Anger is a strong emotional reaction that activates the body’s fight-or-flight stress reaction. Meditation directly disrupts that stress response to help you remain calm and choose your response. Learn how it works and gain seven meditation exercises to get started managing anger.Meditation can heal anger on multiple levels, addressing the underlying thoughts, feelings, and physiological reactions. It reduces our cognitive, emotional, and physical reaction to anger and fosters a sense of relaxed, balanced calm. To understand precisely how and why meditation helps with anger, it’s useful to know how the emotion of anger affects our whole being.Anger causes our whole system to become instantly aroused and agitated. Then, emotional processing and ruminating keep anger alive and the stress reaction activated in a negative cycle.Meditation disrupts this cycle, overrides our fight-or-flight reaction, and promotes emotional self-regulation.It rewires the brain and changes how we interpret and respond to situations that typically make us mad.When we meditate, we quiet the activity in the amygdala, thereby shutting down the automatic stress reaction and reducing the production and circulation of damaging stress hormones like cortisol.
Sitting upright, eyes closed, palms resting on their laps, feet flat on the floor, they listened as course instructor Suzanne Westbrook guided them to focus on the present by paying attention to their bodily sensations, thoughts, emotions, and especially their breath.
“Our mind wanders all the time, either reviewing the past or planning for the future,” said Westbrook, who before retiring last June was an internal-medicine doctor caring for Harvard students. “Mindfulness teaches you the skill of paying attention to the present by noticing when your mind wanders off. Come back to your breath. It’s a place where we can rest and settle our minds.”
The class she taught was part of an eight-week program aimed at reducing stress.
Studies say that eight in 10 Americans experience stress in their daily lives and have a hard time relaxing their bodies and calming their minds, which puts them at high risk of heart disease, stroke, and other illnesses. Of the myriad offerings aimed at fighting stress, from exercise to yoga to meditation, mindfulness meditation has become the hottest commodity in the wellness universe.
When any emotion rises up, we tend to first get caught up in it and then act it out, through speech or action. This couldn’t be truer for the heightened emotion of anger. Meditation, though, can teach us how to change a rash, reactive mindset into a more considered, responsive, and productive one.
We start by first learning to recognize anger’s onset without stepping into it. Imagine a cauldron full of red-hot, bubbling liquid — it’s there, we see it clearly, but we can watch without reaching in and hurling cupfuls of it around the room. We don’t have to get involved.
The ability to transform anger also involves taking responsibility for the fact that our anger is a part of us, regardless of what situation presses our buttons. Few of us purposefully get angry, so familiarizing ourselves with our emotional reactivity helps us understand what makes us hot under the collar and what it brings up for us.
As we stew on what upset us, our angry thoughts fan the flames until we reach the point when we project our ire outward or seek to blame others, and that’s where we need to understand the role our mind plays in stoking the fire.
With practice, we learn to see that anger doesn’t need to erupt in a matter of seconds; in fact, once we learn to view anger as a fleeting energy, we come to realize that we can be in control of it, not vice versa. We also come to see our anger with more clarity, realizing that it can actually be a healthy emotion if channeled in the appropriate way.
You must be logged in to post a comment.