• Processing anger is more doable if it is broken down into its components.
• Anger is a powerful, necessary, and hard wired survival reflex. You cannot tame it with the conscious brain.
• It is an acquired skill that requires ongoing “adult education” in order to refine it.
• Framing the approaches in terms of an “anger academy” will help you rethink the complexity of anger and enable you to deal with its parts in a focused manner.
• Developing a “working relationship with anger” is your degree.
• It an expertise that you will be using daily indefinitely.

Anxiety is the sensation you feel when you sense real or perceived danger and anger represents a more intense reaction when you can’t solve the threat. They are hard-wired responses that are present in every living creature and sustain life. The only way to lower them is to decrease your levels of the stress hormones, inflammatory markers, and metabolism (rate of fuel consumption). You cannot reason with or control the flight or fight response. It is as effective as talking to the hard drive of your computer – can’t work. Consciousness elicits the same threat physiology, but you can’t escape it. Consider how much of your life’s energy is consumed by battling these unpleasant emotions.

There are two distinct aspects of deep healing.

• Learning tools to neutralize and lower these survival reactions
• Placing your energies and attention on creating the life you want.

Healing occurs as you move into wellness and away from the pain circuits. What doesn’t work is using “fun” and other activities to counteract these emotions. The bottom line is that you want to minimize your time in threat physiology and learn to create mental and physical safety. Regardless of the site of intervention, processing anger is focused on lowering the levels of the hormones and inflammation caused by your threat response.

You can directly lower these hormones, increase the resiliency of your nervous system, and learn to change the nature of your input. All three areas are important and require different tools. We are going to use the metaphor of a boarding academy to conceptualize the various strategies.

Welcome to “Anger Academy”

Visualize a walking onto a beautiful campus and seeing the main building bordered by two departmental ones. There is an entry gate with a security guard, and you must be carefully screened before you are allowed be on the grounds. The three buildings represent:

• Output – the student center/ food/ spa/ lounge – Main building
• Your nervous system – engineering and design center – on your right
• Input – educational/ training center – on your left

The curriculum – Enrollment

It is most desirable on a given day or moment to have your “output” or your body’s neurochemical state in a range that is neutral or relaxed. The more time you can spend in this state the better. But, anger is inevitable, and it is important to use it only when necessary and be careful not to cause damage–especially to those who are close to you. The final physiological response is affected by 1) the reactivity of your nervous system and 2) the content of your input. It is a dynamic process that varies from minute to minute.

The state of your nervous system is influenced by your prior programming, current circumstances, and how you are caring for your body. For example, lack of sleep and exercise along with a highly inflammatory diet will elevate your levels of inflammation and compromise your coping skills.

Daily stresses are often overwhelming. If you come from a challenging and chaotic childhood, it is hard to feel safe because maybe you really never knew what that was like. Consider the hypervigilance of a feral cat compared to a pampered domestic one. It is difficult to truly tame a cat who had to fend for itself from birth. It takes less stress to set off the threat response and this is also hardwired in for each individual.

Output is clearly affected by your “input.” There are two categories of input.

• What are you choosing to put into your nervous system?
• What are you holding onto from the past?

The first step is becoming aware of the nature and effects of your ongoing input. Once you have some clarity, there are multiple strategies to alter it. It is a deeply personal process.

Security gate

The security area represents the current state of your body’s chemistry, and it can vary from a profile of being content and safe to upset and inflamed. Of course, the reason you are coming to this institution is that you are trapped in pain and the levels of frustration often reach a level of rage. The sensations are intense and powerful. Your whole body, including your brain, is full of inflammatory markers. Your brain’s blood supply is diverted from your neocortex (thinking centers) to the lower centers that are meant more for basic survival. In this state it is not possible to think clearly or absorb new information. So, before you can enter the university to master anger processing skills, you must first normalize this inflammatory state. Your “output” is hypervigilant, which is the outcome of being trapped for any reason.

The “security guard” will take your temperature, vital signs, and see if you are calm enough to engage in the learning the skills to process anger. This is not a small step, in that anger is the greatest block to healing. There are many facets to it; it is powerful, and most people don’t want to give it up because it keeps you safe – whether the sense of safety is real or perceived.

If you are fired up, you can leave and return another day, or you can hang out in the spa just outside of the campus intended for your use to calm down. It has a pool, hot tub, massage, sauna, gym, and soft music. It is a beautiful modern building and could not be a more relaxing place to be. You can stay as long as you would like and return anytime.

If you choose to turn around and return to your prior situation without taking some action to calm down, it is unlikely that you will be able to meet the criteria to enter the campus. Regardless, whether you calm down on your own or with some help from your time in the spa, it is the first step in being able to engage in learning the strategies to understand and deal with anger. Your brain has to come back “online.”

On the grounds

Once you are through security, you have a choice of which building you want to enter but continuing to calm yourself is probably the best option. Each one has multiple resources to help you acquire anger processing expertise.

The center main building (output) is a deluxe version of  the spa area just outside of the campus. It’s large with nice facilities and concierge services. There is no limit as to how well you are treated. You can hang out with your friends, eat great food, and kick back in the jacuzzi. There are resources to teach you to self-soothe and nurture yourself. You may want to spend more time there to re-energize before you start to work on the other aspects of anger.

The engineering and design building on the right is where you will be rebuilding and strengthening your nervous system. Every action you take today is based all of your life experiences up to this very second. It consists of your prior life programming, the state of your general health, and how skilled you already may be in using tools to calm and improve it. In essence, it is the sum total of your coping skills and resilience. Both can be refined and strengthened with a thoughtful approach.

The training/ education building on your left is where you will learn strategies to process the input from your life – all of it. What is being entered into your nervous system affects the composition of output?

CHOICES OF INPUT

Examples of what you might currently be uploading are conversations that are critical of others – either directly to them or in the form of gossip, discussing your pain and medical care, complaining, sharing a generally negative world view, watching violent TV, etc. These types of activities keep your nervous system fired up with many direct effects on your body and peace of mind.

What are you holding onto from your past that continues to agitate you? Why would you do that? The past has little if anything to do with your day. You have given your quality of life over to someone or some entity that you despise. Forgiveness is an advanced set of techniques that dramatically alters the input into your nervous system.

Your degree

An “working relationship with anger” diploma will allow you to efficiently neutralize your flight or flight response. It is one of the more practical degrees you can attain. Acquiring these skills is one of the most powerful and definitive moves you can make to take back control of your life. But remember, the first step is getting past security.

Recap

Anxiety is the sensation generated by your neurochemical response to a threat and intended to motivate you to take action to solve it. If the stress persists, your reaction will become stronger, you’ll secrete more stress chemicals, and feel anger. Anger is your body’s last ditch effort to regain control.

It is a powerful and hard wired impersonal reaction. It is also complex and involves every cell and organ system in your body. You cannot survive without it, and it is impossible to thrive if this physiological state is sustained.

Developing a “working relationship” with it involves understanding the different aspects of it and learning to minimize your time in a threat state through different portals. Do you want your life to continue to be an ongoing replay of your past or are you ready to create the life you want – from reactive to creative?

 Questions and Considerations

1. When trapped by chronic mental or physical pain, your brain and body are literally on fire. Your inflammatory markers are sky high, and you cannot think clearly. Have you considered how you feel in this state and compared it to when you are calm? Even without pain, what is the quality of your life when you are enraged?
2. Your brain is “offline” while you are angry, and it really is temporary insanity. It is humbling to consider how many “issues” disappear after you have calmed down.
3. Every living creature, including homo sapiens, has a version of this reaction. It is universal and intended to be unpleasant. So, why you take it personally? It is protective, and what you have, but not who you are.
4. Forgiveness alone is the historic approach in addressing deal anger. However, it is a big leap to forgive in light of many circumstances. Anger is a complex full body response to an uncontrollable threat and breaking it down into its components is a basic starting point to master dealing with it.

The post Anger Academy first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Anger Academy appeared first on Back in Control.

The gift of life

Every living creature, from one-celled organisms to mammals, have a reaction to threats that improves it odds of survival. It is intended to be so unpleasant that action has to be taken to resolve it. Once the danger is passed, the chemistry of the organism returns to a neutral or safe state. Humans have the additional characteristic of language and consciousness. Unpleasant thoughts and emotions cause the same reaction except that we can’t escape them. Repressed thoughts and emotions are even more problematic. Every person has to deal with this issue at some level. Although every animal has this response to danger, humans have labeled it “anxiety”. It describes your total bodily response to threat; it is not the cause. It signals danger and it is the pain – and also a gift.

It is critical that you separate your identity from this powerful reaction. It is amoral and unpleasant and not who you are.  The first step is to get rid of the word, “anxiety” from your vocabulary and substitute, “elevated stress chemicals” or “survival response.” So, regardless of how you accomplish it, lowering your stress hormones and levels of inflammatory proteins/cells decreases this unpleasant sensation. It does not respond rational means.

When your stresses overwhelm the coping capacity of your nervous system, you will experience mental or physical symptoms. There are ways of increasing the resiliency of your nervous system and also methods to process stress so it has less of an impact. But this response is part of life and inevitable. When it occurs, you will want to minimize the time spent in this state. This set of tools directly lower your elevated stress reaction.

Taking control of your body’s neurochemical state

Much of the effect is modulated through the vagus nerve, which is at the core of the autonomic nervous system. It is calming and strongly anti-inflammatory. Many of these suggestions directly stimulate this nerve.

Changing sensory input

• • Active meditation/mindfulness – you are placing your attention on something more pleasant.
  • Deep tissue or light touch massage
  • A cold compress to the face (Mäkinen), especially after exercising or if acutely stressed.
  • Connecting with nature – historically a basic aspect of the human experience.
    • Walking barefoot in the sand.
    • “Hearing” the silence
    • Taking in all of the senses
      • Birdwatching
      • Learn about the flowers and trees
      • Notice different smells and fragrances
    • Awareness
      • Become aware of your feelings of anxiety and anger and train yourself to separate from and observe them.
      • Awareness is a powerful tool. A pain psychologist and close friend of mine pointed out that, “You have to feel to heal.”

Breath work directly stimulates the vagus nerve, which is strongly anti-inflammatory (Mason).

A lot of research has been done on the effectiveness of meditation. It is challenging to measure as there are so many schools of thinking that espouse different methods. However, one common factor that has  been documented in an extensive medical literature review  (Zaccaro), is slow breathing.

• A respiratory rate of < 6 breaths per minute (bpm) and < 10 bpm was consistently correlated with stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which also decreases inflammatory cytokines (communication proteins). Whether you paid attention to your breath or not, was not a factor.
• Breathing through your nose during either inspiration or expiration could be of some benefit.
• One deep breath, followed by a slow exhalation
• Meditation with deep breathing. Try using a counting method (such as 4 counts breathing in and 4 counts out; or 4 counts in, hold for 7, and release for 8)
• Alternating nostril breathing (block one nostril while breathing in and the other nostril while breathing out)
• Focus solely on your breath (Mason).

Calming activities

• • Acupuncture
  • Exercise – hard workouts
  • Biofeedback
  • Medical hypnosis
  • Yoga, Tai Chi, Chi Gong

Visualization

• • Remembering in detail the most enjoyable of your life.
    • Connect with and feel it.
  • Visualize what others are seeing when you are upset.
    • Would you be attracted to you?
    • Would you want to be around you?
    • Is this really how you want to treat those who care about you?

Decrease stimulation of your nervous system

A sensitized nervous system more quickly creates anxiety. So, it is important to be mindful of activities that fire up your brain. It is not a matter of right or wrong. The point is to observe the effects on your nervous system. Consider what you feel happening to your body when you:

• Play intense video games or watch violent movies
• Argue with family members
• Watch news that upsets you

Some additional suggestions to remain calm include:

• No discussing your pain or medical care with anyone except your health care providers.
• Limiting the time that you spend watching news and other over-simulating programs.
• Choose less intense video games.
• No complaining about anything, including the pandemic.
• No criticizing anyone. You are simply projecting your view of yourself onto them.
• No offering advice that is not requested. How do you feel when you are on the receiving end?
• No gossip

These techniques are effective and necessary short-term strategies, they can be incorporated into the larger picture to solve your pain. The bottom line is to use common sense to actively calm yourself and avoid activities that stress your nervous system. It is surprising how much difference it can make.

References:

Berk LS, et al. The neuroendocrine and stress hormone changes during mirthful laughter. Am J Med Sci (1989); 6:390–396.

Kok BE, et al. How positive emotions build physical health: perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone [published correction appears in Psychol Sci (2016); 27: 931]. Psychol Sci (2013); 24: 1123‐1132. doi:10.1177/0956797612470827.

Mäkinen TM, et al. Autonomic nervous function during whole-body cold exposure before and after cold acclimation. Aviat Space Environ Med.

Mason H, et al. Cardiovascular and respiratory effect of yogic slow breathing in the yoga beginner: what is the best approach? Evid Based Complement Alternat Med (2013); 2013:743504. doi:10.1155/2013/743504.

Miller M, et al. Positive emotions and the endothelium: Does joyful music improve vascular health? Circulation (2008); 118: S1148

Vickhoff, B, et al. Music structure determines heart rate variability of singers. Frontiers in psychology (2013); 4: 334. 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00334.

Zaccaro A, et al. How breath control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers of Neuroscience (2018); 12: 1-16.

The post Directly Calming the Threat Response first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Directly Calming the Threat Response appeared first on Back in Control.