Podcast #1,083: Good Anger — Harnessing a Misunderstood Emotion

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Most people think of anger as a problem, something to avoid or repress. It’s irrational, immature, and best left behind. But what if anger isn’t bad? What if it can actually be an incredibly positive, productive, and energizing life force? My guest argues we’ve misunderstood anger and that doing so has made us more anxious, depressed, and stuck. His name is Sam Parker and he’s a journalist and the author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. Today on the show we explore the surprising psychology and philosophy of anger. Sam explains how anger should be understood as a neutral emotion that imparts valuable information. He shares why we confuse anger with aggression, how anger can point to unmet needs and violated boundaries, and why repressing it can be damaging our health. We also talk about anger’s role in work, creativity and relationships and how to channel anger. It helps achieve more, maintain our self respect, and live a more grounded life. If you ever thought anger was something to outgrow, this conversation may just change your mind. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/goodanger.

All right, Sam Parker, welcome to the show.

Sam Parker: Hey, thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you got a book out called Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. This is all about… You did a deep dive into the emotion of anger that we often think of as something problematic. How did a 10-minute session with a heavy bag kickstart an exploration of anger?

Sam Parker: Well, I was having a year of anxiety and thought that the way to get out of that was to learn to relax. And so I would been trying all these different wellness techniques to do that. Everything from sort of yoga and meditation, stuff that’s been proven for very long time, to cold plunging and gratitude journaling some of the more modern stuff. And nothing was working for me. And I was trying out various exercises at this time in my life and boxing was one of them. I’d never really been a boxing guy before and one morning while I was going about my sort of regime as such as it was punching away at the bag, about 10 minutes in, I felt this strange surge of energy kind of coming up from somewhere lower down in my body and I just started punching and swinging away with like this kind of energy that I’d never had before, but also this feeling that I’d never had before in my body. And this went on for however long I managed to box for. And afterwards I was kind of sweating and bent over, exhausted. But I felt better than I had in months.

And I realized that the feeling that I tapped into was anger. I was absolutely furious. And I was thinking about the things in my life that were going wrong and the conversations I needed to have to put them right. And everything was kind of unfurling beautifully in my thoughts. Everything was looking like targets rather than things to be afraid of. And my relationship with anger until this point had been pretty much non-existent. I believed that anger was sort of a nuisance emotion, something that if you’re sophisticated, you’ve kind of moved beyond, something that flared up now and then that you had to get rid of as quickly as you could. And I’d never really considered that anger could be a source of power and energy. And that was what I got a glimpse of that day at the bag. And so as a journalist, I thought, okay, I’m going to explore this with the most open mind that I possibly can. I’m going to come at it with a blank slate and see where it leads me. And that was the start of the book.

Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s talk about this. What is anger? I think a lot of us, if you describe, like, what does it feel like to be angry? We could describe it like. But how do the psychologists describe anger? Maybe philosophers even, how do they describe what anger is?

Sam Parker: So there are five core emotions. Most psychologists are in agreement with this. Anger is one of them. And the mistake we make is to conflate anger with aggression or even violence as though they’re the same thing. And it’s actually a little bit of an anomaly because when you think about it, if I was to say to you, I saw such and such yesterday, he was really sad, you wouldn’t immediately picture that person crying in the corner curled up in a ball. But if I say to you, I saw such and such and he was angry, quite often people immediately think that means that they were ranting and raving, that they were getting into some kind of confrontation. They needed to be calmed down physically. They’re two separate things. So anger is a healthy emotion. It gets called a negative emotion because we don’t always enjoy the experience of it, but not because it’s negative and that it’s inherently bad for us or wrong or needs to be gotten rid of. It’s an emotion. And then aggression and violence is a behavioral choice. It doesn’t always feel that way, but it is. And when you start to separate out the idea of anger, the healthy emotion that’s actually neutral that you can act on however you want.

And aggression and violence, which is a behavioral choice, that’s when you can start to have a calmer relationship with anger yourself. The best way to think of aggression actually is as a rejection of anger. Because when we get aggressive, what we’re really saying is we can’t tolerate the insecurity, the pain, the fear, the disrespect. Whatever it is that the anger is pointing us towards, we find intolerable. So we get rid of it by losing our temperature.

Brett McKay: So we feel certain things with certain emotions. So when you experience sadness, you feel low, you feel like you don’t want to do anything. When you experience happiness, you feel excited. How do we feel when we experience anger?

Sam Parker: Well, one thing you feel is a surge of energy. And I think that’s the thing that people don’t always know what to do with. And so the classic sort of stereotype of smashing a plate or kicking a wall or something like that. You feel like a… Some people call it an amygdala flooding, which is when that part of your brain becomes flooded with chemicals. And so you become momentarily disorientated. You can struggle to articulate yourself. You can struggle to understand your own thoughts, all the rest of it. It’s a bit of a sort of mental scrambling. So that’s rage. That’s when it overtakes you in a big flash. You can, of course, experience anger on a lower level, where it’s more of an irritation. Yeah, it’s not a positive emotion. It normally doesn’t feel great. I mean, you can get a flush of righteousness that can feel kind of good. But for most people, yeah, anger is not a positive emotion, which is one of the many reasons why having a sort of conversation about its uses can be difficult to get off the ground, because people immediately think it’s almost like a paradox. What do you mean, good anger? What do you mean healthy anger? But that’s a misunderstanding of what emotions are. They’re not about feeling good or bad. They’re about giving us useful information about something we need to change in our life.

Brett McKay: So what kind of useful information does anger give us? What do the psychologists hypothesize it’s trying to tell us?

Sam Parker: So the hypothesis is that there’s three basic buckets of information that anger is offering to us. The first is like a boundary violation. So this is the most straightforward. Like if you bump into me in the street, that’s a boundary violation. I’m going to step back and go, whoa, whatever. I’m going to engage my anger to protect myself in some way, whether verbally or physically. The second thing it can be alerting us to is an unmet need, like something is wrong in our life. And I think this is useful in things like a work context where the action of a colleague, let’s say, makes you feel really angry, but it feels a little bit out of proportion to the thing that they’ve done. And you’re kind of like, oh, that’s annoyed me more than I can, why is this annoying me quite so much? And then you can analyze that and you can go, well, maybe I don’t feel like I’m respected well enough by this person or perhaps my boss or perhaps the wider team on this point. So there’s an unmet need there that I need to address. Something that isn’t quite lining up in my life. It can work well in relationships as well.

So sometimes it’s an unmet need. The third thing anger can be alerting us to, which is trickier, is a wound from the past. So it is reminding us, in a way, that psychologists would call transference. It’s reminding us or it’s taking us back to a time in our life when we felt helpless or disrespected. And so our anger in the moment belongs more to the past. And I think this happens with kids quite a lot. Sometimes the way your kids act around you can just make you so full of rage in a way that you know doesn’t really belong to them because they’re too young to really have meant it in the way that it feels. Often that’s because it’s reminding you of something in the past that maybe you still need to address or work on. So there’s kind of like three layers of depths of information that anger is pointing us towards usually. Sometimes it’s a mixture.

Brett McKay: You talk about how psychologists make a distinction between trait anger and state anger. What’s the difference between those two?

Sam Parker: Yeah, so trait anger is like a fixed personality trait and it is partly genetic. It does vary from person to person. And this is where we’re really talking about temperament. And state anger is when you are experiencing anger in the moment because of something that’s happened. And that comes for all of us, whether we are people who have high trait anger or not. And the book is really about how do we deal with the state anger and how do we get better at recognizing it’s there? Because if you’re anything like me, someone who thought they have no relationship with anger at all, then even recognizing when state anger has come along is very, very difficult. And I think this sits at the root of anxiety and depression for a lot of people.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we’ll talk more about that, how depression and anxiety might be a mask for anger. But walks through a history of anger, do you do this too? Look at the philosophy of anger and that’s why we have such a conflicted view about it. We typically think of it as like, oh, it’s a bad thing, I don’t want to experience anger. But sometimes we think, oh, sometimes anger is good, that righteous indignation. So why do we have such a conflicted view of this emotion?

Sam Parker: I mean, anger was the subject of the first self-help book, arguably, which was Seneca in AD 45. He wrote a book called On Anger, and he dismissed it as the most intractable of all the passions. He called it a monster that we needed to banish from the human experience. So we’ve kind of been debating whether anger is a good thing or not for a very, very long time. The way I trace it in the book was really through the story of Christianity. That was the backdrop to my upbringing. It’s obviously been a huge shaping hand on Western civilization. So there are many places you can start the history of anger. I decided to go with religion. The seven deadly sins began as evil thoughts, which was a list written down in a desert just outside Alexandria by a hermit monk who was writing a handbook for other monks on how to live a pious and good life. That idea kind of got passed down through the generations. And over time, it evolved into the seven deadly sins. And that became the kind of moral checklist by which early Christian societies were judged.

So we kind of just absorbed this idea that anger was a sin, anger was sort of inherently bad. But there were some kind of renegades in that history, in that story from ancient times to now. And I talk about some of them in the book. Aristotle was much more balanced on anger. He believed that we should pursue feelings and appetites with neither excess nor defect. And he had this term for it, Hexis, which is an ancient Greek word that means a relatively stable arrangement, which I love. And he Aristotle didn’t condemn anger as a sin. He linked it to courage and dignity. He thought it could motivate us to stand up for justice. But his was a sort of minority view. And it was one that got kind of lost when his writings got lost. Jumping forward to the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, who was one of the most formative Christian thinkers in the history of the church. Around the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s writing was rediscovered. And he was the one that sort of took up the challenge of trying to assimilate what Aristotle had to say into the sort of Christian doctrine of the time. So he took a more moderate position on anger as well. So there are people throughout the history who have had this more balanced view of it. But the dominant view and the one that we still live with now is the idea that anger is a sin.

Brett McKay: Yeah, your section on the history of anger and Stoicism was interesting because I think it’s really relevant today because stoicism has become really popular again. I mean, for the Stoics, anger was a negative thing. They saw anger not as a sign of strength, but as like a temporary madness. It was a loss of reason. And that contrasts with Aristotle, who said, no, anger, if you use it in the right way, can actually be a really productive emotion. But the trick is trying to figure out how to be angry at the right things at the right moment in the right amount.

Sam Parker: Right. Yeah. And he called that good temper. Seneca was very clear that he was not a fan of anger in any shape or form. I think the other Stoics had a bit more balance to their view. And some of what they taught about framing emotions in the right way and so on is useful in this discussion as well. I wouldn’t want to sort of say that the Stoics were completely wrong on anger, but yeah, for sure, they were more disapproving of it than people like Aristotle. But I think there’s useful stuff in all of that, really. I mean, even Seneca had useful things to say about anger, but you’ve got to remember the context these people lived in. I mean, Seneca, I think he worked for Caligula, who was mad enough to declare war on the sea at one point. There was a lot of bad anger going around at that point in history. So I can kind of see why it got a worse rep than it needs to today, perhaps.

Brett McKay: So Aristotle and Aquinas, are they kind of laying the foundation for what you call good anger?

Sam Parker: I’d say so. I mean, the quote that you mentioned there is one that I opened the book with. Aristotle talking about being angry is easy, but being angry with the right person, the right way to the right amount is difficult. And that really is the crux of it, I think. It’s interesting to me that in the public mental health conversation, we have done so much to destigmatize sadness and fear, which is depression and anxiety. We’ve come to a much more sophisticated place with that. Anger, we haven’t, and there’s many reasons for that. And one of them is just that it’s so difficult. This mastering anger, I don’t believe you ever can fully, but trying to master anger is really difficult stuff. And so even that framework that Aristotle laid out, when you read it, it’s like, my God, yeah. That really is difficult. And whether you apply it to big or small issues in your life, it’s very, very challenging. But if you can get it right or you can get it half right, you’re in a much better position than if you ignore anger or you let it overcome you.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that difficulty of harnessing anger is why we often take an either or approach to it. It’s like, well, it’s going to be harder to do it right, so I’ll just try not to be angry at all.

Sam Parker: Yeah, exactly. And that makes sense. And that’s certainly how I lived for a very long time. What I didn’t clock was that it was making me physically and mentally ill. So it’s the price that we pay for that anger suppression bit is, I think, what we’re just starting to wake up to. And I think that’s the conversation that we need to have on a sort of broader level.

Brett McKay: So what are the benefits of good anger? So you mentioned Aristotle connected it to courage and action. I guess anger just gets you to do things in the world?

Sam Parker: Yeah, well, I think anger is a voice that says to you primarily that you’re worth defending. If you can’t get angry on your own behalf when somebody has wronged you in some way, then you’re not valuing yourself, really. It’s an incredibly energizing emotion as well, the most energizing emotion of them all. Sadness makes us inert, fear makes us inert, love can be very motivating, but you need to be angry on behalf of the thing that you love to defend it. So yeah, I mean, it has a lot to offer us in terms of wisdom. It has a lot to offer us in terms of energy. It can be the difference between standing up for ourselves and not. It can be the difference between really going after the thing that we want to go after. I call it the FU energy. And I interviewed one woman in the book who had been imprisoned as a teenager. She was a drug addict. Her name is Marcia Reynolds. She does an amazing TED Talk on the energy of anger. And she talks about the fact that the emotion that got her not only out of jail, but to the top of her business to be an incredibly successful professional person was the, I’ll show you anger that she felt at the way she’d been let down by people early in her life or dismissed as a lost cause by society and the people around her because she went to jail. And she said she rode that, FU, I’ll show you energy of anger right the way to the top of a business. So I don’t believe there’s any other emotion available to us that could have quite done that for her. That’s what she felt.

Brett McKay: I love reading biographies of artists or writers, and it’s amazing how many times a writer or a painter put out a great piece of work just to show someone like, hey, I got this. You’re wrong. I’m going to show you.

Sam Parker: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s the great Beethoven example that I mentioned in the book. I can’t remember the name of the piece of music, but he had originally written a tribute to Napoleon, who he very much admired. And then before he’d finished the piece of music, Napoleon declared himself emperor of the French, which scandalized Beethoven because he saw it as a betrayal of the ideals of the revolution. And so he wrote a different piece of music that to our ears is a steering, beautiful piece of music. But for him, was an attack on Napoleon, the memory of a great man. He said it was a tribute to. And this piece of music, I wish I could remember the name of it, the symphony, but it transformed the course of Western music. I mean, people were listening to it in Vienna and literally falling off their chairs. So there’s loads of great examples of anger inspiring, not just like heavy metal and sort of angry per se music or art, but quite beautiful art often has come from an angry place, a desire to give the world something it didn’t have before by getting into conflict with it. So yeah, I agree that the link between anger and creativity is also under-discussed, but very strong.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I know I’ve experienced that using anger as a motivating force. When I played American football in high school, one thing I sometimes did, I would just imagine the guy across from me on the line as just like, you’re just this evil dude and I’m just going to demolish. And I’m sure the guy was probably really nice, great kid, but I needed that energy to play.

Sam Parker: Yeah, I said to my nephew, he was 11 at the time, I asked him about anger and how he used it. And he’s a very sweet and loving boy. And he said that he was warming up for a park run, which is a thing in England where people do a 5k together at the weekends. And he saw a woman being rude to someone else and felt angry at her. And so quietly, he decided he was going to beat her in the race. So he just enacted this noble revenge in quiet and just lapped her a couple of times around the race and she would never have known, but he used that as motivation. He used that as fuel for his run. So yeah, I love that example. Yeah. And I think I interviewed proper boxers and things in the book and they talk about using anger in a very calm and considered way. So you can’t hate your opponent, you can’t lose your temper at them because then you’re in trouble, but you can channel your dislike of them or the disrespect you feel they showed you or something like that and use the anger in a sort of calm and powerful way. And I think sport is a great way to do that.

Brett McKay: One thing you explore is how men and women experience anger differently. What’s the difference there?

Sam Parker: Yeah, well, I think probably the longest-standing myth about anger is that it’s gendered and somehow belongs to men. And I think that comes back a lot to the conflation with aggression and violence, because statistically, most acts of violence and aggression are carried out by men. But in terms of actually just feeling the emotion, this has been studied since at least the 1950s. There’s a guy called Arnold H. Buss, who was kind of the great psychologist when it came to measuring anger and hostility in individuals. He was a pioneer of it. And he studied this sort of supposed gender gap from the 1950s all the way up to the 1990s and concluded very clearly that there was no difference between the sexes in terms of experiencing the emotion of anger. Interestingly, that may have slightly changed recently. There was a Gallup poll in 2022 that saw women polling ahead of men globally for the first time in feelings of anger. I think the anger gap is now at about 6%. So if anything, if we’re going to gender anger, we could say that women are angrier than men at the moment. But no, it’s an emotion that the genders feel equally.

The difference is in how we express it typically. My tendency towards suppression and repression is a more classically female way of dealing with anger, responding to anger. Men tend to be more likely to be anger out, which is the people who become aggressive. So there is a difference in how we express it and also how we socialize it and how we condemn it. I think a woman who loses her temper in public is going to be viewed in a worse light in a lot of ways than a man who does. We still live with that sort of inequality, I think.

Brett McKay: You talk about, too, not only are men and women socialized differently in how to express anger, but there’s physiological differences in our brain that tends to cause men to express anger through aggression and women not to. They’re slower to express it through aggression than men are.

Sam Parker: Yeah, this is one theory. The part of the brain that moderates risk-taking behavior is stronger in women than men. And so if you extrapolate that to an instance where you get angry, men are more likely to take the risky path in expressing their anger, which is to get into a confrontation. So there is some biological basis in the idea that men are more aggressive than women. There’s also the argument that for women it’s much more dangerous to get into confrontations and to express anger. And so there’s the socially moderating impact as well. So yeah, there is a difference and that contributes to the misunderstanding that somehow men are angrier than women, which they’re not.

Brett McKay: Does anger start in the mind or in the body or is it a combination of the two?

Sam Parker: So it’s a combination of the two. And I think this is another reason why people go wrong with the emotions in general. There’s still the sort of sense that was believed around the time of the Enlightenment that the brain is where emotions happen and that our emotions are responses in the brain to experiences. Actually, the most recent biological understanding of it is that emotions are generated by the whole body and by the mind as well. So it’s actually a physical thing as much as it is a mental thing. And understanding that was… We talked about boxing before, but understanding the way that emotions and anger in particular manifests in the body was like a real eureka moment for me because I was somebody who struggled to know when anger was there. And the body was a way to start to get much better at that. And I still rely on that now. There are times when my mind hasn’t caught up to the fact that I’m angry yet, but my body is telling me pretty clearly that I am. And that kind of helps me understand what I’m feeling about something a lot more quickly.

Brett McKay: So we talked about how because we have such a conflicted view of anger, a lot of people have a hard time recognizing it. And then you talk about how often anger can be masked by other emotions like depression or anxiety. How does that work? How can anger show up as depression or anxiety, etcetera?

Sam Parker: Yeah, so there’s an expression that a lot of people will be familiar with, which is that depression is anger turned inward. And this was something that Freud first wrote about in 1917 in an essay called Mourning and Melancholia. And he compared the state of mourning with the state of what… Wasn’t called depression quite then, it was called melancholia. But he compared those two states, what’s the difference between them. In many ways they’re very similar in the way that you respond to being in mourning and being depressed. The difference that he found was that depression contains a lot of angry self-talk. And if you were to externalize the inner voice of someone who’s suffering from depression, and often these are the most outgoing, friendly people you meet. Their internal voice is very angry. So what they’re doing is they’re turning anger in on themselves, and they’re doing it in their private thoughts. And this is a huge part of why they feel depressed. Less well known, I’d say, is that anger plays a very similar role in anxiety. So for people who have difficulty expressing anger confidently, recognizing it in themselves, being comfortable with it, all of those things, that often manifests as anxiety disorders. And so this is what was happening with me. I had generalized anxiety disorder, spent many, many days feeling a dread and an anxiety that I couldn’t really place on anything. Very much thought it was my lot in life in some sense.

Brett McKay: You had some teeth grinding going on. You were like grinding your teeth to a pulp.

Sam Parker: Teeth grinding. Yeah, so the physical manifestations of it, when I look back now are really quite shocking. But yeah, I mean, I ground my teeth to a point that I had dentists looking at me with real despair. Yeah, I’d wake up every morning feeling like I’d been punched in my sleep. And the anxiety and some of the physical symptoms were the first things to be alleviated when I started working on anger. So anger repression can write itself across the body, it can write itself across our mental health. And yeah it’s an invisible problem. This is the thing is, we know about the anger out problem because obnoxious, aggressive, violent people take up a lot of time and space. They take up the mental space of the people around them. It’s a big social problem, crime, the rest of it. So, of course, that’s where our focus has been so far. But the other anger problem that’s hidden is anger suppression, and it’s individuals who are paying the price for that. And often it’s in the form of anxiety or it’s in the form of physical illness.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. So if anger is an emotion that tells you that something’s not right, like there’s been a boundary violation or there’s an unmet need in your life, and then you don’t have a way to use that emotion productively and… 

Sam Parker: Or even though it’s there.

Brett McKay: Even though it’s there, like you kind of develop a learned helplessness. It’s like, well, I’m feeling this thing, I can’t do anything about it. And now I feel depressed because I can’t do anything about it. So I can see how anger could lead to depression in that sense.

Sam Parker: Yeah, absolutely. That’s it.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Let’s talk about some specific examples where anger shows up frequently. You mentioned work. What’s interesting about work is that in the past three decades or so, there’s been a lot of time and money spent trying to make work more pleasant and less anger prone. I mean, managers and employees, they get training on soft skills that should help reduce anger. But you highlight paradoxically, many people are experiencing more anger at work. What’s going on there?

Sam Parker: Well, I was always very puzzled by this. Is being angry at work an advantage or not? Because in a typical team of 10 people, there might be one person who’s sort of outwardly quite angry and quite confrontational. And what tends to happen is that the other nine people tiptoe around that person. They take up a lot of energy. But are they getting ahead or are they not? What I started to look into was the quiet quitting phenomenon, which I’m sure most people will have heard of. It’s been much discussed in recent years. But this idea that people are just disengaging at work. They’re kind of there, but they’re not there in body and mind, although they’re in body, not in mind, not in soul. And so I started to dig into the stats behind this phenomenon. And what it turns out is that a lot of people now, they’re quiet quitting, not because of remuneration, not because of how much they believe the company cares about them. Companies are very careful now to seem caring and might even have good policies to that. What they often feel is unchallenged. They don’t feel that they are giving enough direct, constructive feedback and guidance.

And I think what’s happened is that of course, there are exceptions. There are still workplaces that are full of bullying and toxic behavior and aggression. But in many workplaces, I think there’s been an overcorrection to the point where we feel like anger has absolutely no place at all at work, because if you’re a boss, it can get you into trouble. If you’re a peer, it can mark you out as a problem, someone who doesn’t collaborate properly, all those sorts of things. And we’ve sort of lost the ability, or perhaps we never had it in a work context, to just sit with somebody and say, you’ve angered me with what you’ve done there. And I think some of it is about this and some of it might be about my own stuff, but can we talk it through? Instead, what happens now is that someone pisses you off at work and you go to Slack and you find your ally and you slag them off for a moment and there’s some unproductive thing that can be happening, really. And so work has become this area of life where there’s so much unexpressed anger and so much sort of frustration that we have with each other in private. I don’t think it’s healthy. And I think part of it, as you say, is the fact that we’ve gone so far in the other direction with trying to make sure that workplaces are kind of very polite and caring places. And that’s not a bad aim at all, but you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Brett McKay: Yeah, work can feel just sort of like this mushy, amorphous, because anger can set boundaries, it can push back when you need to. But when you don’t have that, you lose that. And so people just feel like, what are we doing? I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. What’s the metric I’m supposed to hit? And because they don’t feel like they have any direction at work, they’re like, oh, I’m just not engaged and I’m going to bounce out.

Sam Parker: Yeah, exactly. People just feel like, well, what’s the point of this? I’m not being challenged. I’m not being developed. And I think there’s the bad boss. What used to be a bad boss was a kind of an obnoxious bully. And they still exist. But actually, the more common bad boss now, I think, is the one who’s just afraid to upset you. They just want to be everyone’s best friend and they want to be first down the pub and they want everyone to like them. And I’ve been guilty of this as a manager over the years as well. So I say it from a point of self-reflection as much as anything. But if you don’t have that gear where you can give honest feedback and say when you’re not happy with someone, then no one really… It’s sort of stasis, isn’t it? It’s kind of everything gets quite static. And yeah, it’s not good.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, I’m sure people have experienced this. They’ve had a boss that’s very demanding, strict, can seem angry, but sometimes they’re like, I loved working for that guy because we got things done. I knew where I stood and it was productive. I know I experienced that when I played sports. I loved having that really stern kind of mean coach because I knew that they were doing it for a purpose. I knew they wanted to help us win. But then you had the coach, kind of your buddy, buddy, and you slacked off.

Sam Parker: Yes, yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: You actually, you cite a study in the book that people actually prefer an angry boss over a non-angry boss as long as they’re angry and helpful. And that just goes back to that, well, they know what’s expected of them and they don’t know that unless their boss says hey, look, you messed up here. So it’s not a toxic anger, it’s not bullying, but it’s just being willing to say I’m frustrated because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. And just for everyone at work, when you’re an employee, it’s good to recognize when someone else is making you angry and figure out what to do about it than to ignore it.

Sam Parker: Yeah, and it comes back to that idea of we’re very good at spotting what anger has told us about someone else. It’s the first bit of information we get. We’ve been wronged. Somebody’s done something that’s pissed us off. You have to learn to ask yourself the second question, which is, well, what is this anger telling me about me? And at work, that often means I feel insecure. I’m not sure I’m respected enough on this part of what I do. I’m under-challenged by my boss, and so that’s part of why I’m getting frustrated with this not working out. If you look at your anger and what it’s telling you at work, you actually get to the nub of, like, what’s making you unhappy a lot quicker. And addressing that, as well as having the honest conversation from time to time, but addressing that deeper unmet need that the anger is pointing you towards can be so useful, and I’ve found it so useful in my career, looking at anger that way and thinking about what’s really making me frustrated here. Because at the end of the day, we sort of know that work isn’t that important. For most of us, it’s something we do for money and so on, but if you’re losing sleep at the weekend over something at work, chances are there’s something a little bit deeper going on than just someone sent a shitty email.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, this is useful. This goes back to that idea of transference you talked about earlier, Freud, where sometimes we’ll bring to the table a problem that we’re experiencing with another person, like some of the stuff we dealt with as a kid. And so if you experience that at work, if you experience anger at work, you have to ask yourself, okay, is it what this person’s doing that’s making me angry, or is it like, am I bringing something up from my past, on how it was dealt with as a child? I’m transferring my dad treating me, like making me feel crappy to my boss giving me critical feedback.

Sam Parker: Exactly, yeah, and I think that happens all the time, and something I’ve had in my life is that sometimes people in charge of me really bring out that people pleaser, and I’m desperate for their approval and that’s about my own baggage from the past, and it stops you sometimes from sticking up for yourself. It can make you a bit of a pushover. It can mean people take advantage of you. And again, that’s not honoring your anger because you feel like there’s no place for it, or how could I possibly be angry with my boss? Well, of course you can be and maybe your inability to feel it towards them is, as you say, is a case of transference. So it works the other way around. You can be getting too pissed off with someone at work, and they don’t really deserve it, and you’re doing a bit of projecting from the past. Or you can be underreacting to something at work, which I see just as often. So yeah, the role of transference at work is so fascinating, and not many people have written about it that deeply, but I think there’s a really good book to be written on that in itself, probably.

Brett McKay: Why is anger an important emotion to experience in a romantic relationship or even a friendship?

Sam Parker: So this comes down partly to a concept called rupture and repair, which is basically that any healthy relationship, whether it’s a friendship or a romantic relationship or a parent and child, goes through phases of rupture and repair where you break apart. Symbolically you argue, you drift, and then you come back together and reconcile and reaffirm your love for each other. And this is the flux that all healthy relationships go through. When a relationship has no space for anger, when you have two people together who don’t know how to argue, don’t know where to say that they’re angry with each other, the rupture and repair sort of gets… It gets snagged, it’s not working properly. And it can create this really sort of inauthentic, quite tense environment. I don’t know if you… I mean, I’ve certainly been in relationships a bit like that. And you’re wondering why things are a bit tense and weird behind you. And it’s almost like the weather before a storm, like the storm needs to break between you. But if you can’t access your anger, then it doesn’t happen. So anger is a really important part of love.

If you don’t know what makes your partner angry, and if your partner doesn’t feel confident enough to show you when they’re angry, then you’re not really being your full self with each other.. It’s about being… It’s an overused word now, but it’s about being authentic, isn’t it? If you can’t be angry with the person that you are closest to ostensibly, and most linked with and tied up with, then something’s not right. So yeah, anger is a huge part of love.

Brett McKay: So how do we get better at recognizing anger in ourselves?

Sam Parker: Well, I think the first thing is to really sit and think about what you think anger is. And I’m glad we started this conversation talking about definitions because that has to be the starting point for people, I think. And if you have in your head that anger is an inherently catastrophic, dangerous thing or something to be ashamed of, which is another thing a lot of people feel, then you really got to start with resetting that and believing in yourself that anger is an acceptable emotion. It’s a neutral emotion. It’s something we have a choice about, but it’s also something that we can’t avoid. There is no life without anger. Then it’s about learning, okay, well, if I’m not comfortable with anger, what do I do in its place? What’s my racket emotion, they call it in psychology, which is when you replace one emotion with another one that you think is more acceptable. So the classic racket emotion for women and anger is sadness. It’s to start to cry. And I spoke to many very professionally accomplished women who have this frustration of when they get angry at work, they start to cry.

Another good example of a racket emotion is the guy who can’t stop telling jokes when he’s sad, the clown who’s crying on the inside. Figuring out what your racket emotion is, what do you do when you’re angry instead of be angry, is one way that you can start to get the pieces on the map to figure this thing out. The next, which we touched on before, is to look at your body. So I know now when I grind my teeth and I don’t know why I’m grinding my teeth, something’s happened at some point recently that’s made me angry. And I’m just not ready to accept it yet or haven’t quite come to terms of that yet. So then I can kind of look at what’s going on in my life at that moment, my relationships, recent conversations, and try and find the thing that I’m angry about because my body’s telling me that I’m angry even though my mind hasn’t quite caught up yet. So tuning into your body is a great way to start to find your anger. Some people do use physical activities. I spoke to a fascinating scientist who wrote a book about embodied emotion.

And this is a form of meditation where you sit and you meditate on an emotion, so anger. Often it manifests somewhere in your diaphragm. And you teach yourself the discipline of sitting with that feeling in your body for as long as you can and seeing where it spreads in other parts of your body. And I think this is what happened to me boxing that day. The anger spread to my arms. It was in other parts of my body. And the more you spread it, the more empowered you feel by it, the greater you can carry that load of it. So there’s lots of interesting ways that you can start to find the anger when it doesn’t seem to be there. I’ve gotten to a habit of just, any time I’m going through an emotional experience or something significant has happened, I ask myself, well, where’s the anger here? Because there’s going to be a little bit of anger in response to most things. And so teaching myself to look for it even when I don’t think it’s there is another way of just normalizing your relationship with the emotion.

Brett McKay: And what’s interesting by recognizing and then naming the emotion, in a way that helps you kind of harness it and control it. If you just say, I’m feeling angry right now, just the naming of it can go a long way for you to not let it get out of control.

Sam Parker: Oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Naming it to yourself is powerful enough. I think people are afraid of anger. One of the reasons they’re afraid of it is that they think, well, if I accept that I’m angry, I’m going to have to do something scary. I’m going to have to go and have it out with that person or get into a fight or whatever it is. And it might lead to that, but you don’t have to. You can just, as you say, you can name it in yourself, you can name it in the conversation with somebody else, and that goes a long way. And then you’re kind of in a place where you’re being curious about the emotion rather than overwhelmed by it and you start seeing your response to it as a choice. But it has to start with recognizing that it’s there and this is a problem that so many people have. And I spoke to some amazing people who had this challenge very accomplished, sophisticated, intelligent people who could not name anger in themselves and found it really, really difficult. So we kind of have to do that first bit. And then you start getting to the really good stuff, which is like, okay, I’m comfortable with anger now. How am I going to act on it? Like, what am I going to do with this insight? What am I going to do with this energy? How am I going to use it to make my life better?

Brett McKay: Okay, so the first step in harnessing good anger is just naming it and claiming it?

Sam Parker: Yeah.

Brett McKay: What do you do after that? Because I mean, I think there’s these misconceptions about if you do recognize anger, like what you’re supposed to do with it, one of them you talk about is the whole, well, you’re feeling angry, to get rid of anger, you have to release it like a pressure valve. So you just got to yell and punch a pillow and break stuff in one of those wrecking rooms that are there. Does that actually do anything for anger?

Sam Parker: No, I mean, I’m very skeptical of that. I mean, I think it can have symbolic value. And the primal scream therapy, which I think we’re about the same age, I think we’re probably both a bit too young for that era, but primal scream therapy was a big thing in the ’70s. And it was this idea you could go and scream out your bad emotions and your difficult emotions could just be sort of vented. From everything I’ve read, there’s very little evidence that that is genuinely cathartic. You get a momentary release. But beyond that, it doesn’t really do anything for the anger itself. And part of the reason is that you’re not linking it to anything useful. So this is like now we’re back to the good anger bit. If I go and smash a plate because I’m frustrated, it might feel good for 0.5 seconds, but then all I’m left with is a smashed plate. If I take that anger and I go and channel it into, you mentioned American football or boxing or something. The acquisition of a skill, something that we see as being healthy and useful, then great. Okay. I’ve linked anger to just something useful.

That’s a good step on the road to using it well. Socially, what it looks like is, okay, I felt this anger. I’ve taken a moment to really be honest with myself about what it’s saying, not just about the other person, but me, what my unmet needs are, what my insecurities are. I’ve got the measure of like how bad this thing is, and I still need to do something about it. Well, that means I’m going to have to go and have a conversation with this person and I’m going to have to find a way to say to them, I’m angry with you, which can be really difficult. And then you work on a way forward together that’s defined by mutual respect and empathy and everything that makes a conversation productive. But you can’t just siphon it out. It doesn’t really work like that. And this is where we go wrong online as well. Sorry to jump around a little bit, but one of the problems with expressing anger on social media, which is where most people do their venting now, is that by design, these platforms don’t want you to go anywhere. They certainly don’t want us to have a productive conversation with each other so we can get on with our day, having reached a good conclusion with our anger.

They want us to stay frustrated. So what we get is the opportunity to vent, to smash the plate, but absolutely no opportunity for a cathartic resolution to the anger. So venting anger without purpose, without any sort of proper resolution is not very useful for us. In fact, it’s actually pretty unhealthy. It feels rubbish. And this is why if you spend an afternoon on Twitter arguing with someone and you’re not listening to each other, it feels crap. No one walks away from that experience feeling good. But you can walk away from the experience of being angry with someone in real life and feel great, because you can get to a point where you both feel more respected than you did before.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So I’ve read research about the whole venting thing. They found that it actually just makes you angrier, but it’s not a productive.

Sam Parker: Right. You stew. 

Brett McKay: Yeah, you just stew and you feel more and more upset and more riled up.

Sam Parker: Right.

Brett McKay: And it doesn’t do anything. So how can we turn anger into, you call it a life force, an energy, that thing that Aristotle talked about, where it compels us to solve the problem, write a great book, create a great piece of art. What can we do to make anger a positive energy in life force?

Sam Parker: Well, I think you have to make a choice with what am I going to do with this energizing feeling that I’ve got? Is it going to be the difficult conversation with someone? It may be that that is impossible or undesirable. It may be that tactically it’s just not the right thing. So the choice you’re making is, am I going to channel this into a productive conversation or am I actually just going to take the energy and turn it into the, I’ll show you energy and I’m going to go and write the report that makes me outshine this person. I’m going to go and work on the side project that’s going to help me get out of this job where I feel things are hopeless. It’s making that choice about what you’re going to do with the energy that the anger is giving you, coupled with the insight that it’s provided. And then you take it forward. But I mean, talking about having it as something that’s kind of integrated into your life in a general sense, which is where I try and end the book and something I’m still working towards myself. I think that takes a long time.

And I think that one of the beautiful things about being more in touch with anger is that paradoxically, it actually makes you feel more at peace in other areas of your life. And this has been my experience. I used to have quite an ungenerous interpretation of certain other people who might have certain traits or behave in certain ways. And what I didn’t realize I was doing was I was projecting a lot of the frustrations I had and a lot of the anger that I wasn’t really in touch with onto other people. And I think people do this in politics. People do this online. People do this with lots of different issues that are out there in the world at the moment. But once you’ve actually integrated anger into sort of being a daily part of your life, and you’re very comfortable with it, and you’re actually pretty kind of chill with it, and you can have fun with it, but act on it when you need to and all those things, you get a greater sense of balance in how you see the world in general. And that was the lovely surprise for me when I’ve been able to work on anger productively is how much more balance it’s given me in the rest of my emotional life. So I think that’s what having anger on your side feels like most of the time.

Brett McKay: I think this kind of goes into what Aristotle is saying. He’s like, you experience the emotion of anger, then you have to kind of stop and figure out, okay, how can I channel this for the right reasons in the right amount? And even like the more nuanced Stoics had this idea too, that okay, you don’t have any control over the emotions you feel. You can control how you express or respond to that emotion. Any tactics you came across where, okay, you experience the emotion of anger, you feel it flare up, you name it. Any other things that work to sort of give you that space so that you can formulate an appropriate response? Is it the counting to 10 thing or leaving the room? Is that what you do?

Sam Parker: Yeah, so the counting to 10 thing actually is not bad advice per se, or it’s like halfway there. So what is recommended physiologically, if you’re in an argument with your partner, let’s say, and you’ve had the amygdala hijack, you’ve lost your head, somehow between you, you find the wisdom to say, okay, let’s go cool off. They reckon 20 minutes is about the amount of time that you need for your body to kind of reset itself. In that time, rather than rehearse the thing you’re going to say or kind of obsess about why you’ve been hard done by, if you can, you should go and listen to a podcast or read or do something else to try and take your mind off it. That’s the best way to reset yourself physiologically. So that’s one thing. Another thing that I found really useful was this idea of the discomfort caveat, which is where if you do have to have a conversation about something you’re angry about, and you maybe you haven’t quite had the time to calm down yet as much as would be ideal. It’s confessing to the other person at the start of the conversation. And saying, okay, just so I’m angry right now. I might struggle to express myself as clearly as I would like to. 

And then you’re immediately disarming that person. They might be angry with you and you’re kind of setting the conversation on quite an empathic footing, but you’re also not pretending you’re not angry. You’re not betraying your anger. You’re saying, look, it’s there and I’m going to have to get into it, but bear with me. And I think that can be really useful. So there’s definitely tips and things that you can employ to try and help you in the moment. I don’t know if you’ve come across the idea of meta-awareness, that idea of trying to… It’s kind of a mindfulness thing, really. It’s like learning the inner curiosity that you can have with emotions so that when you start to feel angry, you almost immediately try and elevate above that in your consciousness and go, okay, I’m angry right now. You try and almost like third voice it to look at anger from a sort of zoomed out perspective. If you can learn to do that, that can help you in the moment as well, not become so overwhelmed. So there’s definitely techniques out there.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, it’s been interesting to watch my 14 year old son trying to get a handle on his emotions. He’s got hormones coursing through him. So of course you’re feeling big emotions. And the other day he was having… Starting to have like a, he calls it a crash out. I was like, oh, it’s like the dumb teenager stuff. But then I think he had the self-awareness. I was really proud. He was like, I got to go take a walk. So he went for a walk and he came back 10 minutes later and he was just calm and collected and he was able to talk about the situation in a cool, calm, collected way. And it was productive.

Sam Parker: I mean, I have to say, first of all, there’s no chance I could have done that at 14. And secondly, I think that’s about as good an example of good anger that I can think of. I mean, that’s perfect. Go give yourself the time you need, admit to the feeling and then come back and get into it productively. But you don’t want to wait too long that the angers pass completely. That’s the other thing is that you still want to act when the energy is there or it just kind of gets repressed or you lose confidence in it. Was I really… Am I in the right actually? You can start to doubt yourself if you leave it too long. But yeah, I think that sounds like a great example.

Brett McKay: Sam, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Sam Parker: So I do have a Substack that’s also called Good Anger. The book can be ordered on all the usual places. And yeah, just Good Anger is out now. Thank you for such a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: Well, thank you, Sam. I enjoyed it too. My guest here is Sam Parker. He’s the author of the book, Good Anger. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his Substack, goodanger.substack.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/goodanger, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for the Art of Manliness newsletter. It’s free. We get a daily option and a weekly option. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to justreview us on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you not only to listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.