Understanding anger : The foolishness of being a puppet

What is the most important thing for survival? There are a few things without which you cannot survive. What is the most important among them. Food, water, breath? We can survive without food and water for a few days but we cannot survive without air or oxygen even for a second. Do we all agree that breath is the most important thing required for survival?

According to positive psychologists, for each of our emotional condition—sad, angry, etc—there is a corresponding breath pattern. Otherwise, as we change our mood, our breath pattern clearly changes. Is this clear? Do we all agree?

Now turning this fact outside down, can we control our moods or how we respond to situations by monitoring and regulating our breath?

Recent scientific studies in positive psychology says yes we can change and in control of our moods, emotional reactions by monitoring and changing our breath pattern. Which means, we can get rid of negative mental conditions and moods such as stress, fear, depression, etc simply by regulating our breath pattern.

But are we giving enough importance to breathe without which we cannot survive for a second and bother to understand how our body is trying to assimilate breath for our survival and growth?

Unfortunately the answer is no; caught up in the rat race called modern life, we—when I say we, I mean the whole human community, not all of us who are gathered here—tend to think work, weakened shopping, eating out, facebook, what’s app, etc are more important. And we end up doing passive breathing, instead of active 

breathing. 

Basically there are two breathing patterns—passive and active. Passive breathing is what most of us normally do. So what is active breathing? Active breathing is breathing deeply and rhythmically. Simple—breathing deeply and rhythmically.

What is the benefit of breathing deeply and rhythmically? Why should we do this? Well when we breathe deeply and rhythmically, we inhale almost 10 times more oxygen—10 times more oxygen. Which means our blood is awash with oxygen and our cells get abundant supply of oxygen which can revamp, rejuvenate us. Once we practice deep and rhythmic breathing, we transform from being lethargic to active; from being depressed to vibrant, being sad to joyful. Active breathing also reduce blood pressure, headache, stomach problems, depression, anxiety, fear, etc.  

So can a do a brief session of active breathing? There are various breathing techniques—there have been techniques developed in Indian tradition of yoga and modern therapists suggest diaphragmatic or abdominal or belly breathing—but the underlying principle is to breathe deeply and rhythmically.

So let’s begin; those among us who have breathing or asthmatic problems or are unwell may not do this.

I am doing to count four like this: one, two, three, four, one, two, four, three, two, one, one, two—when I count one to four in the ascending order, inhale; when I count one, two, hold the breath; when I count four to one in the descending order exhale; and when I count one, two again hold your breath; one to four inhale; one, two hold; four to one exhale and one, two hold; and repeat the cycle (repeat twice).

Now back to my friend. Who do you think he is? Teddy bear? He is a teddy bear, but for the time being let’s assume he is a puppet and his name is pappu; so he is pappu the puppet. He is a nice, cute guy; but the problem with him is he doesn’t have a clue as to how to respond to situations. If I tell him to stretch his arms, he will do so; if I tell him to turn on his head, he will do; I can punch, squeeze, kick or throw him. Which means how he responds to situations is not decided by him but by someone else.

Would you like someone else to decide how you should respond to different situations in life? Would you like to be a puppet? No?

But there is one specific situation or mood when we degrade ourselves to be a puppet. Can you tell me when or what that specific mood is? Anger, yes. When we are angry we let someone else—a person or a situation—decide how we react; or we become a puppet in the hands of a person or a situation. Is becoming a puppet and let a person or a situation decide how we react a good thing? Is being a puppet a wise thing to do? No; the first reason why we should not be carried away by the feeling of anger is it is the most foolish thing to do; because when we are angry we are a puppet in the hands of a person, persons or a situation; and that can be dangerous.

So the first reason why we should not let ourselves to be carried away by anger is that it is a most foolish thing to do; because when we are angry, we are a puppet and when we are a puppet anyone can do anything to us because what we are doing at that point in time or how we react is decided by someone else or by a given situation.  

This is important because scientific medical research says most modern day ailments are triggered by stress and anger and stress are interrelated. If we want to reduce stress and thus improve health and inner well being, we should understand anger.  Understanding anger is also important resentment and anger are the core of increasing instances of violence in human society. If we want to reduce violence we need to understand anger.

Stress is a big problem in work place. Some of our brothers and sisters are working in typical corporate ambience where stress can build up. Managing stress is a challenge especially to those who are in the IT, technology space, especially if you are doing a client facing role. Stress caused by angry reactions can be a problem in our personal relationships also.

The second reason not to be angry is when we are angry, we are causing more damage to ourselves than to the other person or persons. Physiologically when we are angry we are in a ‘fight or flight’ response mode (flight means run, ‘fight or run’ response mode). We humans have this inbuilt fight or flight response to protect ourselves in extremely dangerous situations. Suppose you are confronted by a tiger on the road; your entire physiology changes immediately; the glycogen is your liver is converted to glucose and sudden rush of ATP molecules that transports chemical energy to provide extra dose of energy required to handle a dangerous situation. In an actual danger situation, the extra energy is used either to fight or flight (run).

When we are angry, physiologically we are in a fight or flight response mode. But unlike a real danger situation, the glycogen that is converted to glucose is not used, thus raising the glucose levels your blood stream. So when we are angry we increase the chance of becoming a diabetic and diseased hence damaging our own health. 

In order to understand anger — the key thing is understand anger not to control it because the more we try to control the stronger it will become. But the moment we understand anger, it will vanish —we can classify or rate it scale of one to 10—one being the relaxed mode and 10 being the peak of anger where anything can happen. At points one, you are relaxed; at two you are unpleasant; from three to five you are annoyed and irritated; five to seven; you are very angry and will blurt out anything (the words we speak when we are hungry is like a bullet that is already released from a run; we cannot take it back) beyond seven means you are completely out of control and anything can happen—severe physical damage or even death.

You may ask being humane, how to completely eliminate anger. The key is not letting anger grow beyong the level of annoyance. We are humans and being annoyed is natural; there is nothing wrong in it. The key is to understand anger at the formative stages and never let it grow beyond point five or beyond the level of being annoyed.

There are a few things that can help us overcome the initial trigger:

(1) Drop the luggage—anger is often the result of accumulated resentment. Often we are like ragpickers—picking each negative word that is spoken about us and each negative experience that we come across and keep loading them onto the huge sack of memory and carrying that over our shoulders with great difficulty. Nobody is asking us to carry this luggage; we are doing it ourselves. As long as we carry this luggage, we will continue to be resentful and hence angry. But luckily we can drop that whole luggage in a second by just releasing our hand and be free of resentments.  

(2) Take a few deep breaths

(3) Take bath—if you are at home and if you are annoyed, take bath; it will wash away the bitterness and 

rejuvenate you

But the key to understand anger is to understand and practice forgiveness. I would want to suggest five easy steps that will help us practice forgiveness:

1) Forgive yourself: the practice of forgiveness should start with ourselves. Often we forgive others but not ourselves—I did this I did that; stop cursing yourself and forgive yourself.  

 2) Forgive others—if you can forgive yourself, we will find it easy to forgive others

 3) Allow others to forgive you—this is equally important as forgiving others. If the other person come to you for reconciliation, don’t resist; accept it gracefully—allow others to forgive you   

4) Forgive God—it may seem misleading or even blasphemous, but let me explain. There are a lot of things around us and on planet earth that we are not happy about and complain about—it rains at the wrong time, water supply is bad, road is not wide enough, traffic is horrible. As humans, we tend to think we are perfect and everything else is imperfect We tend to keep on complaining about things happening around us and tend to think it is because God created an imperfect world. Actually it is the other way around, the creator has created everything well. It is just that we are either hampering the Gods creation or fails to see it in the right perspective. Forgiving God means accepting things and people as they are; and not as you want them to be.  

5) Allow God to forgive you—often we tend to classify things as forgivable and unforgivable and think God will never forgive you for certain things that you did or said. That is wrong: God is
merciful enough to forgive all our lapses—big or small. 

So, deciding not to be a puppet as per changing situations and in the hands of others is the first step towards understanding anger. Once you understand anger and how it operates, it is easier to be aware when anger arises. If you can be aware of aware of anger the very moment it begin to manifest, it will vanish like mist under hot Sun.