how does meditation help with anger issues?
Meditation absolutely helps with anger issues and emotional regulation in general. In a neuroscientific context, much of this occurs due to meditation’s effect both on the limbic system and on the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is our higher executive function. It is what tells us that we shouldn’t strangle the person at whom we are mad. It allows us to override our emotional urges. The limbic system is what activates during trauma and extreme emotional states, among other functions it has. Studies using brain imaging have shown interesting ways meditation impacts these areas.
So how does meditation help with anger issues?
What does it mean to be overwhelmed by an emotion? It means that you start using that emotion as a lens. You see yourself through that emotion. You see other people through that emotion. And you see the world through that emotion. When an emotion can distort your perception, it means you have been taken over by it. This is why we start saying and doing things we wouldn’t ordinarily–and often regret later on when we have calmed down.
Meditation practice facilitates a greater sense of self-awareness such that even when you are feeling an emotion intensely, you know that it is not a trustworthy lens upon which to orient your behaviors and thoughts. This brings us to point #2.
2. Enhanced emotional processing.
When something provokes a strong emotion in us, for example let us say anger in this context, one of two things happens. Either we feel the emotion and then it passes or we latch on to the emotion. Emotions are sticky things and this “latching” happens if we try to push the emotion away or if we fixate on the emotion. In both cases, the same thing is happening: the mind is tuning into the emotion.
When the mind tunes into an emotion, it creates a feedback loop. If you feel angry, the mind can start having angry thoughts. Angry thoughts makes the body feel angrier and so the anger intensifies. Then the mind’s angry thoughts intensify so you start perceiving events and people around you through that angry lens. Everything just makes you more mad. That loop can continue for some time.
Meditation helps to disrupt this feedback loop. Even though you may feel angry, you learn how to experience it without judging it as right or wrong. When you don’t judge the emotion, your mind doesn’t get stuck to it. By not allowing the mind to tune into the same frequency as the emotion, then the emotion has no fuel to keep it going. It is like depriving a flame of oxygen; eventually it dies out.
3. De-escalation of triggers.
There are some things that just push our buttons. Why those buttons are there is a topic for the next and final point. However, as a continuation from the previous point, meditation will also de-escalate your triggers. This means that things that used to really trouble you lose their power over you.
While before I mentioned how meditation helps you to no longer be controlled by your emotions and how it can help disrupt emotions that get lodged in you, meditation can also prevent emotions from getting stuck inside you in the first place.
As your self-awareness and emotional processing mature, you will better notice your changes in emotional states as they happen in the moment. Many of us don’t notice the signs of rising emotion until it is a full-blown experience or until we start experiencing the physiological symptoms of an emotion. Meditation allows us to be more tuned into our inner state and aware of changes as they happen.
Why is this helpful? Because it is very difficult to dislodge anger when you are already in a rage. But it is much easier to avoid getting into a rage in the first place. Why? When an emotion gets stuck inside you, it is because you have identified with it. Example: “I am angry.” And when we identify with something, we don’t want to let it go. If we can notice the rising of an emotion, we realize it isn’t us. It is just another passing experience. You were here before the emotion, you are here during the emotion, and you are here after the emotion. What comes and goes is not you; it is just an experience.
Therefore, when you can notice the way you react to triggers, you can actually be present and allow your reactions to come and go without feeding into them. It also means it is more difficult for your reactions to overwhelm you.
4. Digestion of conditioned emotional imprints.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, meditation helps you to digest your conditioning and emotional imprints. This is our “baggage” that we have been carrying with us.
A chronically angry person is not angry all the time. But that anger is just beneath the surface, ready to come out at a moment’s notice. The moment an angry person is given a good excuse to be angry, they will unleash it. Eckhart Tolle calls this phenomenon the “pain body,” which I think is a helpful concept.
The pain body is the accumulation of all our negative past emotional imprints and our conditioned responses. Some people have a pain body that is always ready to explode, others have a pain body buried deep inside. Either way, if we want to be free from our past, at ease in the present, and truly open to the future, we must digest the imprints that comprise the pain body.
This is the effect of long-term meditation practice. This is the essence of self-work and healing. And this is the best service you can render the world: freeing the world from your own ignorance, your tendency to inflict your suffering upon other people.
The effects that I have described in points 1-4 tend to occur in that order when you undertake meditation practice.
First you develop the self-awareness to feel your emotions without dancing to their tunes, without allowing your emotions to obscure and intoxicate your perspective. Then you learn how to disrupt the feedback loops when you are overtaken by intense states of emotion. You essentially learn how to choose peace over emotional angst. After that, your awareness matures to the extent that you can allow emotions to come and go without deluding, confusing, or otherwise getting stuck in you. And lastly, once you stop being so challenged by your emotions in the present moment, you start to digest all the wounds, imprints, and baggage from the past.
All of this more or less happens at once but you will likely notice these effects in that order.
Start your meditation practice and let me know how it goes for you. :)
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