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How to make your anger work for you

94 points by 1970-01-01 3y ago

1970-01-01 3y ago
Note the HTML title " How to deal with anger in a healthy way " differs from the article's working title " How to make your anger work for you " which differs from the URL title " use-anger-productively-motivation-problem-solving "
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Gotta cover all the bases for SEO.
- harryvederci 3y ago
  How does that make you feel?
082349872349872 3y ago
> People are the root cause of anger. For some values of "root"? I've seen people angry at animals, and anger at even inanimate objects is common enough to be a film trope (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E_SDwUM4kM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E_SDwUM4kM ). (the sentence is ambiguous, but taking the other branch, it's easy enough to find vertebrates angry at each other; as for invertebrates, although we say wasps get angry, it's not so clear)
- danparsonson 3y ago
  Yeah but the root of being angry about an inanimate object is likely not the object itself; likewise for animals. If someone finds themself shouting at the door that just closed in their face, they probably have something deeper going on. Wasps get aggressive but personally I think calling it anger is anthropomorphising a bit :-)
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    And this is why I assume living in nature first environments is so good for your sanity.. chances of this kind of emotional pain is drastically lower.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
> "Be strategic with your reactions to anger." i think as u get older u learn the value of silence. delaying your response (if ever) to a more strategic time.
smeej 3y ago
One amusing way I've found to diffuse a little bit of the useless anger, a la > yelling profanities at the guy who cut us off in traffic A friend of mine says he just pulls an index finger and mutters under his breath "red turtle," but even then he felt a little bad for envisioning knocking the car off the road, so I invented the purple turtle. The purple turtle does not blow the offender up. It does not knock the car off the road. It merely teleports car and driver safely to a drive-in movie theater playing the relevant section of driver's education, and they have to sit there in timeout until they understand why what they just did was dangerous and/or stupid. It even has a sound effect. So now I just make the sound effect, as loudly as I can when I'm by myself, because it's a silly noise and hard to make loudly without laughing, and it helps relieve the tension!
- wkjagt 3y ago
  If you’re referring to the shells in Mario Kart, then you should also try the lightning bolt :-) When it hits someone’s kart, they shrink down and slow down, and their engine noise becomes high pitched.
  - smeej 3y ago
    Making someone slow down in front of me is the very last thing I want to do in traffic!
    - wkjagt 3y ago
      But like in Mario Kart, you can now easily pass them.
      - smeej 3y ago
        I don't know what roads you drive on, but when my problem is someone's going slow, the problem is already that I can't easily pass them. Slowing them down and making them smaller ain't gonna fix it.
csydas 3y ago
Anger got me into programming; when properly guided it can help you to address a situation that is very frustrating for you without having a full blown melty. My very first “real” code was a script i made in my support days was only because i was tired of having to get some specific hardware info from systems, which no one could do. fed up with cranky clients and incomplete data, i decide enough is enough and made a script to ensure it always got collected. from there, i just never stopped writing tools to solve annoying tech problems; my experience was that learning to write code to do it automatically and correctly was less frustrating than begging people to run the correct commands, much less all of them. this strategy carried over to many non tech things and i find i trust my anger to tell me when something is bad, but i also now pay attention and think what i want to do with such situations and what i actually want as an outcome and try to work towards that, or even consider “why am i so upset at it? is it really that bad?”. it just forces a more rational reaction in the service of my anger, and the anger is satisfied even if i find i’m upset over nothing; i still understand my feelings way better
- agumonkey 3y ago
  I honestly believe there's a whole space of exploration into how balancing / channeling emotions the way you describe. It's the dual of depression somehow.. if you let papercuts lock you down you get into a depressive spiral. Tapping into anger flips this around.. key is to convert it into genuine planning / thinking / acting and not destruction :) And this goes beyond programming.. probably worth knowing for one's life globally.
- j45 3y ago
  What I used to call anger that resulted in programming often times turned out to being frustrated an disturbed enough to no longer not do anything about it.
padolsey 3y ago
I’ve been thinking about the anger response recently as me and my partner are thinking about becoming parents. Some of our friends with children seem to be liable to anger, and it is quite a stereotype of parents around the world using anger, sometimes unintentionally, to impose control on their children, or to express severe disapproval. I wonder, how do the HN parents here theorise around that? I really don’t want to be an angry parent, as I’ve learned it can wreak havoc on a child’s feeling of psychological safety, but I know that’s easy to say and less easy to do. In my head, one should only ever rely on anger when there is a genuine threat to the child’s life. Really curious of others’ thoughts.
- Ryoung27 3y ago
  The majority of a small child's activities are a genuine threat to the child's life. I'm naturally prone to anger, so were my parents, in my experience with my parents, and my kids, the line is how you react once angry.
- itronitron 3y ago
  sleep deprivation is a helluva drug But seriously, it's important to be able to have, and use, an authoritative voice without becoming angry. I didn't realize how loud I can be (without screaming or yelling) before having children. They can't read your mind and I think most people get angry with others when there is some fundamental miscommunication or missed expectation.
- tareqak 3y ago
  Somewhat related to your question: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful-way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/6855333... Previous threads with about this article: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=How%20Inuit%20Parents%20Teach%20Kids%20To%20Control%20Their%20Anger&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- sandreas 3y ago
  This is kind of true... It is extremely hard to stay calm in many situations having kids. In my opinion this has nothing to do with the ability to stay calm in general. It's more like long time of being stressed out that gets you there. Understanding that you are permanentely stressed out and taking the right measures (take time for yourself, don't take things to seriously, make everything a little game, children just don't WORK like adults - they are children, etc.) is most important. Becoming parents is a process. Most of this process is great and it enriches your life, but parts of it may be so hard, that you can't explain it to anyone without kids. The first child was kind of ok-ish in my memory :-) But: Imagine you have 2 little kids, both are sick, because one of them brought it in. They are not able to express their feelings by telling you what the problem is, they just cry the whole day and night. You and your partner are also getting sick, not as bad as your children, but you don't feel well. You can't ask for help, because there is a probability of infecting these persons. You don't sleep much for days and can't really rest. You are worried all the time, because your kids are really sick and you have to care about them, if it gets worse. In a situation like this, minor daily tasks will be major efforts and at some point you just break down. Not everything is as hard as this example, but usually having a toddler is energy-sapping all the time. At the same time it's a totally great experience.
b0bb1z3r0 3y ago
[dead]
amelius 3y ago
I guess venting in an echo-chamber isn't very effective, but why do smart people keep doing it?
dr_dshiv 3y ago
Just me? I thought the article was terrible. Most of the solutions discussed involve not being angry but being motivated. Did i miss something?
- dwighttk 3y ago
  >Anger is selfish (road rage) and selfless (protesting a war half a world away). Thought that was a pretty weak example of selfless… couldn’t be something happening in front of you?
- from-nibly 3y ago
  Yeah the solutions were like, "when you're angry, don't be"
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    But maybe people with anger issues don’t want to read an article entitled “anger has minimal functional value in the modern world.” Although, I’ve found that anger can be an effective way of dealing with certain angry people (not most!). Some people get calm when others are angry but don’t notice it in themselves. It’s frustrating though, because I hate getting angry. I very rarely get angry at my kids and I usually signal (“I don’t want to get angry… I’m starting to get angry”). So even when anger is functional for me, I really don’t like how it cognitively disrupts me.
- Xeyz0r 3y ago
  If anger is expressed in a healthy and constructive way, it can be a powerful force for good. However, if anger is expressed in an unhealthy and destructive way, it can have serious consequences. Anger can motivate us to take action and make changes but uncontrolled anger can lead to violence and aggression
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  I thought it was terrible too. The author didn't state their assumptions and didn't address the social norms surrounding anger. Anger is, at least where I live, not a socially acceptable emotion to express. This belief is the core of the article, and I imagine that a lot of folks reading this are thinking, "That's right it's not," "There's always a reason not to be angry," &c. However, anger is also a completely valid emotion - we've all experienced anger. My point is that we have no socially acceptable outlets for anger. We have to mask, sublimate, redirect, suppress, or simply not be angry for basically our entire lives. This article is a product of that belief. I run a sporadic event with a group of friends called "Scream at the Moon Night". On a full moon we go out to an open field and I run through a list of prompts that all ask for a screaming response. We scream out all that pent up anger and once we're done we take a seat and just talk. It's cathartic. I've had moms take their kids and scream about bullies. People have screamed about work, ex's, life struggles, everything. It's great, but the take away is that this is so outside the social norms that I wouldn't blame you if you thought it was weird. There isn't space to do this socially, I had to make it.
alecco 3y ago
It worked for me in the past but I don't think it's sustainable. Just like you can't be gung ho all the time, you can't be angry all the time. And when it drops you lose your focus. I picked and dropped 100 things in my life. The only way for 100% is to "embrace the suck". Keep going on bad days, too. Even if it's only a little.
- noisy_boy 3y ago
  I got into an argument about fitness that pissed me off and I signed-up for gym. Then I actually started enjoying lifting weights and didn't need the anger anymore. Sometimes anger provides the escape velocity to beat the Jovian gravity of lethargy and procrastination.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  > Even if it's only a little. This is key, I think. Do a little of a project most days, just even a few minutes. I find this useful to keep the momentum going on creative projects, including programming and 3D rendering. There are quite often little things that need doing, which keep you in touch with the project, but which can be completed quickly if you aren't in the mood for sustained effort.
andrewstuart 3y ago
>>> Go ahead, get mad. It’s healthy. Absolute garbage. My mother brought me up this way and it’s one of the most damaging things she could have done. DONT get mad. Regulate your emotions. Be a kind person. Communicate with people. Anger destroys relationships fast. If you want to dispose of your relationships like they’re worth nothing then sure, get angry. Angry people aren’t aware of it, but they are behaving like dickheads. Anger is a mechanism for controlling other people through emotional verbal violence implying the threat of physical violence. If someone gets angry with you, laugh at them and tell them you are immune to their attempt to control you with anger.
- prmph 3y ago
  I think you misunderstand the article. Getting angry can be healthy, because it shows you care about something that is going wrong, in your opinion. It's the way you channel the anger that can be productive or destructive. I think a lot of problems spiral out of control because people _don't_ get angry when they actually should. And being kind has little to do with not being angry. The most unkind people I've met don't get angry; they just let things slide, because they don't care about you, or about things being right in general. They are usually cunning people who smile and are agreeable for expediency.
- StefanBatory 3y ago
  "If someone gets angry with you, laugh at them and tell them you are immune to their attempt to control you with anger." Yep, this was how it was at my home. My mom would get angry at everything, and then I was the one who had to regulate her emotions. And if I failed, she'd be even more mad.
apwheele 3y ago
For a random bit I feel hackernews crowd will appreciate, I clench my jaw when I get angry. I have given myself TMD (jaw pain closing/chewing and will click/pop in fits). Not recommended. Root causing the source of stress and amending lifestyle (if possible) to limit those exogenous sources is my old man advice. I don't think focusing my inner rage Hulk is healthy for me.
andrewstuart 3y ago
If you are someone with an anger problem, here’s how to address it: When you feel yourself getting angry, just ask yourself “does this issue REALLY matter”. If it really matters then by god get angry. If it doesn’t matter then why bother? I rarely if ever got angry again after I started asking myself this, cause not much actually matters.
- antihipocrat 3y ago
  That works, another method to add to the toolset is to ask what is actually driving the emotion. Sometimes it's actually frustration that things aren't going the way you want (and the next question is why is my way really better than the other?). Sometimes it's someone else's mistake (and the next question is have I ever made a mistake?) Then someone cuts in front of you in line and it could really matter (time pressure or opportunities missed) and that behaviour could be something you would never do to others. In that situation believe it's healthier to speak up, but there is much less risk of escalation, and a good chance of gaining allies around you if the message is delivered calmly rather than with anger.
- Xeyz0r 3y ago
  Sometime also it's hard to Acknowledge and Validatethe Feeling
endorphine 3y ago
I'm halfway through the article and one of the suggestions seems to be to understand why we're feeling angry at the moment. This got me thinking: philosophy and psychology are in part ways to understand ourselves and the world around us. Are there any ways in which more and better _understanding_ does not necessarily lead to a better, more fulfilling life? How important do you think understanding ourselves and the world around us is, for that matter?
- mistermann 3y ago
  I think transcendental phenomenology combined with modal logic is what gets into this, a Q&A session with ChatGPT could probably answer a lot of your questions.
Helmut10001 3y ago
Anger got me into self-hosting. It is such a driving force for me. The trade-off would be reliance on predatory cloud services such as Amazon or Google, which is (for me) always worse than the many hours spend maintaining open source software.
photochemsyn 3y ago
In a healthy society, learning emotional control is part of growing up. If people in a society are constantly engaging in angry outbursts, it means they feel the need to engage in some kind of threat display, which in turn indicates they're living in fear. If you walk into an organization and discover all the bosses are constantly screaming at their obsequious underlings, who are in turn screaming at their underlings and so on down the line, it probably means everyone's afraid of losing their jobs, and it's a good idea to turn around and walk out the door, if that's an option. People who deliberately get angry (or sad) in order to get others to do what they want are engaging in emotional manipulation practices, which should be treated as a huge red flag. Such behavior is a common side effect of growing up with manipulative, unhinged and/or abusive parents, and it can be overcome, if the person wants to - but some people get addicted to their emotional highs and lows. Fundamentally, making good decisions under stress requires a calm rational mind not given to emotional breakdowns and outbursts, and people who don't have that capability should never be placed in positions of responsibility.
cat_plus_plus 3y ago
Anger is caveman emotion which is still useful in caveman situations. If someone is in the middle of attacking your family, you stop them, even at the cost of your own safety and quite possibly with deadly force. You don't sit and talk to him about how his intergenerational disadvantage led him to his current choices. Now, when planning public safety, this would be a bad response even for strictly selfish reasons of not wanting to suffer crimes. If tough policing is proven to reduce crime, do tough policing, you don't want to become San Francisco. If giving opportunities or education in jails helps, do that rather than sacrificing your own safety to indulge your understandable anger. And so on. There is even space for empathy with people who have never been given a chance. In civilized situations there are superior ways to motivate change - justice, snapping out of complacency, enlightened self interest, striving for success. Your boss may be an asshole, but rage quitting could jeopardize your visa or chances of an internal transfer. You need to calm your caveman brain and call upon values instilled upon you by centuries of civilization to get to a good outcome for yourself and others. Unless again, civilization has already failed you, then old ways may be necessary.
- MarcoZavala 3y ago
  [dead]
ptsneves 3y ago
Anger gives you drive. Cold fury is the most powerful. If well placed it allows to keep the drive past the adrenaline. The if part is the critical one. Negative emotions are often poisonous and after a while a person realizes it is kind of a bad fuel. I realised that toning them down allows better directing. To finish: anger is an effective driver.
- twodave 3y ago
  This is the literal same term I use while weight lifting. I channel all pain and rage into the lift. It sounds crazy, but it works since a lot of athletic activity is about training your mind in the first place. My workout buddy says he can see it on my face when I’m in the cold fury.
  - abound 3y ago
    Same here. Weightlifting for me is sometimes more of a mental workout than a physical workout. Getting oneself into the headspace to "go for broke" on that final set is crazy taxing and requires a ton of focus, especially for full body lifts like squat and deadlift. I find lifting moderates my mood more than anything, it's hard to be angry when you've thrown all that emotional energy into a set.
User23 3y ago
Anger has caused me to start weeklong (including weekends) coding binges where I get a month’s work done. Leaves me a bit exhausted at the end, but still a huge net win.
2devnull 3y ago
Did vox used to be better? I think anger is like flatulence. You can talk a lot about it but at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of hot air. “Make your flatulence work for you.” Odd.
Xeyz0r 3y ago
Anger is a strong emotional response to a perceived threat or injustice. When I was in school, I experienced a lot of injustice, which made me quite an angry child. However, my parents noticed this and began teaching me how to cope with my anger. As a result, I became quite adept at meditation at a young age.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
Let fury have the hour Anger can be power Do you know that you can use it? -- The Clash
peheje 3y ago
David Whytes poems about everyday words in his book "Consolations" includes one about anger. It begins: "ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for." .. Can recommend reading the rest (poem and book).
lordfrito 3y ago
You don't control your emotions, your emotions control you. We don't choose to be angry -- we simply are angry. Anger is your primitive brain stem prodding you into doing something, anything... because what you are dealing with at the moment just isn't working. Being angry is never the problem -- it's your body's way of telling you it's time to change something. Usually way past time to change things. That's a good thing. Now... What you do about being angry -- well that's the rub isn't it? Punching someone may not be the best option, maybe channel the anger into something else, something more constructive. In any case, a change must be made. Listen to your emotions -- they're telling you what you need to be focusing on.
- cma 3y ago
  > Being angry is never the problem Misplaced anger is common.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    Anger is a secondary emotion. You need to figure out what you are actually angry about. That was advice that helped me a lot.
  - lordfrito 3y ago
    What's wrong with misplaced anger, other than it's misplaced? My point still holds, something is wrong, some boundary is violated, you need to do something. Even if the anger is misplaced, you're not simply angry about "nothing" -- find out what the root is and fix it. The anger isn't the problem. Anger will give you the energy to do the work. And, as I said, what you do in response may or may not be constructive/helpful. Yes I understand misplaced anger can cause you to focus on the symptoms rather than the problem. In other news, throwing fists usually doesn't help. There are a bunch of things you can do when angry that aren't helpful. But the anger isn't the problem, it's the symptom of a problem that needs to be addressed.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  I don't see the utility in thinking in absolutes. It's absolutely possible to consciously direct one's emotions.
karaterobot 3y ago
> Don’t wait so long your anger fizzles to complacency or you suppress your emotions into obliteration. “You lose the benefits of anger,” Parrott says. What I will say is that, for me, the most effective decision for my life has been to just move away from sources of anger. To not do anything out of anger, even positive actions, even in cold blood. Call it complacency, but I think if you only do something because you're angry about it, it's not something you should be doing in the first place. Find a better reason, one that makes sense without emotion being the driver. It took me well into my thirties to realize the most common metaphor for suppressing anger was wrong. People say you're bottling up your anger if you don't express it, or at least use it. The idea is that it'll explode eventually if you don't vent it. But a better metaphor would be a fire, which you want to keep contained and starved of oxygen, and if you don't contain it it'll just grow and grow and take on its own life.
TomaszZielinski 3y ago
I don't see anyone else here mentioning it, so I'll do it - there's at least one philosophy, Stoicism, in which anger is a vice, basically a bad thing, to get rid of. By "get rid of" I don't mean suppress or somehow hide it, but change your worldview (internal narrative) in a way that makes it disappear. How to do that? Given that anger is the emotional expression of an opinion (narrative), that some rule that's important to you has been violated (an injustice happened), you change that narrative to weaken the assumption that the injustice mustn't/can't happen. An important thing is that it doesn't mean that you don't react to the injustice, quite the opposite--there's a whole part of Stoicism for that called "discipline of action". It's just that you act on it out of principles and not driven by emotions. Here an overview of Seneca's "On anger": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Ira https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Ira
jl2718 3y ago
I think emotions are over-classified. There are only a few major neurotransmitters that determine our limbic experience, and there is continuity between them. So, in the Kubler-Ross framework for the experience of extreme adverse events, it’s probably more accurate to describe as a transition from sympathetic to parasympathetic, and return to normal. But ultimately, the cognitive component in all Kubler-Ross emotional stages is the same: a negative comparison of reality versus expectation, on some perceptual timeline. It takes small amounts of dopamine and adrenaline to make changes that affect reality, and serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins etc to accept and ignore reality. Those are really the only choices: do something, or stop caring. But what happens when you mix them incorrectly? And this is now more editorial, but I think the problems occur when a brain is constantly hitting the cocktail of accept and ignore to mask the effects of a desire for change. Eventually the inhibitory ligands fail to control the overwhelming buildup, and you get this flood of “do something” mixing in with the “don’t care” cocktail. So that cocktail says, “do something big, and don’t care about the result”. That might explain a lot of risky human behavior: thrill seeking, promiscuity, gambling, substance abuse, etc. Do something big, and don’t care about the result. It seems completely illogical and stupid, but it’s exactly how we’ve been training our brains since birth. The “don’t care” cocktail is how we get along and be nice to everybody. And yet we are never good enough, and under threat of losing everything, so we must “do something”, even when there’s not much logical connection between action and desired result. For instance, the connection between the desire to have a nice family and the action of grinding leetcode is incredibly weak and uncertain, but you have to muster the dopamine for it anyway. And then after years of thankless toil, you finally have a job, but it’s layoff season and you have to accept all sorts of terrible deceit as everybody you’ve been so nice and giving for is stealing credit and shifting blame. And if you’ve gotten this far, I’ll give you a little story. Things can get crazy when layoffs are announced. One time, this guy was yelling at me about how they didn’t need a data scientist (me), and then he opened up his vest and pulled a gun on me. Real-deal loaded Beretta M9. Pointed straight at me and then slammed on the table. That one messed me up for a while. I know it sounds crazy, but I didn’t associate the things going on in my head with that incident and didn’t say anything, but I was really not feeling well. I was maniacally focused on proving my value, stopped sleeping, and did some relatively groundbreaking work. Eventually I requested two weeks of leave at the worst possible time. While away, I received notification of a prestigious award, and a layoff.

94 points by 1970-01-01 3y ago

1970-01-01 3y ago

Note the HTML title " How to deal with anger in a healthy way " differs from the article's working title " How to make your anger work for you " which differs from the URL title " use-anger-productively-motivation-problem-solving "

AlecSchueler 3y ago
Gotta cover all the bases for SEO.
harryvederci 3y ago
How does that make you feel?

082349872349872 3y ago

> People are the root cause of anger. For some values of "root"? I've seen people angry at animals, and anger at even inanimate objects is common enough to be a film trope (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E_SDwUM4kM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E_SDwUM4kM ). (the sentence is ambiguous, but taking the other branch, it's easy enough to find vertebrates angry at each other; as for invertebrates, although we say wasps get angry, it's not so clear)

danparsonson 3y ago
Yeah but the root of being angry about an inanimate object is likely not the object itself; likewise for animals. If someone finds themself shouting at the door that just closed in their face, they probably have something deeper going on. Wasps get aggressive but personally I think calling it anger is anthropomorphising a bit :-)
- agumonkey 3y ago
  And this is why I assume living in nature first environments is so good for your sanity.. chances of this kind of emotional pain is drastically lower.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

> "Be strategic with your reactions to anger." i think as u get older u learn the value of silence. delaying your response (if ever) to a more strategic time.

smeej 3y ago

One amusing way I've found to diffuse a little bit of the useless anger, a la > yelling profanities at the guy who cut us off in traffic A friend of mine says he just pulls an index finger and mutters under his breath "red turtle," but even then he felt a little bad for envisioning knocking the car off the road, so I invented the purple turtle. The purple turtle does not blow the offender up. It does not knock the car off the road. It merely teleports car and driver safely to a drive-in movie theater playing the relevant section of driver's education, and they have to sit there in timeout until they understand why what they just did was dangerous and/or stupid. It even has a sound effect. So now I just make the sound effect, as loudly as I can when I'm by myself, because it's a silly noise and hard to make loudly without laughing, and it helps relieve the tension!

wkjagt 3y ago
If you’re referring to the shells in Mario Kart, then you should also try the lightning bolt :-) When it hits someone’s kart, they shrink down and slow down, and their engine noise becomes high pitched.
- smeej 3y ago
  Making someone slow down in front of me is the very last thing I want to do in traffic!
  - wkjagt 3y ago
    But like in Mario Kart, you can now easily pass them.
    - smeej 3y ago
      I don't know what roads you drive on, but when my problem is someone's going slow, the problem is already that I can't easily pass them. Slowing them down and making them smaller ain't gonna fix it.

csydas 3y ago

Anger got me into programming; when properly guided it can help you to address a situation that is very frustrating for you without having a full blown melty. My very first “real” code was a script i made in my support days was only because i was tired of having to get some specific hardware info from systems, which no one could do. fed up with cranky clients and incomplete data, i decide enough is enough and made a script to ensure it always got collected. from there, i just never stopped writing tools to solve annoying tech problems; my experience was that learning to write code to do it automatically and correctly was less frustrating than begging people to run the correct commands, much less all of them. this strategy carried over to many non tech things and i find i trust my anger to tell me when something is bad, but i also now pay attention and think what i want to do with such situations and what i actually want as an outcome and try to work towards that, or even consider “why am i so upset at it? is it really that bad?”. it just forces a more rational reaction in the service of my anger, and the anger is satisfied even if i find i’m upset over nothing; i still understand my feelings way better

agumonkey 3y ago
I honestly believe there's a whole space of exploration into how balancing / channeling emotions the way you describe. It's the dual of depression somehow.. if you let papercuts lock you down you get into a depressive spiral. Tapping into anger flips this around.. key is to convert it into genuine planning / thinking / acting and not destruction :) And this goes beyond programming.. probably worth knowing for one's life globally.
j45 3y ago
What I used to call anger that resulted in programming often times turned out to being frustrated an disturbed enough to no longer not do anything about it.

padolsey 3y ago

I’ve been thinking about the anger response recently as me and my partner are thinking about becoming parents. Some of our friends with children seem to be liable to anger, and it is quite a stereotype of parents around the world using anger, sometimes unintentionally, to impose control on their children, or to express severe disapproval. I wonder, how do the HN parents here theorise around that? I really don’t want to be an angry parent, as I’ve learned it can wreak havoc on a child’s feeling of psychological safety, but I know that’s easy to say and less easy to do. In my head, one should only ever rely on anger when there is a genuine threat to the child’s life. Really curious of others’ thoughts.

Ryoung27 3y ago
The majority of a small child's activities are a genuine threat to the child's life. I'm naturally prone to anger, so were my parents, in my experience with my parents, and my kids, the line is how you react once angry.
itronitron 3y ago
sleep deprivation is a helluva drug But seriously, it's important to be able to have, and use, an authoritative voice without becoming angry. I didn't realize how loud I can be (without screaming or yelling) before having children. They can't read your mind and I think most people get angry with others when there is some fundamental miscommunication or missed expectation.
tareqak 3y ago
Somewhat related to your question: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful-way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/6855333... Previous threads with about this article: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=How%20Inuit%20Parents%20Teach%20Kids%20To%20Control%20Their%20Anger&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
sandreas 3y ago
This is kind of true... It is extremely hard to stay calm in many situations having kids. In my opinion this has nothing to do with the ability to stay calm in general. It's more like long time of being stressed out that gets you there. Understanding that you are permanentely stressed out and taking the right measures (take time for yourself, don't take things to seriously, make everything a little game, children just don't WORK like adults - they are children, etc.) is most important. Becoming parents is a process. Most of this process is great and it enriches your life, but parts of it may be so hard, that you can't explain it to anyone without kids. The first child was kind of ok-ish in my memory :-) But: Imagine you have 2 little kids, both are sick, because one of them brought it in. They are not able to express their feelings by telling you what the problem is, they just cry the whole day and night. You and your partner are also getting sick, not as bad as your children, but you don't feel well. You can't ask for help, because there is a probability of infecting these persons. You don't sleep much for days and can't really rest. You are worried all the time, because your kids are really sick and you have to care about them, if it gets worse. In a situation like this, minor daily tasks will be major efforts and at some point you just break down. Not everything is as hard as this example, but usually having a toddler is energy-sapping all the time. At the same time it's a totally great experience.

b0bb1z3r0 3y ago

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amelius 3y ago

I guess venting in an echo-chamber isn't very effective, but why do smart people keep doing it?

dr_dshiv 3y ago

Just me? I thought the article was terrible. Most of the solutions discussed involve not being angry but being motivated. Did i miss something?

dwighttk 3y ago
>Anger is selfish (road rage) and selfless (protesting a war half a world away). Thought that was a pretty weak example of selfless… couldn’t be something happening in front of you?
from-nibly 3y ago
Yeah the solutions were like, "when you're angry, don't be"
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  But maybe people with anger issues don’t want to read an article entitled “anger has minimal functional value in the modern world.” Although, I’ve found that anger can be an effective way of dealing with certain angry people (not most!). Some people get calm when others are angry but don’t notice it in themselves. It’s frustrating though, because I hate getting angry. I very rarely get angry at my kids and I usually signal (“I don’t want to get angry… I’m starting to get angry”). So even when anger is functional for me, I really don’t like how it cognitively disrupts me.
Xeyz0r 3y ago
If anger is expressed in a healthy and constructive way, it can be a powerful force for good. However, if anger is expressed in an unhealthy and destructive way, it can have serious consequences. Anger can motivate us to take action and make changes but uncontrolled anger can lead to violence and aggression
kelseyfrog 3y ago
I thought it was terrible too. The author didn't state their assumptions and didn't address the social norms surrounding anger. Anger is, at least where I live, not a socially acceptable emotion to express. This belief is the core of the article, and I imagine that a lot of folks reading this are thinking, "That's right it's not," "There's always a reason not to be angry," &c. However, anger is also a completely valid emotion - we've all experienced anger. My point is that we have no socially acceptable outlets for anger. We have to mask, sublimate, redirect, suppress, or simply not be angry for basically our entire lives. This article is a product of that belief. I run a sporadic event with a group of friends called "Scream at the Moon Night". On a full moon we go out to an open field and I run through a list of prompts that all ask for a screaming response. We scream out all that pent up anger and once we're done we take a seat and just talk. It's cathartic. I've had moms take their kids and scream about bullies. People have screamed about work, ex's, life struggles, everything. It's great, but the take away is that this is so outside the social norms that I wouldn't blame you if you thought it was weird. There isn't space to do this socially, I had to make it.

alecco 3y ago

It worked for me in the past but I don't think it's sustainable. Just like you can't be gung ho all the time, you can't be angry all the time. And when it drops you lose your focus. I picked and dropped 100 things in my life. The only way for 100% is to "embrace the suck". Keep going on bad days, too. Even if it's only a little.

noisy_boy 3y ago
I got into an argument about fitness that pissed me off and I signed-up for gym. Then I actually started enjoying lifting weights and didn't need the anger anymore. Sometimes anger provides the escape velocity to beat the Jovian gravity of lethargy and procrastination.
KineticLensman 3y ago
> Even if it's only a little. This is key, I think. Do a little of a project most days, just even a few minutes. I find this useful to keep the momentum going on creative projects, including programming and 3D rendering. There are quite often little things that need doing, which keep you in touch with the project, but which can be completed quickly if you aren't in the mood for sustained effort.

andrewstuart 3y ago

>>> Go ahead, get mad. It’s healthy. Absolute garbage. My mother brought me up this way and it’s one of the most damaging things she could have done. DONT get mad. Regulate your emotions. Be a kind person. Communicate with people. Anger destroys relationships fast. If you want to dispose of your relationships like they’re worth nothing then sure, get angry. Angry people aren’t aware of it, but they are behaving like dickheads. Anger is a mechanism for controlling other people through emotional verbal violence implying the threat of physical violence. If someone gets angry with you, laugh at them and tell them you are immune to their attempt to control you with anger.

prmph 3y ago
I think you misunderstand the article. Getting angry can be healthy, because it shows you care about something that is going wrong, in your opinion. It's the way you channel the anger that can be productive or destructive. I think a lot of problems spiral out of control because people _don't_ get angry when they actually should. And being kind has little to do with not being angry. The most unkind people I've met don't get angry; they just let things slide, because they don't care about you, or about things being right in general. They are usually cunning people who smile and are agreeable for expediency.
StefanBatory 3y ago
"If someone gets angry with you, laugh at them and tell them you are immune to their attempt to control you with anger." Yep, this was how it was at my home. My mom would get angry at everything, and then I was the one who had to regulate her emotions. And if I failed, she'd be even more mad.

apwheele 3y ago

For a random bit I feel hackernews crowd will appreciate, I clench my jaw when I get angry. I have given myself TMD (jaw pain closing/chewing and will click/pop in fits). Not recommended. Root causing the source of stress and amending lifestyle (if possible) to limit those exogenous sources is my old man advice. I don't think focusing my inner rage Hulk is healthy for me.

andrewstuart 3y ago

If you are someone with an anger problem, here’s how to address it: When you feel yourself getting angry, just ask yourself “does this issue REALLY matter”. If it really matters then by god get angry. If it doesn’t matter then why bother? I rarely if ever got angry again after I started asking myself this, cause not much actually matters.

antihipocrat 3y ago
That works, another method to add to the toolset is to ask what is actually driving the emotion. Sometimes it's actually frustration that things aren't going the way you want (and the next question is why is my way really better than the other?). Sometimes it's someone else's mistake (and the next question is have I ever made a mistake?) Then someone cuts in front of you in line and it could really matter (time pressure or opportunities missed) and that behaviour could be something you would never do to others. In that situation believe it's healthier to speak up, but there is much less risk of escalation, and a good chance of gaining allies around you if the message is delivered calmly rather than with anger.
Xeyz0r 3y ago
Sometime also it's hard to Acknowledge and Validatethe Feeling

endorphine 3y ago

I'm halfway through the article and one of the suggestions seems to be to understand why we're feeling angry at the moment. This got me thinking: philosophy and psychology are in part ways to understand ourselves and the world around us. Are there any ways in which more and better _understanding_ does not necessarily lead to a better, more fulfilling life? How important do you think understanding ourselves and the world around us is, for that matter?

mistermann 3y ago
I think transcendental phenomenology combined with modal logic is what gets into this, a Q&A session with ChatGPT could probably answer a lot of your questions.

Helmut10001 3y ago

Anger got me into self-hosting. It is such a driving force for me. The trade-off would be reliance on predatory cloud services such as Amazon or Google, which is (for me) always worse than the many hours spend maintaining open source software.

photochemsyn 3y ago

In a healthy society, learning emotional control is part of growing up. If people in a society are constantly engaging in angry outbursts, it means they feel the need to engage in some kind of threat display, which in turn indicates they're living in fear. If you walk into an organization and discover all the bosses are constantly screaming at their obsequious underlings, who are in turn screaming at their underlings and so on down the line, it probably means everyone's afraid of losing their jobs, and it's a good idea to turn around and walk out the door, if that's an option. People who deliberately get angry (or sad) in order to get others to do what they want are engaging in emotional manipulation practices, which should be treated as a huge red flag. Such behavior is a common side effect of growing up with manipulative, unhinged and/or abusive parents, and it can be overcome, if the person wants to - but some people get addicted to their emotional highs and lows. Fundamentally, making good decisions under stress requires a calm rational mind not given to emotional breakdowns and outbursts, and people who don't have that capability should never be placed in positions of responsibility.

cat_plus_plus 3y ago

Anger is caveman emotion which is still useful in caveman situations. If someone is in the middle of attacking your family, you stop them, even at the cost of your own safety and quite possibly with deadly force. You don't sit and talk to him about how his intergenerational disadvantage led him to his current choices. Now, when planning public safety, this would be a bad response even for strictly selfish reasons of not wanting to suffer crimes. If tough policing is proven to reduce crime, do tough policing, you don't want to become San Francisco. If giving opportunities or education in jails helps, do that rather than sacrificing your own safety to indulge your understandable anger. And so on. There is even space for empathy with people who have never been given a chance. In civilized situations there are superior ways to motivate change - justice, snapping out of complacency, enlightened self interest, striving for success. Your boss may be an asshole, but rage quitting could jeopardize your visa or chances of an internal transfer. You need to calm your caveman brain and call upon values instilled upon you by centuries of civilization to get to a good outcome for yourself and others. Unless again, civilization has already failed you, then old ways may be necessary.

MarcoZavala 3y ago
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ptsneves 3y ago

Anger gives you drive. Cold fury is the most powerful. If well placed it allows to keep the drive past the adrenaline. The if part is the critical one. Negative emotions are often poisonous and after a while a person realizes it is kind of a bad fuel. I realised that toning them down allows better directing. To finish: anger is an effective driver.

twodave 3y ago
This is the literal same term I use while weight lifting. I channel all pain and rage into the lift. It sounds crazy, but it works since a lot of athletic activity is about training your mind in the first place. My workout buddy says he can see it on my face when I’m in the cold fury.
- abound 3y ago
  Same here. Weightlifting for me is sometimes more of a mental workout than a physical workout. Getting oneself into the headspace to "go for broke" on that final set is crazy taxing and requires a ton of focus, especially for full body lifts like squat and deadlift. I find lifting moderates my mood more than anything, it's hard to be angry when you've thrown all that emotional energy into a set.

User23 3y ago

Anger has caused me to start weeklong (including weekends) coding binges where I get a month’s work done. Leaves me a bit exhausted at the end, but still a huge net win.

2devnull 3y ago

Did vox used to be better? I think anger is like flatulence. You can talk a lot about it but at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of hot air. “Make your flatulence work for you.” Odd.

Xeyz0r 3y ago

Anger is a strong emotional response to a perceived threat or injustice. When I was in school, I experienced a lot of injustice, which made me quite an angry child. However, my parents noticed this and began teaching me how to cope with my anger. As a result, I became quite adept at meditation at a young age.

rufus_foreman 3y ago

Let fury have the hour Anger can be power Do you know that you can use it? -- The Clash

peheje 3y ago

David Whytes poems about everyday words in his book "Consolations" includes one about anger. It begins: "ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for." .. Can recommend reading the rest (poem and book).

lordfrito 3y ago

You don't control your emotions, your emotions control you. We don't choose to be angry -- we simply are angry. Anger is your primitive brain stem prodding you into doing something, anything... because what you are dealing with at the moment just isn't working. Being angry is never the problem -- it's your body's way of telling you it's time to change something. Usually way past time to change things. That's a good thing. Now... What you do about being angry -- well that's the rub isn't it? Punching someone may not be the best option, maybe channel the anger into something else, something more constructive. In any case, a change must be made. Listen to your emotions -- they're telling you what you need to be focusing on.

cma 3y ago
> Being angry is never the problem Misplaced anger is common.
- jamiek88 3y ago
  Anger is a secondary emotion. You need to figure out what you are actually angry about. That was advice that helped me a lot.
- lordfrito 3y ago
  What's wrong with misplaced anger, other than it's misplaced? My point still holds, something is wrong, some boundary is violated, you need to do something. Even if the anger is misplaced, you're not simply angry about "nothing" -- find out what the root is and fix it. The anger isn't the problem. Anger will give you the energy to do the work. And, as I said, what you do in response may or may not be constructive/helpful. Yes I understand misplaced anger can cause you to focus on the symptoms rather than the problem. In other news, throwing fists usually doesn't help. There are a bunch of things you can do when angry that aren't helpful. But the anger isn't the problem, it's the symptom of a problem that needs to be addressed.
slothtrop 3y ago
I don't see the utility in thinking in absolutes. It's absolutely possible to consciously direct one's emotions.

karaterobot 3y ago

> Don’t wait so long your anger fizzles to complacency or you suppress your emotions into obliteration. “You lose the benefits of anger,” Parrott says. What I will say is that, for me, the most effective decision for my life has been to just move away from sources of anger. To not do anything out of anger, even positive actions, even in cold blood. Call it complacency, but I think if you only do something because you're angry about it, it's not something you should be doing in the first place. Find a better reason, one that makes sense without emotion being the driver. It took me well into my thirties to realize the most common metaphor for suppressing anger was wrong. People say you're bottling up your anger if you don't express it, or at least use it. The idea is that it'll explode eventually if you don't vent it. But a better metaphor would be a fire, which you want to keep contained and starved of oxygen, and if you don't contain it it'll just grow and grow and take on its own life.

TomaszZielinski 3y ago

I don't see anyone else here mentioning it, so I'll do it - there's at least one philosophy, Stoicism, in which anger is a vice, basically a bad thing, to get rid of. By "get rid of" I don't mean suppress or somehow hide it, but change your worldview (internal narrative) in a way that makes it disappear. How to do that? Given that anger is the emotional expression of an opinion (narrative), that some rule that's important to you has been violated (an injustice happened), you change that narrative to weaken the assumption that the injustice mustn't/can't happen. An important thing is that it doesn't mean that you don't react to the injustice, quite the opposite--there's a whole part of Stoicism for that called "discipline of action". It's just that you act on it out of principles and not driven by emotions. Here an overview of Seneca's "On anger": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Ira https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Ira

jl2718 3y ago

I think emotions are over-classified. There are only a few major neurotransmitters that determine our limbic experience, and there is continuity between them. So, in the Kubler-Ross framework for the experience of extreme adverse events, it’s probably more accurate to describe as a transition from sympathetic to parasympathetic, and return to normal. But ultimately, the cognitive component in all Kubler-Ross emotional stages is the same: a negative comparison of reality versus expectation, on some perceptual timeline. It takes small amounts of dopamine and adrenaline to make changes that affect reality, and serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins etc to accept and ignore reality. Those are really the only choices: do something, or stop caring. But what happens when you mix them incorrectly? And this is now more editorial, but I think the problems occur when a brain is constantly hitting the cocktail of accept and ignore to mask the effects of a desire for change. Eventually the inhibitory ligands fail to control the overwhelming buildup, and you get this flood of “do something” mixing in with the “don’t care” cocktail. So that cocktail says, “do something big, and don’t care about the result”. That might explain a lot of risky human behavior: thrill seeking, promiscuity, gambling, substance abuse, etc. Do something big, and don’t care about the result. It seems completely illogical and stupid, but it’s exactly how we’ve been training our brains since birth. The “don’t care” cocktail is how we get along and be nice to everybody. And yet we are never good enough, and under threat of losing everything, so we must “do something”, even when there’s not much logical connection between action and desired result. For instance, the connection between the desire to have a nice family and the action of grinding leetcode is incredibly weak and uncertain, but you have to muster the dopamine for it anyway. And then after years of thankless toil, you finally have a job, but it’s layoff season and you have to accept all sorts of terrible deceit as everybody you’ve been so nice and giving for is stealing credit and shifting blame. And if you’ve gotten this far, I’ll give you a little story. Things can get crazy when layoffs are announced. One time, this guy was yelling at me about how they didn’t need a data scientist (me), and then he opened up his vest and pulled a gun on me. Real-deal loaded Beretta M9. Pointed straight at me and then slammed on the table. That one messed me up for a while. I know it sounds crazy, but I didn’t associate the things going on in my head with that incident and didn’t say anything, but I was really not feeling well. I was maniacally focused on proving my value, stopped sleeping, and did some relatively groundbreaking work. Eventually I requested two weeks of leave at the worst possible time. While away, I received notification of a prestigious award, and a layoff.