The Little Blue Book

We get angry, it happens. It’s a normal responsive emotional state. Anger is a survival response to confrontation, to real or imagined threat, and sits in the part of the brain – sometimes referred to as ‘the lizard brain’ - that regulates our more primitive basic human needs and responses. When we feel anger, depending upon the event that triggered it, we feel it at varying intensities; it can escalate along a scale from irritation, to cranky, to freakin’ furious. We’ve mostly all been there, right along the scale. But most of us don’t ‘flip out’ at the top end. When triggered to anger, we will rationally weigh a situation, take control of our emotions and responses and de- escalate. Controlling and regulating the heightened emotions driving our anger response is something we’ve learned. That learning has been part of our socialisation training that happens both by design (by parents, teachers, family) and by default (the influence of friends and ‘fitting in’) as we progress from childhood to adulthood. So, thanks to a capacity for higher reasoning and decision making around our behaviours, we learn to control and regulate the intensity of our emotional responses. (We don’t, or shouldn’t, have gunfights in the street over small slights. That’s the benefit of maturity and higher reasoning.) Getting cranky Sometimes, however, financial or family pressure, uncertainty or stress can wear away at our emotional control. It can be felt acutely when things around us are out of our control – such as many may be experiencing now with loss of income, perhaps even loss of employment, and the financial uncertainty and pressure of ‘lockdown’ due to the coronavirus response. ‘Groundhog Day’ on steroids: when you wake up to a bad day and it’s all downhill from there, leaving you frustrated, frayed and cranky. If feeling bruised by life’s setbacks, even small irritations that we might normally cope with – that straw on the camel’s back – can be ‘the last straw’ and trigger an angry outburst. ABOUT ANGER COVID-19: The Challenge 46