The Vicious Cycle of Stress and Anger

Craig 00:02 

Stress and anger mutually reinforce each other in a vicious cycle of negative emotion. In this episode, I discuss why this is and what you can do to avoid falling into this downward spiral.

Welcome to Live Well and Flourish, where I help you understand what it means to live a flourishing life. I'm your host, Craig Van Slyke. If you're ready to think beyond material and external success, if you're ready to take control of who you are and the kind of life you live, if you're ready to flourish, this is the podcast for you.

Over the last few episodes I’ve been talking about stress, what causes it and how to manage it. Today I want to add anger into the mix. Stress and anger are pretty closely linked in an oddly reciprocal relationship. Stress can lead to anger and anger can lead to stress resulting in a vicious cycle that's harmful to your well-being. Let’s look at how this might play out.

Craig 01:10 

Suppose you’re overloaded at work. A too-heavy workload is a common cause of stress. The feelings of stress you experience might cause tension, anxiety and worry. You try to deal with the stress by prioritizing your work. Temporarily, this adds even more to your workload, making you even more exhausted and susceptible to anger. So you’re trying to figure out your priorities, a co-worker comes up and asks you if you want to grab a long lunch. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but you think “What a jackass! Here I am drowning in this work and this clown is taking a long lunch!” So you snap, “No! I have too much to do to take a long lunch” while giving your poor co-worker a scowl. You, being a good person, pretty quickly realize this is an inappropriate over-reaction so you take a deep breath and, despite your pounding pulse and residual frustration, you tamp down your anger and say, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped at you. Normally, I’d love to go, but I just don’t have time today, but you guys enjoy your lunch.” And you get back to your pile of work, but now you’re feeling guilty about your response, which makes you even more stressed … and more prone to get angry at whatever comes up next.

Craig 02:32 

Now let’s dissect this little scenario. What happened here?

Stress occurs when the demands on you exceed your resources for dealing with those demands. Overload is one of the “big three” causes of stress, along with uncertainty and isolation. (If you wanna learn more about these causes of stress, check out episode 64 at livewellandflourish.com/64.) Stress pops up when you encounter something in your environment (a stressor) that puts you into overload. In our little example, the overload was brought on by being overworked. You're overworked, so you feel stressed.

Craig 03:09 

But your brain doesn’t like feeling stressed, so you try to do something to relieve the stress, you try to cope. In our scenario, you’re trying to cope by prioritizing your work. But, coping responses involve mental and emotional work, which can lead to being even more exhausted. Feeling exhausted depletes your emotional and cognitive resources, making you more susceptible to anger. So, things that you would normally shrug off make you angry, like an innocent co-working asking if you wanna go to lunch. Most of us don’t like feeling angry, so we try to do something to deal with the anger, which you did in our scenario by trying to calm down and apologizing. Just like coping with stress, dealing with anger involves work, which adds to being overloaded, and you get even more stressed, which makes you more prone to anger, which leads to more stress … and well, you get the idea.

Craig 04:07 

There are several underlying reasons for the vicious cycle of stress and anger, but the core cause is fatigue, this often comes from dealing with a lot of stress. When you feel tired, your cognitive capacity is reduced, which makes it harder to regulate your emotions effectively, leading to heightened emotional responses (like snapping at a co-worker). Fatigue also lowers your tolerance for frustration, making you prone to irritability and anger, even in response to trivial annoyances. Being worn out also heightens your stress response, making you even more prone to anger. So it's a bad situation. Finally, fatigue can affect your judgment and decision-making abilities, which can lead  to misinterpretations or overreactions, triggering feelings of anger.

Craig 04:56 

I want to take a couple of minutes to discuss a hidden cause of a lot of our stress … emotional labor, which is just the management and regulation of emotional expressions in accordance with societal or occupational norms. (I feel like I shouldn't have said "just" in front of all of that) We live in a (mostly) civil society that is governed by certain norms of behavior. In other words, there are socially acceptable and unacceptable behavioral responses to common events. Politely declining a lunch invitation is acceptable, yelling at a co-worker is not. But we’re not automatons (that's a fun words) … at least not yet. It’s pretty natural to have an initial feeling of frustration, irritation, or anger when a coworker interrupts your work, especially when you’re already feeling stressed and overworked. But, you know that snapping at your colleague isn’t socially acceptable. As a result, you take steps to regulate your initial emotional reaction, and this involves work … sometimes A LOT of work. This work is emotional labor. Some jobs, such as those that are customer facing and emergency service jobs, are especially prone to emotional labor, but all of us face emotional labor from time to time. Social norms affect our personal lives as well. 

Craig 06:13 

Some families and cultures find it perfectly acceptable to express emotions, sometimes quite loudly, while in other societies and families, expressing extreme emotions is frowned upon. But even in expressive groups, some emotional outbursts are against the norm, so all of us face emotional labor to some extent. And when it gets to be too much, the added burden of emotional labor can cause stress … and anger.

This is the important point here. There are stress and anger consequences to emotional labor. Although emotional labor helps us fit into societal roles and norms, it can become a substantial burden when it’s excessive or constant. The work involved with regulating your emotions exacerbates feelings of stress, which may also make you quicker to anger. Understanding this can be a huge step in managing your emotional health and your interactions with others.

Craig 07:10 

It feels like I’m painting a pretty pessimistic picture here, but there are some steps you can take and ways you can think that can reduce the vicious stress-anger cycle. I’m going to draw on two of my favorite philosophies here, Aristotle’s ethics and Stoicism.

Aristotle’s ethics makes two important points that are relevant to our discussion here. The first is the “Golden” mean and the second is Aristotle’s process of practice-habit-being, which I’ll get to in just a minute. Briefly, the golden mean is finding the midpoint between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency … in other words, it’s finding the right balance between too much and too little of something. Keep in mind that it’s not the literal midpoint, but rather finding the “virtuous balance” of what’s appropriate in a particular situation.

Regarding emotions, you need to find the right balance between excessive emotional suppression and overexpression … this is the Golden mean of emotional regulation and labor. In terms of emotional labor, this balance could be achieved by allowing yourself to feel and express emotions honestly, without being overwhelmed by them, and without overwhelming others.

Craig 08:27 

Here’s the key … to do this successfully, you need to understand that feeling and expressing emotions are different things … You can feel an emotion without expressing it, this is part of being an adult. You probably do this all the time without really thinking about it.

But there’s something really critical to understand. Every time you feel an emotion and don’t express it, you experience emotional labor and its consequences. So, it’s important to get better at emotional labor. But, how can you do this?  Well, here’s where we can combine Aristotle's practice-habit-being and Stoicism. Aristotle’s practice-habit-being approach basically says that to make something part of who you are … part of your being, you first have to consciously and intentionally practice that thing. Over time, it becomes habit, and eventually part of your being. The critical part of this is that when something becomes habitual and part of your being, acting in accordance with that thing requires very little effort.

Craig 09:32 

Let me give you an example I’ve mentioned before on this podcast, my anger and driving. I used to be a fairly angry driver, sometimes yelling (well, not just sometimes), often yelling at other drivers (with my windows rolled up … they usually had no clue). Because my anger had big negative effect on my lovely wife Tracy, I started practicing dialing it back significantly. This took effort, but over time and through conscious practice, I started to tamp down my anger more or less automatically, and over more time, I just became a calmer driver. Yeah, I sometimes slip, and I can see Tracy rolling her eyes right now, but it’s much, much better … I swear. At first, I got a bit stressed by controlling my anger, but these days I mostly don’t think about it. I just stay calm … or at least calmer.

Craig 10:31 

So, how did I pull off this feat? Well, I turned to Stoicism. When you’re stuck in traffic, there’s not much you can do about it, that’s what it means to be stuck. So, what’s the point of getting upset? Stoicism teaches that some things are in your control and some are not. This simple precept can be tremendously helpful in dealing with negative emotions like stress and anger. To paraphrase the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, it’s not events that upset us, it’s our opinion of those events. So it wasn’t the traffic that stressed me out, it was my reaction to the traffic. As I’ve said repeatedly, you CAN choose not to get upset. It IS within your power. But, it takes practice, which brings us back to Aristotle's practice-habit-being method. I had to consciously and intentionally practice being a calmer driver, which led to habitually reacting more calmly and finally being a calmer driver. Putting effort into increasing your ability to regulate your emotions and therefore reduce your stress and anger is a pretty solid investment in your emotional well-being and in the well-being of those around you.

Craig 11:44  

Now, it might be tempting to address emotional labor by just ignoring societal norms, but that’s really not a good option. Although it’s fine to challenge harmful or overly restrictive norms, a healthy well-being requires connections with others. This means that you need to balance the needs of others with our need for personal emotional well-being. This balance sometimes requires aligning our behavior with societal norms. To do otherwise runs the risk of causing distress in others, and the possibility of social isolation, which is a major cause of stress. It can help to keep in mind that societal norms aren’t inherently good or bad. They exist to smooth social interactions. That being said, sometimes norms cause undue emotional regulation and therefore may be unhealthy. Norms can also be unjust. In these cases, the costs of violating the norms may be worthwhile. Aristotle’s Golden Mean can help here. The goal isn’t to completely eliminate emotional labor (which isn’t really possible anyway). The goal is to find a balance that allows for healthy emotional expression without causing unnecessary distress or disregarding the needs and feelings of others.

Craig 13:00 

So, what can you do to help prevent the downward, vicious cycle of stress and anger? Here are three things you can do this week to break the cycle.

My first suggestion, and it’s going to take some time to pay off, is to increase your emotional regulation abilities through conscious practice. Just like regular exercise builds your physical endurance, conscious practice can build your emotional regulation endurance. Really, it goes further than that. Through practice, you can not only make emotional regulation a habit, requiring less labor, you will simply be a person with emotional control.

My second and third suggestions offer specific practices that can help. When you face a stressful situation or feel anger creeping in, apply what we can call the “Plan and Pause” technique. Oops, I think I got that backwards, it's the "Pause and Plan" technique. When you feel stress and anger creeping in take a few deep breaths, then ask yourself the following questions: “What am I feeling? Why am I feeling this way? Is my reaction proportional to the situation?” By doing this you’re practicing emotional regulation in the heat of the moment, allowing yourself to respond rather than react.

Craig 14:18 

My final suggestion is to practice mental venting. This involves recognizing and validating your emotional state, rather than suppressing it or ignoring it. The trick is to mentally vent, but not dwell excessively on the emotion. You just allow yourself to feel the anger, frustration, or stress and acknowledge that it’s OK to have these feelings. Mentally venting gives you the space you need to regulate your emotional response to a constructive end. All of these are forms of taking control, which as I discussed before, help reduce your stress.

Remember, you’re GOING to feel emotions, it's part of being human, you can’t, and shouldn’t want to escape emotions. But you can and should take control of the extent to which you feel and express negative emotions. You control your emotions, your emotions don’t control you. Keep in mind that none of this will happen overnight. As they say, it’s a process … but it’s one that’s beyond worthwhile.

Our closing quote comes from Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher, “You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will gain strength.”

Until next time, be well my friends.

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Until next time.