Beating the Deadliest Killer: ANGER!!! (Part-VI)

Part VI of X Parts

(This is a 10 blog series covering the titled topic. The breaking in small parts are intended to keep the article from being too long or dry. If you like it please continue to read all the blogs of the series before you conclude anything. Share if you think that might help your loved ones. Thanks and happy reading.)

Part-II: Steps to Minimize Anger:

How often it occurred that we have planned that we would not be angry again, but we again blew it up? It happens often to many of us. The reason why anger is not easy to get rid of is that it is a primordial program which is running in human brains. It was originally, etched as one of the basic instincts of survival. When men lived in caves and went to the forests to hunt and gather food, they were under constant threat of wild beasts of prey. In facing such situation, the Flight or Fight response is the most appropriate as per the natural programming. The split second saved in jumping early out of morbid fear or the extra bit of strength derived from uncontrolled rage could have made a difference between life and death in those circumstances. Fear and Anger thus found its structural roots in the human psyche. Even today these two emotions comprise the most damaging and difficult-to-control emotions for the human creed. The two go hand in hand. Even with the progress of civilizations and humans marching from the stone age to the space age, Fear and Anger dominate the minds of so many of us. The spectre of physical danger having gone, today we often manufacture imaginary spectre of ‘Danger’ and get going. Blame it on the Amygdala, it is constantly looking for creating a hype out of nothing. Sometimes, we fear danger to our existence, sometimes danger to our freedom, sometimes danger to our beliefs, sometimes danger to our ego and whatever follows after that sense of danger is an intense reaction directed against the perceived danger.

It needs to be pointed out here that perception may actually differ from reality depending on our own conditioning or thinking patterns. A person more conditioned for fear or anger tends to have perceptions more distant from reality. Delusions and Hallucinations are only the extreme manifestations of such perceptual distortions. Once reaction is unleashed out of sense of being endangered, all hell breaks loose. All thought, said and done appear to be self-righteous directed for a great ‘Cause’ of protecting or preserving oneself. With so much sleeping and waking up occurring with the prejudices, we get ourselves so much identified with them that we forget to first check whether the ‘danger’ actually exists or not. On the contrary, our reactions become self-fulfilling prophecy because our alarm and consequent change in thoughts and behaviour causes further reaction from the perceived ‘Danger’. The vicious cycle has thus started. The seed for long term damages are sown.

(Please go over to Part-VII of this series.)