Anger and Anxiety–Highway to Hell

There is an intense relationship between anxiety and anger. Understanding this interaction is perhaps one of the most important concepts that will have a major impact in calming down your nervous system.

Anxiety and Anger are universal. Few human beings have seemed to rise above them. They are both survival emotions.

Anxiety represents a feeling of vulnerability and helplessness. At the deepest level of our existence we are hard-wired to avoid this emotion at all costs.

Anger represents the opposite feeling of powerful. It is a very fast effective response that covers up anxiety.

But what happens to your thinking when you are angry. Not only do the original anxiety-producing pathways reinforced, there is the barrage of angry, irrational thoughts that follow. The anger not only the mechanism that masks the feeling of anxiety, it is the turbocharger that gets these negative circuits really spinning.

Remember, anytime you feel angry you have already experienced some level of anxiety and blamed someone or something for your grief. You are now a victim and the anger kicks in.

Anger at the same time it is effectively masking the feeling of anxiety is also dramatically reinforcing it. It is a deadly axis.

Not only is it deadly for your quality of life, the interaction between the two makes treatment very difficult. In essence, you are being asked to give up your anger so you can experience anxiety. Raw anxiety is a very unpleasant feeling. It is this interaction that may be the root cause of why it is commonly thought that you cannot really be open for change until you “hit bottom.” In other words, the anxiety is so out of control that it can no longer be contained by either functional or dysfunctional means. At that point you might be open to anything.

Click for Video

Video summary: Dr. Hanscom discusses how anger is the turbocharger that keeps anxiety both covered up and fired up. With chronic pain there is usually anxiety. Anxiety creates a feeling of vulnerability, and helplessness which causes us to avoid situations that cause anxiety. Essentially, structure, and control is sought after to help control anxiety. When we lose control of a situation that causes anxiety then we become angry. That anger helps to give us a feeling of power, but the angry reaction is only a temporary solution to the problem. Until you turn off anger you will not get a handle on your anxiety or your pain.