Hello my friends,

Welcome back to your weekly mental health check! This week we are continuing with our mini series on “negative” emotions. Today, it is anger. Anger is an emotion associated with awful outcomes, such as destruction and trauma.  It can be triggered by threats, real or imagined, but also injustice. It can be destructive but also highly adaptive. It serves the role of protecting one’s boundaries, of recognising threats or obstacles and forces us to fight for our goals. 

Anger is not necessarily always perceived as a negative emotion. It provides energy, focus, control and a sense of power. When we are angry, we move forward and fight towards a goal. In athletes this is a common way of increasing motivation across players and hyping each other up for the game: a controlled way of using that hyper focus, that sense of control and channeling that energy in a sports game. I think the best football games are those against the biggest rivalling team, high on emotion!

However, sometimes, there is more to anger.  Maybe you know someone, a friend, family member, neighbour, or colleague who is constantly on edge. Quick to react in an angry way, when something happens in a way they didn’t plan. When looking deeper beneath the surface, often you will find that the emotion is not anger, but sadness. In psychology, we call this phenomenon the iceberg effect. The primary, much deeper emotion is sadness or grief, but on the surface we only see anger. Anger is more tolerable, easier to regulate than sadness or grief.  So next time that friend, neighbour or colleague snaps at you in anger, try to be empathetic. You never know what someone might be going through beneath the surface. And if you are the one to always tend to be triggered and get angry easily – try to listen and understand why you respond that way. Are you really angry or is there unresolved sadnesss or grief underneath the anger?

Look underneath the “iceberg”….

Of course, this should not be an excuse for unregulated anger and destructive behaviour. We do need to learn to regulate our emotions. Anger can have many faces: the destructive uncontrolled type, the highly controlled way of using anger (as in a sports performance, acting or fighting for goals that are important to us), or the “mask” when we use anger to suppress other, more unbearable emotions.

This shows the complexity of our emotions. They have a story to tell us, and if we don’t listen, we move more and more in a destructive direction. Emotions offer such valuable insight into our unconscious, let’s listen to what it’s trying to tell us. 

Stay tuned for next week, where we will look at the final emotion in this series: sadness. 

Take care  – and take charge!

See you next week, 

It’s me, Jules, your biggest fan