But if our collective LIFEMORTS is being activated, what exactly are we going to do about all this rage?
“If we don’t manage it, it turns into passive aggression or tantrums,” says Tawwab, author of the book “Set Boundaries, Find Peace.”
“We are disappointed,” Ms. Tawwab said. “We were in the house. We are angry with our partners. Or we get upset with this person who we can’t really express, like maybe the boss. When our anger surfaced, “it was superseded, and that’s why you see people having these moments with the flight attendant or the cashier. Do those people deserve that level of response based on the situation? Absolutely not.”
The pandemic is dragging on, there’s a land war in Europe, the global economy seems to be reeling, and we’re all algorithmically incentivized to stay outraged. In addition, as Dr. Epstein has pointed out, for everything unusual we face this year, “just ordinary life is filled with unpredictability, illness, old age and death. ” – the things we feared, that bothered us, are gone. our control and it makes us insecure and angry. No wonder we lost it this year. The question is: Will we ever get it back?
The answer, it seems, is not to suppress our anger, or to ignore it, or to belittle it.
We need to make peace with our rage.
“Anger has a bad reputation as this terrible feeling — like you should never feel it and it sucks, and it just isn’t right,” Ms. Tawwab said. As an emotion, “it fits, like any other emotion we have.” Rather than repressing it, she says, “it is much more helpful if you just say, ‘I’m really angry, I’m frustrated, I’m frustrated,’ so you can recognize it when it’s happening. instead of trying to squeeze it down. and then the top was blown away.
After all, our anger is trying to tell us something. Professor Laurie Santos, who teaches positive psychology at Yale and hosts the podcast “The Happiness Lab,” said: “What we forget is that emotions are a signal – like a microwave oven tells us what to do. You know when your food is ready.” She points out that while anger can be self-destructive, it can also lead to positive changes to our mental health if it leads to action and a sense of self-determination. .
