“Let it out,” goes the common wisdom. “If you don’t vent your anger, it will just keep bothering you.” This kind of advice dates at least back to Freud, who believed that negative emotions build up like water behind a dam and must be released if a person wants to get relief. But psychological research in more than a century since Freud’s time has not supported this idea: instead of letting go of anger, venting may really be a way to hang onto it.

The problem with theory that venting anger helps stems from the idea that emotions build up and are retained in some kind of raw state. But emotions consist of a variety of kinds of activity throughout the brain and the rest of the body (see “How emotions work“), especially in the specific thoughts we are thinking (like “People like that shouldn’t be allowed to drive!” or “I look like an idiot in this shirt”) and in various chemicals released in our bodies, like testosterone, which tends to increase aggressive and arousal; adrenaline, which kicks off our fight-or-flight response; and seratonin, which helps regulate mood–to name just a few. Realizing that emotion is largely made up of fleeting thoughts and temporary chemical states, it begins to be clear that we can’t really “store” emotions in the same way that our bodies store nutrients or even in the same way we store memories. It is possible to keep anger (and other kinds of damaging emotions) going over a long time through self-talk, but this is just another form of “rumination,” the same kind of thing we’re doing when we vent anger.

Rumination, what we’re doing both when we vent anger and when we keep reminding ourselves of it, means “chewing over” an emotional experience we’ve had–re-experiencing it. Acting angry to vent an emotion is therefore a way of dwelling and obsessing on the emotion that we’re trying to get rid of. Even doing nothing is, it turns out, a more effective way to deal with anger than venting.

There’s a good body of psychological research to support this idea, much of which tries to find the benefit of venting anger and finds no evidence of it. If you’re interested in reading more on the subject, for instance, you might want to the Dr. Brad J. Bushman’s paper “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding.”

So if venting doesn’t help to fix anger, what does? Focusing on someone or something you love is one approach: see “Antidotes to bad moods and negative emotions.” Another is to become aware of your self-talk and to repair broken ideas: see “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair.”

Look for more articles on the topic of anger over coming weeks. I’ve dug up a variety of information on the subject that I hope you’ll find as interesting as I find it.

Photo by amanky

Here’s part of a novel opening I’ve admired since I first read it, the fifth paragraph of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash:

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

One of the things that always resonated with me in that confident, attitude-laden bit of writing was the phrase “starts like a bad day.” Maybe you know the experience, the feeling that just waking up in the morning, things are already stacked against you, that the day has chosen to be a mess without ever asking you what you thought of the idea. If so, you may have begun immediately reacting to that sense that things were going wrong, giving in to irritability or anxiety or depression out of a sense that a bad day was unavoidable.

I’ve certainly had that experience, but in the past year or so, with the topics from this site so often on my mind, I’ve realized the opportunity that those first moments of the day offer me. If I can use one of the many tools at my disposal to turn the day around right from the beginning, then the world seems to transform to a much kinder place. I may wake up feel harassed sometimes, but by the time I eat breakfast I usually feel serene or enthusiastic or cheerful. Here are some of the ways I’ve been able to take control of my mood first thing in the morning.

• Meditation. If we’re am uselessly dwelling on bad experiences or concerns we can’t affect, some types of meditation can help us relax, let go, and find some peace of mind.
• Emotional antidotes. Negative emotions can often be washed away by deliberately conjuring up memories or ideas that make us feel love, hope, joy, etc.
• Mindfulness. Moods like anxiety and irritability often feel like they’re coming from nowhere when they’re really reactions to some specific situation or worry. Reflecting on what our biggest worries of the moment can often bring those worries right into focus. Simply acknowledging those concerns can be a relief: the bad mood no longer seems to be coming from nowhere, and in being understood has done its job of bringing our attention to the problem. If more effort is needed to make headway against the reaction to a particular thought, idea repair can be very helpful.
• Journaling. Writing out thoughts, feelings and hopes for the day can help improve awareness of what’s going on with us while providing direction and helping make emotional reactions more understandable and manageable.

For more on turning difficult times around, see “How to Stop Having a Bad Day“. You may also be interested in reading my article “How emotions work“.

Photo by tombothetominator.

I’ve mentioned in some recent articles that I’m doing my best to remember and make good use of whatever tools I have to make good choices. Some of the most useful tools of this kind are for getting past negative emotions: anger, depression, frustration, anxiety, avoidance, despair, and so on.

Here are five of the best tools I know of for handling bad states of mind. I’ll post another article or two in the near future with more.

Idea repair: Negative emotions that keep going even when no new bad things are happening are usually maintained by specific kinds of thoughts (as talked about, for instance, in Jenefer Robinson’s book Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art). Idea repair, called “cognitive restructuring” in psychology circles, is the process of detecting flawed thoughts and reframing them so that they become constructive and stop causing pain.

Mindfulness: A key ingredient in sorting out negative emotions and one of the requirements for idea repair and other positive processes, mindfulness is simply being aware of what’s going on both around and inside us. We can’t be mindful all the time, but there are certainly situations in which we become more sane, happy, focused, and relaxed just by using this one idea.

Meditation: Although some people meditate for spiritual reasons, others do it just for the immediate personal payoff in serenity, self-awareness, and clarity. It’s not difficult to get started.

Understanding schemas: Mental schemas are flawed patterns of thinking and behavior that are usually learned when we are young but stick with us into adulthood, often causing trouble for us on a daily basis. There are a variety of them, including, for example, Abandonment, Mistrust, and Emotional deprivation. If we find any schemas in ourselves, we can learn to understand and overcome those schemas, clearing away a lot of emotional drag and clutter in the process.

Emotional antidotes: Buddhist inquiry into human emotion, which is a time-honored and conscientious tradition, has come up with some kinds of emotional experiences that can be used to reverse negative emotions. I explain something of how this works in my article “Antidotes to bad moods and negative emotions.”

For more tools, see the follow-up articles: Part II and Part III.

Photo by Michael Flick

My yurt-dwelling, goat-raising, kid-celebrating, writer friend Maya has a daughter named Sophie, and Sophie has developed a new mindfulness tool that I expect may be showing up and getting some use in our house soon, and I don’t mean for my son. It’s called an “Idiot Hat.”

I’ll leave it to Maya to fully explain the origin and use of the Idiot Hat in her post, “the idiot hat, or, sophie has had enough“: the short version is that when someone is being grumpy, they put on the Idiot Hat and wear it until they do something nice. (“But what if I want to be grumpy sometimes?” you may ask. “Are you telling me I can’t be grumpy?” This is an excellent point, and if grumpiness isn’t something that you personally feel no need to work on, I say grump away. Still, there might be other uses for the hat in your house.)

As playful as the Idiot Hat idea is, I have to say that it exemplifies what I consider extremely practical thinking about mindfulness. After all, if I want to change a habit (like grumpiness, which is the specific vice the Idiot Hat is designed to cure, although I think the hat’s potential uses are legion), I’m going to need to 1) catch myself in the act whenever the habit comes up and 2) change my behavior. And I’ll need to do that consistently until it becomes a habit. The Idiot Hat catches the behavior when it occurs and leaves a visible reminder until change occurs. For extra points, it also offers an immediate change of perspective, distancing both grumper and grumpee(s) from the negative emotion, and provides an emotional antidote through humor–as long as the grumper is in the mood to take a little ribbing.

The basic idea behind this–using something physical as an aid to mindfulness in changing habits or behaviors–is a pretty impressive one. By definition, the tricky thing about mindfulness is paying attention to the right thing at the right time. Having a physical reminder of that thing makes keeping attention on it strongly enough and for long enough to make a difference more likely. Having a physical reminder that doesn’t go away until you’ve taken some compensating action gives you something to actually accomplish and a constant reminder to accomplish it.

Examples: an ugly statue you set on your desk whenever you miss a deadline you’ve set for yourself, a little meditation waterfall you turn on whenever you’re feeling stressed until you feel better, or something you carry with you to a restaurant to remind yourself that you plan to eat mindfully when you’re there.

A note: I don’t mean to be posting two articles close together with the word “Idiot” in their title, since just last week I posted “How to Form a Habit: It’s Like Training a Friendly Idiot.” It just happened that there was this idiot hat thing that came up and needed to be blogged about. I promise to underuse the word for the next little while.

Illustration by Ethan Reid, age 13. Ethan also did a cartoon on the subject.