means strong negative (rarely positive) emotion, in response to events that are provocative or threatens your loved ones or your very own being.

7 Side-effects of anger over health will be discussed in the following paragraphs and how can we try to avoid these side-effects from happening in the future.

1. Violence

Violence is often correlated with anger because humans have learned this perk since the beginning; we have it in our blood, like it or not. Boxers are often told to be angry and destroy their opponents through violent attacks that cause harm to them without realising the consequences of anger are too great to ignore.

Wars are the ultimate violence acts that are being abused by humans. Wars taught people to be merciless, angry and bloodthirsty; what did that bring? What did being angry in wars brought us? Crimes, mad psychos controlling a nation and marching to war, cruel acts against humanity, animals dying everywhere, bombs exploding and killing millions. That doesn’t sound good at all…

We often see civil wars going on and on around the globe, often caused by the impossibility of a government to control a nation anymore. That results in many side casualties, innocent people that just wanted to live their lives in peace get killed or tortured. Violence, in my opinion, is the greatest weapon of anger. It has the potential to destroy the whole planet!

Religion has the power to change someone, but there are those that wanted to abuse of that power. There were many wars fought in the name of religion and are still happening to this day! In this society, most humans have chosen the religious aspect to approach God, but they often think the religion they accomodated in is the best, often resulting in religious clashes. A sort of war between “clans” which is really not the best way to show respect to God.

2. Anger affects your driving skills

The aspect of anger affects one’s driving potential.

• My story: I had a day off from work because of holiday. I went to pick up my mom from work so we can go do some shopping for the upcoming trip to my grandma. I had to drive with my car to pick up mom from work but given the fact that there was a holiday that day, many other drivers decided to go out shopping as well. I noticed i needed

  30 minutes to arrive to my first destination, something that shouldn’t have taken more than 5 minutes. I arrive at my mom’s workplace, i pick her up, and go shopping. I was exhausted that day because the previous day i had to work 14 hours non stop. I was already angry and impatient before i went to pick up mom. So what did happen when we got inside the mall? I ignored mom because i was too angry, then we got out to leave home. Guess what? The traffic was 100% jammed! No one would move their car even 10 cm! I told mom this would tak e a while. Cars started to move slowly but then drivers that don’t care about surroundings at all cut the lane in front of me. That was the beginning of my wrath (I usually am not this angry while driving but seeing such people cut in lines with expensive cars, thinking they are gods pisses me off). So i look at mom, tell her that i will not let anyone cut the lane in front of me anymore and then after the traffic unjammed a bit, i started being aggressive in traffic. If mom wasn’t in the car, i would have probably used a lot of swearing words. Eventually i calmed myself down after i got home… but that was hell.

There are hundreds of millions of drivers around the world including myself. Being angry in traffic dispels your concentration on driving properly and you begin to do mistakes….sometimes mistakes that cost you a life. I noticed a lot of people like to show the middle finger , swear at one another or even start a physical fight in traffic, showing their frustration in forms of anger towards the other traffic participants. Personally, i tried to be as calm as possible, checking whatever changes in my driving skills. Guess what? I was doing less mistakes, i was concentrating on the road ahead, i gave no problems to other drivers and reached my destination safe and sound. I feel very unconfortable when i’m angry and start driving!

3. Failure

To fail at something in life proved out to be more frustrating than we expected it to be. To fail at making money, to fail at exams, to fail at becoming great at some game etc have different negative effects on our emotions. There are few stages of what one’s feel when they fail at something. Note: These might vary from one human being to another so we take just few examples for Human X:

• Stage 1: Failed at something – Frustration, anger, feeling hopeless, everyone around should just dissapear, can lead to depression and anxiety and could trigger health problems;
• Stage 2: Accepting that failure – Calming oneself down, stop being angry, stop feeling hopeless but develops a fear of failure again, moves to isolation state;
• Stage 3: This stage depends on the person at hand. I’d like to give the two possible outcomes of what is after stage 2.

a) Remaining in an isolated state (means oneself does not have the confidence to try that thing he failed at again) , not trying anything new again, procrastination;

b) Moving on, removing anything that holds oneself in chains and trying to do X thing he failed at again despite having the fear of failing all over again.

There is absolutely no one in this world that has not failed at something once or twice. Some people cope with this better than others, like they develop the motivation necessary to try over and over again until one is successful and never give up. Others, instead of coping with failure, become avoidant of almost any task that is higher than themselves. Complete avoidance leads to depression and procrastination. Why depression? When someone doesn’t know what else to do and feel like their lives are too empty, they become desperate and thus become depressed.

As we could see above, anger is in the first stage of what happens when someone fails at something. Some people might use that anger to hurt their loved ones or quit their jobs, beat innocent animals etc, so it’s a very important issue that needs to be solved immediately when the first stage is triggered.

4. Marriage

One of main issues in marriage is when two people of opposite sex are not and they weren’t on the same frequency from the very beginning. Marriage, good relationship between two people is one hard thing to attain because one of them has a certain perspective and the other has it’s own certain perspective as well. Sometimes this issue can lead to many problems in marriage, such as domestic violence (which we will mention later in this subject) , divorces (it’s even harder when they have kids), unfaithful wife or husband (cheating), depression when they are close to each other and more.

As we stated earlier, humans tend to get angry often the cause being the events that surround them daily. Jobs that take most of our time during the day/night become the main source of our anger. Not being promoted in a company to earn more salary for his/her family drives that person into a state of constant anger, lack of self confidence,  even depression. Most of the times, because of their pride, men (often than women) lose their control, coming home drunk and use their anger on their wives, applying domestic violence, which is a very despicable act.

Anger is often followed by domestic violence, divorces and complete ignorance of eachother, which makes it the most important issue that needs to be solved in a marriage to avoid divorce.

Following an anger management therapy or going to a marriage counseling might help with these issues.

5. Family and friends

When i was a child, i used to get angry on my family pretty often, sometimes even thought of leaving house because i had no one that understands me. Yes my anger was because no one understood me that i was different. At school i was bullied by few of my classmates, (got traumatized thanks to that) and at home my mom, dad and my brother did not understand me very well. Of course i wasn’t a saint so i took beatings a lot. When raising a child, it’s best that you always look for anything that is upsetting and fix it. When a child is angry, he/she is most likely angry because he/she is not understood by the closest people. Society is another factor that does not comprehend that raising a child doesn’t need necessarily to follow all the strict rules surrounding it. Sure, education is important, but any parent can do that without schooling for example.

Most of the children these days don’t get enough education to follow even basic rules. A child that does not know the value of an animal’s life for example, will try to hurt that being without knowing what it means for that being – the pain – suffering and so on. Schools, in my opinion, are worthless socially; they do not offer anything except words , words and words. You live most of your life with different classmates in schools trying to get the hang of it, then some kid that was abused by his parents comes and ruin your day, making you angry on him, even enough to make you want to kill him. But whose fault is it really? The kid’s or the parent’s?

Parents have the ultimate role in raising a child. They gave birth to that child, so they should take the responsibility of teaching him what is bad and what is good. Many parents fail at even teaching him basic rules of house / society, thus the child becomes something unwanted in the future. Being abused by classmates/friends/parents is another way of saying anger gets imprinted into that child’s mind, which becomes a young adult with no self confidence, is angry all the time on everyone, can’t find a girlfriend/boyfriend, isolates himself, even thinks of suicide.

Anger comes in various forms during childhood:

1. Anger towards classmates; Being bullied is the worst thing to have experienced during childhood and can traumatize you for life;
2. Anger towards parents; Being abused by parents is yet another extremely bad thing. No one likes that in this society but it still happens;
3. Anger towards friends; When two children are playing together and one insults the other, he becomes enraged sometimes even starting a fight.

If you become a responsible parent, the child will become the same in the future.

6. Health

To summarize this up, anger is the most deadliest emotion that we fuel in our daily lives. Being angry can profoundly damage our health and mind once it gets out of control. Furthermore, being angry all the time means you are facing with a psychological disease and need to seek professional help.

Anger can damage your life as following:

1. Induce prolonged depression, anxiety, guilt, low self-esteem;
2. Heart problems (including higher rate of heart attacks), weaker immunity system, high blood pressure, headaches, insomnias etc;
3. Mentally unable to control your thoughts, meaning you sometimes think of hurting someone or destroying something;
4. Social issues – talking with other people, accomplishing easy to hard tasks at work / school, unleashing wrath upon your family or friends.

Learning to control your anger is really really hard, but must try and do the best we can.

7. Connection with God, nature and animals

Back in the days, when my life wasn’t so full of everything, i used to meditate and research everything i could about God, understand more about animals and nature and try to progress on my path that i have chosen for myself; one of becoming a better person.

I have learned a lot about qi kung training, chakras, reflexotherapy, chanting, meditating and so on that i thought it would impossible for me to regress. That was back in 2012 and now we are in 2015. Nowadays i don’t do the relaxation / health methods that i mentioned earlier because the lack of time in my life. Job takes almost a full day and when i get a free day i am always not really free.

Meditating, i have reached a nice level of relaxation few times that got me by surprise. My thoughts were organized, my muscles were relaxed, all the other emotions were closed; anger was absent.

But since then, my meditation skills diminished, i cannot relax more than 5 minutes without worrying or thinking of something, i am getting angry almost from anything and not enjoying my free time at all. Meditation has kept me in a close connection to a divine power, nature and animals but then it suddenly dissapeared. Why did it happen? Society is forever moving in a direction towards future, never sits still. If you sit tight in one place, it will devour you and bring you back to reality. To avoid that, you need to have enough self confidence to jump over the stressful events in your life given by society, and achieve a new level of peace with yourself and everything else.

Anger, hate, envy and all other negative emotions break your connection with God , nature and animals, sometimes bringing these to extreme levels. What do i mean by that? Humans begin to hate God because he doesn’t provide everything they ask him, begin to destroy nature because they think it doesn’t have a soul and inflict pain unto animals because they think they are on earth to be eaten or killed by humans.

What is your path?

Not being able to control anger means that you become the slave of that emotion. Learning to control anger might be more difficult than it looks like. I am trying everyday to repress anger but sometimes i fail miserably to do so and i’m hurting myself and others.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson