The upside of anger: harnessing our most explosive emotion

Photographs by Shaw & Shaw

There was a lot going on in my life at the time that I was angry about: my parent’s divorce, my first heartbreak, the pressures of school. Instead of talking about any of it, I kept a tight lid on those feelings until they burst out in destructive and confusing ways. I’d get drunk with friends and find myself smashing things or getting into fights – compulsive acts that filled me with shame retrospectively. As I got older and this behaviour became even less excusable, I learned to try to never express anger under any circumstances, until my denial of it went one step further, from suppression to repression.

By the time I reached my late 20s, I could no longer even recognise when I was angry. If you’d have asked me if I was an “angry person”, I would have been offended. I know this because a therapist did precisely that. I arrived at his door hoping for help with anxiety, but mostly determined to make him like me, and convince him I had no reason to be there. I had become a classic people-pleaser, someone who believed the most effective way to move through the world was to charm and flatter others in order to keep the peace. “I’m not a very angry person,” I told him, entirely unaware of the fact that my inner monologue of constant, vehement self-criticism was a very angry voice indeed.

Many people are familiar with the idea that depression is “anger turned inward”. When depressed, we suffer under the weight of a rage we direct towards ourselves rather than at an appropriate external target. Freud figured this out as far back as 1917, in his essay Mourning and Melancholia. But the link between anxiety and suppressed anger is also far closer than many realise.

The more we bottle anger up, the more it manifests in doom and dread. The scientific data on this is long and varied: it has been found to be true in social-anxiety sufferers, older adults and in particular women, who multiple studies show are more prone towards “anger containment” than men. There are many theories on why this may be: fears around personal safety; the way we are socialised to think of anger as a “male emotion” (a myth: global polls show women actually report experiencing feelings of anger more often than men); the female brain having a slightly larger orbital frontal cortex that regulates risky behaviour, like getting into a confrontation, meaning they’re more likely to turn anger inwards. But the net result for women is higher anxiety levels.

When I finally started talking about anger, I realised I was full of it. Not just at stuff going on in the world – that was the easy bit. I was angry about the events of my past, things I thought I’d long since “dealt with” just because I didn’t think of them often. After years of trying to jog or meditate my anxiety away, what finally helped me overcome it was getting comfortable with expressing rage, including feeling it in my body: an initially scratchy sensation that could, with patience, be turned into something more like a warming energy. I did this not only over hours sitting opposite my therapist, but through learning to box – a sport that allowed me to reconceptualise myself as a person with access to useful aggression – and later, a technique called embodied emotion.

This form of meditation, recommended by somatic therapists, is where you locate the white-hot centre of anger in one part of your body – often the diaphragm, or the jaw – then visualise it spreading slowly to other parts until it feels calmer and more even. It grows our tolerance for difficult feelings in the same way a marathon runner grows their lung capacity. The more I learned, when anxiety reared its head, to look over its shoulder and find the anger it was concealing, the less anxious I subsequently felt.

Life had improved enough by that point that I could have stopped there. But instead I continued exploring anger in therapy and studying it in my spare time, for the better part of a decade. An emotion I’d avoided all my life became an obsession. And the more I got used to feeling anger, the more I learned to act on it, too. Anger was alerting me to things I needed to change or address in order to be happier, and giving me the grit and determination to do so. It started improving all areas of my life. I escaped a professional scenario where I felt undermined and mistreated by learning, finally, to stand up for myself clearly and calmly. I stopped having as many erratic, confusing arguments with my partner and friends by looking beneath the surface of my frustrations at deeper, unresolved problems that actually had nothing to do with them.

I channelled the “I’ll show you” energy of anger at how my career had stalled into resolving to finally write a book, which involved researching the history of anger and discovering an alternative one, full of people like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, who believed anger could be a force for positive change, not just in the world but in our own lives.

What image do you conjure when you see the word “anger”? Probably a red-faced man on the verge of giving himself an ulcer; perhaps a riot, maybe even a war. It can be hard to picture anger as something healthy, something that actually enriches our lives.

This image problem goes back a long way. Around AD50, the philosopher Seneca wrote an entire book about why anger was a disaster for society, arguing, “The subduing of this monster will do a great deal toward the establishment of human peace.” That utopia didn’t quite come to pass in the blood-soaked Roman Empire. But by the time Christianity established itself fully in the west, the idea of anger as immoral stuck, earning a place on the moral checklist used by the church to keep us in line: the “seven deadly sins”.

Today, we’re supposed to take a more scientific view of our emotions, as well as be more understanding of the so-called bad ones. When it comes to sadness and fear, we are. In the past decade we’ve witnessed a revolution in mental-health awareness in which the stigma around depression and anxiety has been all but eradicated. Companies run mental-health workshops to tell their employees “It’s OK not to be OK.” Actors, boxing champions and intellectuals give candid interviews about their struggles. Emotional ill-health has gone from a taboo to one of the main causes people give for long-term absences from work. We talk about the way we feel more than at any other time in history.

Anger, though, has been left out of the conversation. It remains the black sheep of the emotional family. Even though learning how to express anger properly is crucial to our mental health, the idea that it is entirely unwelcome persists. In Western culture, we reinforce this via the sexist notion that men have a more “natural” claim to anger than women. What we really mean when we say this is that men are more aggressive and violent, something evidenced in no shortage of depressing statistics, from crime to suicide rates. But anger and aggression or violence are not the same. One is a healthy emotion, the others a behavioural choice. In fact, aggression is better understood as a rejection of anger – a sign we can’t handle the hurt and vulnerability it is alerting us to.

We think of anger as emotion non grata partially because of how it is modelled to us as children. Many people grow up in homes where conflict and tension are never resolved in a healthy way, or else get shamed or rejected for expressing their own anger because it makes their adult caregivers uncomfortable. Most people never learn, therefore, to see anger for what it actually is: a natural reaction to the world and a source of vital information about our needs.

Instead we treat anger as a nuisance that needs to be gotten rid of quickly, or more commonly, ignored and shoved down. This is not only terrible for our health; it means anger often re-emerges later in confusing and destructive ways: bad moods, self-harming behaviour, acts of passive-aggression that drive the people around us to despair.

Everybody knows what bad anger looks like. We see it all the time – on the news, out in traffic, in TikTok videos of public meltdowns. We feel it in ourselves when we lose our tempers or when we stifle rage at our own expense. But good anger is different. It’s the crisp, clear assertion of our own boundaries. It’s standing up for ourselves by asking for what we need and deserve. It works with other people – not against them – by trusting them to be able to handle the fact we’re upset. It makes us willing to risk being disliked.

None of this, it must be said, is easy. In fact it can be incredibly difficult – particularly in the beginning. But over time, I’ve learned that addressing frustrations with co-workers, direct reports, even people senior to me could be done calmly and effectively, and doing so saved hours of strife. No more weekends mired in worry or frustration because of unresolved office politics – I’d addressed issues head on. Far less time wasted moaning to co-workers in private about someone I thought was unreasonable, because following my anger had led me to talk to them directly instead.

In her book Radical Candor, which became buzzy in business management circles a few years back, the former Apple and Google executive Kim Scott identified the most common ineffective leadership style in business, which she calls “ruinous empathy”.

This is when a leader ducks giving people difficult feedback because they’re scared of being disliked. Very often, she told me, ruinous empathy is really an act of repressing anger. “You’re telling yourself: ‘Oh, I’m being nice.’ But at some level, you know that it’s not really so nice to the other person, to yourself, or to your ability to get good results,” she said. “If somebody has spinach in their teeth, the nicer thing is to tell them.”

If getting comfortable with anger at work is tricky, at home it can be even harder. Relationship experts have identified expressions of contempt as the number one predictor of divorce in married couples. When our frustrations with each other turn into barbed insults or a lack of respect, we’re pouring acid on our love.

At first contact, we tend to think anger is telling us something about someone else: how unreasonable they are, that they’re out to get us. Our brains construct a version of events or a set of assumptions about their motives. But in most cases, anger is really alerting us to a problem we have: an insecurity, an unmet need, a wound from the past.

After moving house a few years ago, I found myself becoming defensive at the slightest criticism of how I was hanging pictures or arranging furniture, and storming off in frustration. It was disproportionate and illogical. Figuring out why DIY was such a trigger for me and talking to my partner about it brought us closer. It also meant we got through the painting a lot quicker.

Anger can also be a source of rare energy. The psychologist Stephen A Diamond, author of Anger, Madness and the Daimonic, believes fury brings us closer to our most dynamic life force. “To feel rage fully… is to know a type of ecstasy,” he writes, it is “to feel real life pared down to its purist, simplest state: the rousing, rapturous flush of unfettered vitality, pristine purpose, and unshakable will.” What we choose to do with this moment of supreme energy is up to us. Do we lash out, break something or channel it into something positive and productive?

Diamond argues that human creativity is itself an act of anger. We enter into conflict with the world by giving something it didn’t have before. Understood like this, you can see anger in all art: sonnets and love songs and the dreamy haze of Monet’s water lilies. Anger can fuel our passion to create beautiful things, or alternatively, our determination to do something practical: write that report that puts us ahead of a rival colleague, finally launch that side project that brings us closer to our true ambitions, or just clear out the loft. Sometimes anger requires us to enter into a confrontation with others, sometimes we can convert it into a zeal and fuel the best possible revenge: success.

These days, I think of anger not as a source of shame or an unwanted distraction, but as a smart, passionate, loyal friend. It’s a friend you have to wait to calm down a bit before you listen to them, but once they do, you can set a course of action together that makes life better. This can be difficult and I often get it wrong, but anger is not just an unavoidable part of being alive, we live in a world increasingly designed to make us angry. We might as well do the best we can to master it. If the mental health revolution needs a new frontier, anger should be it.

Sam Parker is the author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives, published by Bloomsbury on 5 June, priced £20