Two things a man should never be angry at: what he can help, and what he cannot help.
- Thomas Fuller
First of all, this quote deals with the management of anger, one of the strongest human emotions. Fuller implies that we can either control it or let it run loose. He suggests that if we want to control it we need to understand the root of the anger and whether the investment of emotional energy that anger requires is worth the investment.
In general, anger expressed is never worth the investment of emotional energy it requires. Furthermore, it tends to do more harm to the angry person than to the object of the outburst. It never does any good over the long term.
Mostly we don't realize how much harm anger can do to us. Anger, especially when held as a grudge over a long period of time, can depress the immune system, opening the possibility for organ failure or disease. That's pretty serious, especially as it's a form of self harm.
Even in a short term bout of anger, the immune system takes a sharp downward spike so that during the period of anger the angry person may have little or no defence against attack by rogue bacteria or viruses. While an angry person is shaking a clenched fist at or giving the finger to someone who has given offence, serious trouble may be brewing inside his own body. And he will know nothing about it, until tragedy strikes and a doctor gives the bad news.
There is no point in getting angry at something you can help because if you can do something about it, you should do it and get on with your life. No problem getts better become someone gets angry about it.
If you can't help the problem, there is no point in getting angry because no one else can help you with it either. Sometimes life sucks, but it's just like hitting a pothole in the road with a wheel of your car, you drive on and forget about it.
Why do we even have the emotion we call anger? If it's so self destructive, how did it even evolve and why don't we evolve it out of ourselves?
Evolution is taking place within our species now. We are in the midst of evolutionary progress whereby the female vagina is moving from access from the rear to access only from the front. Slightly more than half of today's women lack a clitoris. And around 35 percent of us never develop wisdom teeth. These changes simply happen so slowly that we don't notice.
We could evolve anger out of our species, but that would mean giving up one of the most critical responses to danger, the fight or flight response. Anger is nothing more than the fight or flight response extended over a longer period of time.
The fight or flight response allows us to quickly evaluate a potentially dangerous situation, then choose to deal with it (fight, in a loose sense of the word) or get out of the way (flight). If we are crossing a road and suddenly see a bus bearing down on us, it wouldn't be wise for us to have to weight all of the options as to how to respond to the situation, requiring a brain process that takes far too much time for our own safety.
With the fight or flight response, a heavy dose of epinephrine (better known by its trade name Adrenalin) races through our bloodstream, making our nerves and muscles almost instantly ready to respond to whatever the brain decides we should do--tackle the matter in a confrontation or get out of the way. As humans rarely win confrontations with buses, we need almost instant response to save our life.
That same surge of epinephrine goes through someone who is in the process of getting angry. Some people can go from calm to full blown anger in the same time it takes a Porsche to go from zero to 60 mph. Unfortunately, that is when the brain process of evaluating a situation to determine the best possible course of action, the one that takes much longer than fight or flight, should kick in. For some, it doesn't.
For others, it does. We have experienced, either by being personally involved or by being onlookers to others in situations, the danger of emotionally violent responses that end up with hurt, regret and repentance later. So we have conditioned ourselves to make that longer brain process kick in instead of the fight or flight response that produces anger.
That's a matter of rigid training or of personal discipline of the self.
Road rage is an obvious example of people who take the stupid behaviour of someone too personally (it's rarely intended to be taken as offence) and allow their fight or flight response to take over. The "fight" part dominates and the person exhibits some form of rage, often an illegal behaviour, but he doesn't consider that at the time because he doesn't have time to think about it.
Implicit in Thomas Fuller's advice is that we should think, thoroughly and clearly, when a situation presents itself that could develop an anger response. Not only is it wise to avoid doing harm to our own health, it's not smart to ruin relationships or break the law in a bout of anger.
Anger is within our own control. All it takes is practice and some self discipline.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children important life lessons, such as how to avoid doing harm through anger and how to master their emotions.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label rage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rage. Show all posts
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
An Important Life Lesson
God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.
- The Qu'ran
The greatest opposition that most people face about changing themselves is from themselves.
The greatest deterrent to social change resides with those who want social change but are not willing to do anything to advance the cause.
The most severe reason why our world's worst problems continue and often get worse is because people complain about them but refuse to work together to make anything different.
Why this reluctance? We want to look after ourselves and to protect or secure what we know as our greatest priority.
Nothing in the world changes unless and until humans change it. Excluding climate and weather, of course, which have the ability to change themselves as consequences of outside influences (usually from the sun).
Why do we not want things to change? Most of us face too much change around us every day. We have equipment that breaks down, commitments that get delayed because others didn't keep theirs to us, a bill we forgot to pay on time, upsets with loved ones, weather and illness that prevents us from doing what we had planned. The list of factors that affect our lives is endless and most of them we have little or no control over.
We don't want to have to change ourselves because too much is changing around us already that we can't control. So, what's he big deal? Why are we so focussed on ourselves that we're prepared to ignore problems we could solve elsewhere?
Somebody told us that we should be able to control our lives. Somebody led us to believe that we would one day reach a plateau where we would have mastered enough skills and have enough control that only minor things could go wrong. Somebody told us that one we day we could "have it made." Somebody told us we could have the perfect job and the perfect mate.
Those happened when we were kids. Those same people, trying to be encouraging and helpful, neglected to tell us that we are fallible, that we have weaknesses, that we would inevitably trust people who would lie to us and break our trust, that nobody is perfect including us, that our hearts would be broken. That sometimes life gets us down so much we think it sucks.
They also didn't give us the information we needed to understand that mistakes and failures are inevitabilities of life. Or the skills to be able to cope with life's downturns that sometimes make impending disaster seem certain.
They didn't teach us that worrying produces nothing and only does harm. Worry never solves anything, absolutely nothing. It not only wastes time, it harms our health and often our relationships with those closest to us. We worry when we think something might happen. We worry for ages, though what we worry about almost never happens.
This is the base from which we approach each new day. Change? Who the hell wants change when the world is swirling around us at a pace we can't keep up with?
Here's a suggestion. Let's teach kids the lessons that we wish we had been taught ourselves. Let's give them the tools they need to avoid the pitfalls we have faced and overcome in our lives. They won't avoid the pitfalls and failures, but they will be able to recover from them faster and with less grief.
Let's do that.
That's change though, isn't it? Yet a painless way to change.
While we're at it, teaching our kids, let's teach them about love. Not lust, not love of money (greed), not hero worship or domination, not abuse or addictive behaviour. These things masquerade as love in some places. Let's teach our kids about real love.
We may have to find out what real love is ourselves before we teach it. For those of us who grew up without love in our lives, finding real love is extremely hard. But doable.
That's painless. The lessons have to be searched out for many of us because they aren't taught commonly to all kids.
Let's teach our kids to have self respect and to respect others. If they love themselves, they won't have trouble respecting others. That's easy. And painless.
But it is change. And it won't happen by itself.
A saying I learned as a child went "God helps those who help themselves. And God help those who are caught helping themselves." It was a kind of ironic joke.
I like the version in the holy book better: God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.
What's to argue? It costs nothing. It will ease the pain of life's miseries.
Eventually it will make for a happier, more loving, more charitable and more peaceful world.
It's worth a little of your time.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that provides the means to make social change without upset or revolution. It's a peaceful way to make changes in ways that will not defy any political ideology or religion.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- The Qu'ran
The greatest opposition that most people face about changing themselves is from themselves.
The greatest deterrent to social change resides with those who want social change but are not willing to do anything to advance the cause.
The most severe reason why our world's worst problems continue and often get worse is because people complain about them but refuse to work together to make anything different.
Why this reluctance? We want to look after ourselves and to protect or secure what we know as our greatest priority.
Nothing in the world changes unless and until humans change it. Excluding climate and weather, of course, which have the ability to change themselves as consequences of outside influences (usually from the sun).
Why do we not want things to change? Most of us face too much change around us every day. We have equipment that breaks down, commitments that get delayed because others didn't keep theirs to us, a bill we forgot to pay on time, upsets with loved ones, weather and illness that prevents us from doing what we had planned. The list of factors that affect our lives is endless and most of them we have little or no control over.
We don't want to have to change ourselves because too much is changing around us already that we can't control. So, what's he big deal? Why are we so focussed on ourselves that we're prepared to ignore problems we could solve elsewhere?
Somebody told us that we should be able to control our lives. Somebody led us to believe that we would one day reach a plateau where we would have mastered enough skills and have enough control that only minor things could go wrong. Somebody told us that one we day we could "have it made." Somebody told us we could have the perfect job and the perfect mate.
Those happened when we were kids. Those same people, trying to be encouraging and helpful, neglected to tell us that we are fallible, that we have weaknesses, that we would inevitably trust people who would lie to us and break our trust, that nobody is perfect including us, that our hearts would be broken. That sometimes life gets us down so much we think it sucks.
They also didn't give us the information we needed to understand that mistakes and failures are inevitabilities of life. Or the skills to be able to cope with life's downturns that sometimes make impending disaster seem certain.
They didn't teach us that worrying produces nothing and only does harm. Worry never solves anything, absolutely nothing. It not only wastes time, it harms our health and often our relationships with those closest to us. We worry when we think something might happen. We worry for ages, though what we worry about almost never happens.
This is the base from which we approach each new day. Change? Who the hell wants change when the world is swirling around us at a pace we can't keep up with?
Here's a suggestion. Let's teach kids the lessons that we wish we had been taught ourselves. Let's give them the tools they need to avoid the pitfalls we have faced and overcome in our lives. They won't avoid the pitfalls and failures, but they will be able to recover from them faster and with less grief.
Let's do that.
That's change though, isn't it? Yet a painless way to change.
While we're at it, teaching our kids, let's teach them about love. Not lust, not love of money (greed), not hero worship or domination, not abuse or addictive behaviour. These things masquerade as love in some places. Let's teach our kids about real love.
We may have to find out what real love is ourselves before we teach it. For those of us who grew up without love in our lives, finding real love is extremely hard. But doable.
That's painless. The lessons have to be searched out for many of us because they aren't taught commonly to all kids.
Let's teach our kids to have self respect and to respect others. If they love themselves, they won't have trouble respecting others. That's easy. And painless.
But it is change. And it won't happen by itself.
A saying I learned as a child went "God helps those who help themselves. And God help those who are caught helping themselves." It was a kind of ironic joke.
I like the version in the holy book better: God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.
What's to argue? It costs nothing. It will ease the pain of life's miseries.
Eventually it will make for a happier, more loving, more charitable and more peaceful world.
It's worth a little of your time.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that provides the means to make social change without upset or revolution. It's a peaceful way to make changes in ways that will not defy any political ideology or religion.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Rise Above The Dumbosity Of Others
Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
- Rene Descartes, philosopher and mathematician (1596-1650)
This way of dealing with offences would be very difficult today because so many people act in offensive ways, by intention and by their neglect of commitments they have made.
Developer of the dualistic theory (or philosophy) of mind and matter--everything we know can be designated to one category or the other--Descartes fully believed that more exists than can be attributed to either matter or energy. Science today tries to teach us different from that, claiming that anything beyond matter and energy is pure fantasy or hallucination.
Using this theory of everything that is known, called materialism, science today encourages us to believe that anything that cannot be proven to exist or that at least doesn't have the potential to be proven is nothing more than imagination. That includes the concept of God, which materialists believe is fantasy.
So believers in materialism have created their own god, known to some as manna, to others as money. They believe that any activity that has nothing to do with either the acquisition of money (including investing it) or the spending of money is worthless, time wasted. Money, they claim, has provable value.
One of the key problems of materialists attributing so much to human imagination is that imagination cannot be designated as either energy or matter. Imagination, itself, defies category in materialist terms. So does free will. So do ESP (extra-sensory perception), presentiment, telepathy, premonition, foreboding, precognition, the Evil Eye (some form of which exists in almost every culture on earth) and even the sense of being started at or watched from behind you. An abundance of both carefully conducted scientific experimentation and collected anecdotes exists to prove all of these.
As one Indian materialist scientist told me recently, "I like living in a world where I know that everything can be proven to exist." As I have a great deal of respect for the intellect of this man, I held myself back from telling him that I refused to believe that he exists because he might be nothing more than a fraudulent persona on the Internet.
Sometimes we just have to rise above temptations that will serve no good to engage in. That's the point Descartes was making. Sometimes the issues simply aren't worth the trouble. Often the offender isn't.
To have the ability to detach yourself from the temptation to engage in worthless debate or argument with no possibility of concluding satisfactorily because at least one party persists in intellectual blindness is one clear mark of wisdom.
Refusing to engage in debate or argument where you might lose, but gain knowledge in the process, does not qualify as wisdom. It qualifies as intellectual cowardice.
The world is filled with people who function barely above the level of retardedness. It doesn't need any more people who are reticent about participating in discussion on topics other than work, the weather or sports for fear of being shown up as knowing very little.
It's amazing how much you can learn by losing an argument you thought out well and presented with confidence. Or by listening with a critical ear.
Humankind did not get this far in its evolution by avoiding thinking. Though, to judge by many people we meet each day, you might wonder.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, when and what to teach children so that they can be lifelong learners who will not step back from fruitful discussion and learning or teaching opportunities.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Rene Descartes, philosopher and mathematician (1596-1650)
This way of dealing with offences would be very difficult today because so many people act in offensive ways, by intention and by their neglect of commitments they have made.
Developer of the dualistic theory (or philosophy) of mind and matter--everything we know can be designated to one category or the other--Descartes fully believed that more exists than can be attributed to either matter or energy. Science today tries to teach us different from that, claiming that anything beyond matter and energy is pure fantasy or hallucination.
Using this theory of everything that is known, called materialism, science today encourages us to believe that anything that cannot be proven to exist or that at least doesn't have the potential to be proven is nothing more than imagination. That includes the concept of God, which materialists believe is fantasy.
So believers in materialism have created their own god, known to some as manna, to others as money. They believe that any activity that has nothing to do with either the acquisition of money (including investing it) or the spending of money is worthless, time wasted. Money, they claim, has provable value.
One of the key problems of materialists attributing so much to human imagination is that imagination cannot be designated as either energy or matter. Imagination, itself, defies category in materialist terms. So does free will. So do ESP (extra-sensory perception), presentiment, telepathy, premonition, foreboding, precognition, the Evil Eye (some form of which exists in almost every culture on earth) and even the sense of being started at or watched from behind you. An abundance of both carefully conducted scientific experimentation and collected anecdotes exists to prove all of these.
As one Indian materialist scientist told me recently, "I like living in a world where I know that everything can be proven to exist." As I have a great deal of respect for the intellect of this man, I held myself back from telling him that I refused to believe that he exists because he might be nothing more than a fraudulent persona on the Internet.
Sometimes we just have to rise above temptations that will serve no good to engage in. That's the point Descartes was making. Sometimes the issues simply aren't worth the trouble. Often the offender isn't.
To have the ability to detach yourself from the temptation to engage in worthless debate or argument with no possibility of concluding satisfactorily because at least one party persists in intellectual blindness is one clear mark of wisdom.
Refusing to engage in debate or argument where you might lose, but gain knowledge in the process, does not qualify as wisdom. It qualifies as intellectual cowardice.
The world is filled with people who function barely above the level of retardedness. It doesn't need any more people who are reticent about participating in discussion on topics other than work, the weather or sports for fear of being shown up as knowing very little.
It's amazing how much you can learn by losing an argument you thought out well and presented with confidence. Or by listening with a critical ear.
Humankind did not get this far in its evolution by avoiding thinking. Though, to judge by many people we meet each day, you might wonder.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, when and what to teach children so that they can be lifelong learners who will not step back from fruitful discussion and learning or teaching opportunities.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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