Mental Health

Why We’re Primed For Anger Right Now

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I’m a lot angrier than I used to be since the start of the pandemic, and I suspect I’m not alone.

There are nine potential triggers for anger most people experience, and the one that inevitably catches us off-guard is being stopped. We are hard-wired to respond to any subversion of our forward progress by an outside party with an adrenaline dump and stress hormones.

This makes perfect sense when our primitive answers feared being immobilised by a bigger, stronger predator, but those same instincts now fire up when faced with a slow-moving queue, call-waiting muzak, or the moment the expected delivery time changes on our Uber Eats order.

It’s also triggered by systemic cultural oppression, by circumstances where we want things to change but can’t see a way out, and the denial of opportunities we’re convinced should be ours.

We’re living in an era full of anger right now. The pandemic thwarts our forward momentum in real and immediate ways, from lockdowns to thwarted plans to the general helplessness in the face of a large and overwhelming problem. Anger is less of a surge, and more a constant companion.

We’re wired to respond to the physiological triggers behind emotions in a ninety-second burst, after which our thoughts take over and we can either nurse the feeling or move on. Which leaves us with two modes of reaction to the surge of anger: reactive, and proactive.

Reactive approaches see you stuff the feeling down, nursing it as a form of icy rage, or seeking the release of an explosive outburst of verbal or physical rage.

The pro-active approach is holding on to your boundaries, acknowledging the rage is there and letting it go. It’s about reframing what you’re feeling and what it means, finding alternative ways to move forward, and disrupting the tendency to stew through tools like exercise, humour, focused breathing, and mindfulness.

Those initial ninety seconds of anger are instinctual, something you can’t avoid. Your nervous system is hard-wired for it, warning you there’s a potential problem that you need to address.

But it’s also an invitation: how will you respond once the ninety seconds are over? Will you slip into the easy, reactive follow-through or find a pro-active way out of the being halted in place? Will you stew or find an alternate route?

Some recommended reading if you’ve noticed a growing trend towards anger or irritability in recent months: Unfuck Your Anger: Using Science To Understand Your Frustration, Rage, and Forgiveness, by Dr Faith Harper.

Gods, I miss drinking right now.

PETERMBALL Journal ,

A few years back I went through a bad time, psychologically speaking, and my doctor quietly pointed out my tendencies towards depression and anxiety, then suggested a series of treatments that might get me back on an even keel.

We cycled through the usual suite of pharmaceutical treatments, discovered I had an adverse reaction to most SSRI inhibitors, and eventually settled on a serotonin drug that’s a) hideously expensive on my monthly salary, and b) will make my liver pop like a balloon if I get funky and mix it with booze.

All in all, it was a good motivation to do the hard yards in counselling to get a handle on things and get off the antidepressants. Then 2019 hit, and my toolkit for coping wasn’t quite up to the task, and when my partner quietly suggested that my mental healthy might be suffering I went back to the GP and signed up for a fresh prescription.

Now it’s 2020. The personal shitstorm of 2019 has given way to a global shitstorm of epic proportions.

And the antidepressants help. A whole fucking lot. As evidenced by the days where I take them and get shit done, versus the few days where I forgot and ended up having panic attacks over email.

Basically, compared to the relief that mainlining scotch might offer right now, there is no real measurable advantage to the booze.

But years of cultural indoctrination trains the brain to think that drinking is the right response to a crisis, and the idiotic monkey brain keeps pondering whether it would all be a little easier if I could embrace the hardboiled detective aesthetic. Pour a drink and stand at a rain-slicked window, peering out at a world gone made through the vertical blinds.

Some days, it’s hard to escape the feeling we are an incredibly clever fucking species who have trained ourselves for idiocy for the sake of aesthetics.

The Day After Two Weeks of Sick Days

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Two weeks ago, the last Heartbeat log I put up on Instagram included the line “Realised the sore throat, aching muscles, and disrupted equilibrium may mean I’m getting sick (do not want).”

The next morning, I woke up discovered that I was right on both fronts: I was sick with the flu, and I truly did not want it. Work ground to a halt, the illness getting an assist from a very sick guinea pig that needed more trips to the vet and help eating every couple of hours.

I’m only just getting back to doing work-related things today, forcing my reluctant brain to look at things I’ve been ignoring for a fortnight without shying away because getting on top of things will be hard. It will still be a disrupted work day, because we’ve still got a very sick guinea pig who needs to be hand-fed every few hours, but there’s the possibility of getting stuff done around that.

Sick days are hard when you have a freelancer mindset (and you live without sick leave). While I’ve been physically better for a few days, my brain is still lagging behind in the foothills of anxiety. My subconscious keeps running around in panicked loops: “We’re so far behind. We’ll never catch up. This is why writing is a terrible idea–let’s just pack it all in and go look for a different job.”

My conscious brain is acknowledging that all those things are possible, but unlikely, and that doing nothing will almost certainly result in getting further behind, so it’s probably better to do something even if it’s not everything I want to get done.

The trick, unsurprisingly, is to cleave to the familiar routines that take thinking out of the equation: start a logbook page for the day; write a blog post to get my brain back into a place where it thinks about conveying things to an audience with words; open a notebook and put the pen next to it, even if I don’t think I’ll write.

The conscious brain knows that I’ll fret much less once things are underway, once the work ceases to be an amorphous blog of NOT DONE, AND OH GOD THE DEADLINES and becomes a set of COOL THINGS I GET TO WRITE NOW.

And the only way to get there is to poke at the work until the cool things manifest themselves, and start getting written.