Don't degrade; Upgrade your anger

Not love, not sadness, it is always anger that is the most powerful emotion. What matters is what angers you and how you respond to it.

A husband scolds his wife for spoiling the dish. A wife fights with her husband complaining that he has time for everyone except for her. A bike rider shouts at a car driver for not driving faster in the traffic. An employee curses his boss for imposing unattainable goals. Some of us feel frustrated with some posts on social media that spread hate.

Frustration, annoyance, hate – whatever you name it, all of them are the results of or reactions to our anger.

Let’s assume, with no offence, wives of Amar, Akbar and Anthony are terrible at cooking.

Amar shouts at his wife for her horrible cooking (and eats it anyway later). Akbar curses his fate, throws away his plate, sometimes cooks food himself or eats outside. Anthony gets angry too, thinks for a moment and decides to teach her how to cook well.

If I ask whose response to the bad cooking was the best, you will surely choose Anthony’s. It does not expect any great brains to analyse. Amar and Akbar are in the problem side and play the blame game (cursing wife, god, life, fate or themselves). Amar accepts suffering. Akbar finds temporarily solutions. It is Anthony who transforms his anger into root-cause-addressing solution.

This is how our reaction to our anger works. Anger is called as a primary emotion in psychology. It is very in-built in human’s nature. Anger is the first emotion that takes birth is us whenever we encounter something undesirable. But if we do not upgrade our anger, it becomes either harmful or useless.

What’s upgrading anger? Is it raising it to the higher intensity? No, it is transforming it to the higher maturity level.

Unlike joy, anger gets better at the end.

When something good happens – like - you get an appreciation, your son or daughter gets a prize, you meet your role model, you feel joyful at first. That’s a wonderful emotion. As the time passes, joy either gets converted into pride (an ego feeling) or it creates indifference (awaited thing happened, what’s now! Daily meeting your role model will make him ordinary) or it starts becoming sadness (what was awaited so long has happened and is soon going to end). So ‘joy’ is wonderful at the beginning and keeps fading away at the end.

But ‘anger’ is best at its end; not at its beginning. Upgrading anger is all about preparing yourself to wait for its end.

Way one: learn to ignore. A colleague, a relative or a neighbour makes an undesirable, an unpleasant comment about your newly bought dress, about your newly built house, about your trip, about anything that belongs to or done by you. At first, you might have reacted by explaining, convincing, warning and sometimes even commenting back about them. But how long? When you notice, they are repeating it, learn to ignore.

Way two: learn to think objectively. Subjective thinking is all about assuming about something or someone as a whole; either good or bad. If you think subjectively, you will ‘love’ or ‘hate’ that person (subject) no matter what they do (or not do). ‘Loving’ subjectively is fine; at least it keeps you happy. But hating/disliking someone subjectively spoils your mood. A mother-in-law starts finding faults in everything that her daughter-in-law does. A subordinate thinks that there is some cunning ploy even if the boss appreciates him/her honestly.

Instead, think objectively. Objective thinking is all about what is good and what is bad, not liking or hating a person as a whole. This helps you to focus your anger on what is wrong and address it. It’s like targeting the cancerous cells and killing them.

Way three: introspect and act. Sometimes anger is a result of our own inability or misfit. When a student starts hating mathematics, it is not because mathematics is bad, but he/she (or the teacher’s way of teaching) is bad at mathematics. A girl makes all possible attempts to look beautiful in the western outfits, she fails every time and looks ugly. She starts hating herself and develops inferiority complex. Whom to blame? The girl or the western outfit? The girl just needs to understand that the outfit is misfit to her.

Upgrading our anger is all about identifying the root cause for the anger and expressing it creatively not on the person or situation, but on the cause.

Developing uncalculated guts and slapping or killing the people who insulted him badly in the childhood might have made Ambedkar an ordinary boy. But he chose to nurture his anger for years and expressed it in a way that stopped all such people being treated that way.

Anger at first, as a raw emotion is harmful. Dilute your anger patiently with thinking. Thank the person or situation that created or ignited anger in you. It should help you think. It should help you express creatively. It should help you to act wisely. Don’t degrade your anger by raising voice or raising hands. Instead upgrade your anger by raising your standards.