Letting Out Your Anger Is Not the Same as Letting Go
By: Vandita Kapoor
Tags: Self-awareness, Anger, Mindfulness

Letting Out Your Anger Is Not the Same as Letting Go Vandita Kapoor Jul 26·3 min read

Or why punching pillows = bad.

You may or may not already know this, but this is something I read today and it felt right to see it validated — that the old way of dealing with anger — of “letting it all out” — doesn’t, as it turns out, really work when you do it indiscriminately.

Here’s an article where you can read more about this.

The thing that really stuck with me while reading this was the bit about how expressing your rage in an attempt to deal with it actually strengthens the neural pathways for anger.

From the article:

…encouraging people to act out their anger makes them relive it in their bodies, strengthening the neural pathways for anger and making it easier to get angry the next time around.

So, when you play-act your anger on a pillow or by punching things, you may be letting it out, but you’re not actually letting go.

You’re instead teaching your body what it feels like to do this thing. Our bodies don’t care that we’re doing the wrong thing with the right intentions. The body is just getting better at expressing rage.

You’re reinforcing the anger.

I’m giving space to my feelings. Isn’t that a good thing?

Noticing and expressing are not the same. I can notice my anger arise and choose to not do anything about it. If I notice it for long enough, it has a habit of eventually dissipating.

Making space for noticing is good. That’s what we do in mindfulness and many types of meditation. You notice your anger. You see that it’s there.

I like to think of it, like many of my other emotions, like a child.

This… anger child is the one that’s really, really prone to throwing a tantrum.

So mad!

Anger child is likely to calm down if you pay attention to it. Not attention to the exact words it's screaming or all the reasons (good reasons, of course, from the perspective of the child) why its face is red and body is twisted in frustration.

If you instead just notice that it’s there — just that, just seeing it be there— then it has a habit of calming down. It might even get up, dust itself off, and go for a nice stroll by the river.

The kind of attention you’d not want to give your anger child is: putting it up on a stage and asking it to show you exactly how and why it's so angry. (i.e., don’t practice stomping on things and screaming into pillows)

You can also (inefficiently) respond by getting angry at your anger child. In this case, to paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh, you now have two angers where before you had only one! Don’t get mad at yourself for being mad. It’s just more work.

By not treating the reasons behind your anger as automatically valid and by simply noticing it instead, something else might happen that I find interesting.

When you no longer find yourself frustrated by the immediate problems in front of you, you gain the space to notice with more depth. It’s like 3-D vision for your intangible insides.

You may discover there is something that truly does make you feel ill at ease, in which case you can go about changing it. Or you might find that actually, now that you’ve got your anger child to stop screaming, your life is pretty sweet just the way it is.