The physiology of anger

Anger has been a common theme in my blog since the beginning, and i am continually learning about what makes us angry and what triggers people to act in an angry way.

I took a physiology of psychology course last semester and was completely drawn in by the functioning of the brain. Its amazing. I learned where my stroke was,The temporal lobe, and that it controls primarily speech functioning, memory,and some visual processes. The part that struck me as interesting though had nothing to do with my speech, memory or my vision. It had to do with the interrupted pathway from my lower brain regions to my upper brain regions. Basic instincts like fear, hunger, and anger (to name just a few) were now disjoint with my frontal lobe- the part of the brain that puts reason behind those feelings.

The other interesting thing that i have learned over the past year about anger is that it happens, physiologically, before you have a chance to put a reason behind it. There is a 10-15 second window from the time you get physiologically upset to the time you can reason about it. Well, that connection wasn’t in tact for me. I would get angry and not now why. I would get sad and not have any reason for being sad. It was intense and I often had no idea how to control this. That’s when I stumbled across Thich Nhat Hanh’s book entitled Anger.

He described this ten second process as the inevitableness of becoming angry, but he put the importance on what we do after those ten seconds. This made me think of  when my mom would say “count to ten before you get mad” and actually retought me how to control whatever emotion I was feeling at the time. I slowly restructured those important areas in my brain in the left temporal lobe, and likewise, the areas on both sides that controlled the delicate interworkings from the amygdala to the pre-frontal cortex. But I highly doubt (looking back of course) that I would have recovered from my stroke so well and understood myself without the ability to stop and realize that something is screwing up inside my brain. I wasn’t an angry person, but i acted in an angry way.

The brain is amazing. The way it can restructure itself, the way that neurons from one part of the brain will switch functioning when one part of the brain is injured, its maleability, its quest to grow and function the best it can, and its complexity. Anyways, the reason I wrote this post was so that you all could understand your anger, and love it. For ten seconds you can embrace the anger, after the ten seconds you can understand what’s happening, and you can abolish your anger. You choose to become angry! Afterall, its just a ten second process. Try counting to ten (thanks mom).

After that, smile, it feels good!

Btho