Mad as Hell
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Red-alert ready Don't get hooked Who's a hot head? Get it off your chest Five steps to serenity How do you channel your anger?  << back to Work/Life Balance << back to ANF Women's Forum |
Whether you explode, simmer, stonewall or pout, the science is in: anger isn’t always bad for you; it can make you a better, healthier person. This article is re-printed courtesy of
Women's Health magazine. Red-alert ready First, the bad news: 30 years ago, scientists reported that type A personalities – competitive, impatient, aggressive – were more likely to suffer heart attacks. The flurry of studies that followed showed this wasn’t entirely true. Only some type A traits were linked to heart disease. Ambition and drive weren’t risk factors; anger and hostility were. Since then, research has linked anger to any number of maladies, including migraines, depression, eating disorders, disturbed sleep and pain during intercourse. A study conducted in 2002 at the University of Miami revealed women who are highly angry during pregnancy are more likely to have newborns with disrupted sleep patterns and inferior motor skills. Anger can even land you in the dentist’s chair: a Harvard University study of 42,523 health professionals found that subjects who reported feeling angry on a daily basis had a 43 per cent higher risk of developing gum disease. In Australia, more than 300 serious cases of road rage are reported each year. Results of a 2005 poll conducted by academic journal UrbanStudies of more than 1620 adult Australians revealed that in a one-month period, one third of respondents had been cut off, bumped, given filthy looks and/or copped an earful of bad language from another driver. How rude! Now for the good news: if handled well, anger can help guide us to stronger relationships, more successful careers and greater overall contentment. The positive potential of anger is of special interest to Dr Sally Stabb, a psychologist at Texas Woman’s University who heads The Anger Project with psychologist Dr Deborah Cox-Hulgus and psychotherapist Karin Bruckner. After seven years of research, they have ample evidence to prove just how badly women manage – or don’t manage – their anger. Here’s the short list: we suppress it, internalise it, explode at our partner when we’re angry at our boss, and express our pique indirectly through sighs, snarky comments, gossip or other passive-aggressive tactics. Ouch. Grant Brecht, a Sydney-based clinical psychologist and author of six books in the Sorting Out series, including Sorting Out Stress and Sorting Out Worry (both $19.95, Prentice Hall) says women who internalise their anger can bring on physical illness. “There was a study in the UK a decade ago that discovered one of the predictive reasons female breast cancer victims get recurrent tumours was whether they suppress their anger.” Brecht recalls the pleasant, caring woman who was so angry she stabbed herself repeatedly with a fork and severed a major blood vessel. The reason for her anger? “This woman couldn’t get over the fact her friend didn’t stick up for her in an argument 15 years ago. She had harboured this anger for all that time, only to take it out on herself.” Brecht calls it the “I’ll get you, you son of a bitch, for what you’ve done to me” syndrome. “People internalise this anger in the hope of one day getting back at that person for what they’ve done, but in the end they may take it out on themselves instead.” That said, Stabb, Cox-Hulgus and Bruckner’s research also revealed that many women put their anger to good use, gaining wisdom, clarity and inspiration as a result of some of their pissed-off moments. Suddenly, the researchers had a new concept – positive anger – and a title for their 2003 book: The Anger Advantage (available from amazon.com). “Anger alerts us to injustice, betrayal and insult,” Dr Stabb says. “In relationships, it tells us where our boundaries are. It helps us define who we are.” Even those with a front-row view of the damage extreme anger causes agree that it can still be a good thing. Part of clinical psychologist and author of Getting Control of Your Anger ($34.95, McGraw Hill Publishers) Dr Robert Allan’s practice involves teaching patients with heart disease to manage their stress, because unbridled anger puts them at risk for heart attacks. Still, even Dr Allan concedes, “Anger is a very powerful, important emotion, and it can be a wonderful tool.” |
