How to Train Your Brain Not to Get Pissed off By Others

What can we do when the wounds are still fresh and we are seething with anger to turn off all that passion so it doesn’t affect us? Can we somehow train our brains to break free of this toxic habit?

Where do Anger and Rage come from?

To overcome the irritation you feel, you need to understand what anger actually is and what triggers it in us. Emotions are created in the brain system which is related to the motives of human behavior (motivational system). Expressing them is a way to help us evaluate how effectively we are accomplishing our goals. Thus, the way these feelings are interpreted creates an emotional experience.

When a goal that we had set and was important to us is blocked and does not succeed, we feel bad. The more important this goal was, the stronger the negative emotions we experience. When this failure is caused by various uncontrollable circumstances and circumstances, then we are simply frustrated and put up with luck and those circumstances. Conversely, when someone else is the reason for the failure, then we get angry and resentful of them since they caused the problem.

From the point of view of biological evolution, the tension and aggressive posture that comes with anger make sense. If we need to fight someone who is threatening us, shouting and using physical violence is helpful. In the modern world, however, where many of our goals are conceptual and ideological in nature and their achievement does not involve the use of physical violence to help us solve our problems, anger can be less than infinitely useful.

To calm yourself and soothe these feelings when these events are still fresh, you may not be able to simply push the bad incident out of your mind and hope that it will eventually stop filling you with rage. You should focus on the person who caused you this anger. Assess if what happened was serious, if it’s the first time he’s done it or if he’s done it all the time, or if he holds a grudge against you, and if not, then you may need to forgive this person for their actions. On the other hand, if what he did seems unforgivable, you should take another strategy.

Why should we forgive and give way to anger in most cases?

First, let us consider the case of forgiveness. A growing body of evidence shows that forgiveness benefits the forgiver more than the person being forgiven.

One of the reasons we persist in being angry with someone is because their presence constantly reminds us of what they have done wrong to us. The details of the events that we keep in mind keep the events fresh. Remembering them triggers activity in the motivational center of the brain we mentioned earlier, which rekindles the original rage and starts all over again.

So when we hear someone say, “I can forgive you, but I’ll never forget what you did,” don’t believe them. When we forgive someone sincerely, then at the same time we forget the details that this person did to us, they are erased from our memory. Forgiveness and forgetting go hand in hand. Over time, forgetting makes it harder for the presence of the culprit to activate the brain’s motor system again. As a result, our body is no longer able to produce the energy needed to feel anger and rage towards the other person.

Of course, we may always be wary of them, and never be able to fully trust them again, but that is different from being driven mad and racing when we see them in front of us. Even if the relationship with them doesn’t recover, at least we won’t feel angry with them forever.

Keep some distance from them

What if you really can’t forgive someone? Will you fatally experience, every time you see them, in vivid detail the events of your last fight? Not necessarily. Even when you are unable to forgive someone, you don’t need to expose yourself to situations that keep anger levels high towards them. The strength of your emotional response to a person depends on the degree of psychological commitment you have to them.

Often, when you are angry with someone, you tend to think repetitively, throughout the day, about what they caused you. This keeps you emotionally committed to feeling wronged. Psychologists call this repetitive thought pattern “rumination,” taken from the term we’ve given to the way cows chew their food.

To avoid dwelling on such negative thoughts, keep yourself at some psychological distance from the situation. Focus on other aspects of your life. When you think about the situation, change your perspective and imagine what a third person, perhaps a mutual friend, would say about it. By forcing yourself to look at events from the outside, you force your mind to think about the situation more neutrally. Thus, the finer details of what this person did to you will be less accessible, resulting in less impact on your emotional state.

Retouch the facts

Finally, it’s worth noting that anger tends to lock us into a certain way of thinking about what happened. The interpretation we gave and repeated becomes a wound that will not heal.

An alternative approach is to find other ways to characterize the situation. Phrases like “No bad no good” are really meaningful psychologically speaking because they encourage us to look at our current situation in a different way. The problem that someone else caused you can turn into a good opportunity for you that could not have existed if this setback.