Can You Be Addicted to Anger?
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When you feel negative emotions on a regular basis, you might want to ask yourself: Can you be addicted to anger?
Anger is not harmful until you start to lash out and hurt your relationships or your health.
Just like love, anger puts out chemicals in our brains that we can get addicted to. This happens because anger is a survival emotion and is meant to be short lived.
Unless you are in a fight for your life, your anger is generally a reaction to a threat to your ego and your addiction to your anger is really an addiction to the identity you would like to protect.
How the Addiction Works in Your Brain
Inside your brain, you have an inner-part that is your primitive brain. It is responsible for all your instinctual reactions.
Considering this, anger is an instinctual reaction to a type of threat or danger. Many times the threat is to the person we are striving to be.
On the other hand, the outer layer of your brain is the part that is responsible for the wisest parts of you. This is where you are able to problem solve and work through situations.
During a trigger, like anger, your wise brain goes offline and it can be very hard to think rationally. You go into a primitive reaction like fight, flight, fawn, or freeze.
At some point in your life this reaction got you out of a stressful situation. Because of this, you automatically respond and might not even know why.
How an Addiction to Anger Works With Your Ego
Your ego needs to be right because there are actual neurons that are wired up in your brain that explain the world to you.
To illustrate this, imagine you were constantly making new meaning of your environment and your beliefs, your brain would be overloaded. Consequently, it wires up with the ideas of “right and wrong”.
This harms you when your wiring makes someone else so wrong to the point that it makes you angry.
While you are angry at others, you are then superior to others. This superiority feeds what we know as the ego and can keep us in a conflict for far too long.
But, you cannot beat yourself up, because your ego is there to help the world make sense and to keep you safe.
What Can You Do?
Have you heard the phrase, you need to feel it to heal it?
Well, anger is no different.
To begin, you will need to really notice things that activate your anger. Then, you will have to actually feel the anger and understand why it is trying to protect you.
Then you will have to learn to love yourself while managing your anger. While working on this, you will go through certain phases to dissolve your triggers.
Start Managing Your Anger
Overall, your anger is natural and shoving it down or ignoring it, will only take away from your ability to manage your reactions. Your angry reactions take away from your relationships with others and with yourself.
Therefore, it is time to start managing your anger in a healthy way that supports your boundaries and your growth. You are worthy of a life of peace and grace. Unfortunately, when we are addicted to anger, we end up focusing on things that irritate, frustrate, or drive us crazy.
A positive focus with an anger management program can support more and more moments of calm confidence and inner peace.
Dr. Autumn Thomas
Does an anger management program sound like the next step for you? Purchase our program here.
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