For most people, social media is where much of the venting takes place. Photo: Stocksy
you'll only make it worse. According to a recent study published in NYMag,
venting about problems might feel validating or cathartic in the
moment. But researchers have found that "expressing anger preserve[s]
rather than reduces the hostile feelings".
This conclusion is the
culmination of over 40 years of research which has found that letting
off steam is doing the opposite of what you think it's doing. This is
why we don't feel better getting it off our chest. Instead, we feel
adrenalised and, as one psychologist told NYMag, ready to "scream, shout, swear, hit, and kick".
After
40 years, why bring it up now? Well... There's this thing you might
have heard of called social media. And it's gone from a place where you
do perfectly innocent things like creep on your ex-lover or show off
your kids to a world of throbbing outrage and gleeful group shaming. Choire Sicha, writing for Slate last year, described the online formula thusly, "Start with a broad world view, pick an example, and add umbrage."
Now, I love to get my rage on. I've stood, finger pointed sternly in the air, to rant about everything from coffee to a catchphrase, all the while maintaining that rage is necessary. But is it? Is getting worked up over reading glasses, for example, really going to alter the moral arc of the universe?
Advertisement
This is not to say that anger is unimportant. In fact, if we're discussing social change, rage is a significant vehicle through which to
motivate us out of the status quo and ensure that voices which are
normally silenced are heard. In her essay on systemic violence, feminist
academic Xochitl Alvizo writes, "Anger is part of the work of love". Alvizo cites Beverly Harrison in that essay who has said that "Anger is – and it always is – a sign of some resistance in ourselves to the moral quality of the social relations in which we are immersed".
In his book, Between the World and Me,
Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks of his admiration for civil rights activist
Malcolm X precisely because of his anger. "He was unconcerned with
making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their
belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it
was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver." Writer Clementine Ford
echoes that same sentiment
and rightly so. This is the burden of writers and activists – to keep
their anger ablaze so the rest of us don't forget how far we have to go.
But,
sometimes, we frail humans and our status updates get it backward. We
feel an emotion, like anxiety, or powerlessness, or rejection, and
quickly look for a reason why – not inside of ourselves, as therapists
recommend, but outside, to others - online.
Writing on the psychology of anger,
Dr Harry Mills points out that "Part of the transmutation of pain into
anger involves an attention shift – from self-focus to other-focus.
Anger thus temporarily protects people from having to recognise and deal
with their painful real feelings".
When we're connected so
closely to the world and all of its grievances, it's sometimes easy to
hook our emotional funk onto a cause, while telling ourselves that what
we see before us is A PATHETIC EXCUSE FOR HUMANITY. In its most violent
and disruptive form, it's called trolling and, while the argument seems
like a straw man, the outrage often stems from something deeper – the
wounded ego.
We should of course talk about hideous bosses. We
should tweet about quarrelsome toddlers. We need to sign a petition
demanding something better. Because sharing such information has the
proven ability to bring people together.
But here's the clincher. Whether it's speaking out against social
injustice or letting off steam about your ride into work, psychologists
recommend that after your face returns to its usual colour, you sit back
and find a way to a solution.
The reason is simple: anxiety and
anger are closely linked. Indeed, they feed off each other. Researchers
have gone so far as to point out that "anger and Generalised Anxiety Disorder may be two manifestations of the same biased thought process".
Further, those who tend to "boil inside" are generally more anxious.
Are you seeing what I'm seeing? People who "boil inside" IRL are more
likely to let off the rage valve online.
As one former troll candidly puts
it "trolling as an impulse has always been largely the domain of white
men — and especially of those acutely aware of a world where the
theoretical foundation of their inherited power is crumbling. They — we —
are all anxious."
This is not to suggest that you start spinning
positives where there are none. "Well, after my car broke down a pigeon
pooped on my face, which was awesome!" But, rather, allow space to find
out why we're angry. If this sort of New Age yoga preaching makes you
want to scream - hey, I hear you. That's why we have alternatives like
wine and pizza and, you know, our ex on the internet.
