Your Hidden Dangers of Unhealthy Anger: Breaking the Cycle
© 2024 Richard Chandler, MA, LPC
Unhealthy anger has far-reaching effects, jeopardizing relationships with others and ourselves. This article delves into the hidden dangers of unhealthy anger, exploring its impact on self-perception, physical health, and emotional well-being. By understanding the impact of unhealthy anger, we can transform our relationship with anger in healthier ways.
Note: This article is part of our “Healthy and Unhealthy Anger” series. You will find “Healthy Vs. Unhealthy Anger: Can Getting Mad Be OK?” on this website. The series explores the impact of unhealthy anger on various types of relationships, including romantic relationships, professional relationships, and friendships.
What are some Dangers of Unhealthy Anger?
Unhealthy anger, when not properly managed, can bring about a host of negative impacts. It’s often compared to drinking poison and expecting another person to suffer. Anger can lead to emotional trauma and physical health issues that impact your perception of yourself and your relationship with others.
Five Ways Unhealthy Anger Harms You:
- Emotional trauma: Constant anger can inflict psychological harm, potentially leading to mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety.
- Physical health issues: Chronic anger can lead to a host of physical problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and weakened immune function.
- Self-perception: Unhealthy anger often distorts self-image, leading individuals to view themselves as victims or inherently defective.
- Self-destructive behaviors: Chronic anger can trigger harmful behaviors such as substance abuse, self-harm, or reckless actions.
- Stalled personal growth and development: Unhealthy anger often prevents individuals from effectively addressing personal shortcomings. It shifts blame onto others, preventing introspection and personal growth.
In addition to the impact of unhealthy anger on oneself, anger can severely impact relationships with others, leading to isolation, misunderstanding, and potentially damaging those connections beyond repair.
How Does Unhealthy Anger Impact Your Brain?
Our brains evolved to favor repetition. They default to the familiar and the well-practiced. This principle holds for any thought pattern, including those deemed unhealthy or destructive, such as anger.
The more frequently you express anger in inappropriate or harmful ways, the more ingrained this behavioral pattern becomes. It’s as if each repeated episode of anger is a step along a path. Initially, this path might be little more than a faint trail, barely discernible amid the undergrowth of your mind’s many thoughts and emotions.
But each time you tread a path of anger, it becomes more defined and pronounced. In time, it evolves from a trail into a well-trodden path, from a path into a paved road. And it doesn’t stop there. As anger continues, the road expands into a highway and then an interstate. Your pattern of unhealthy anger can become a wide and easily accessible route your mind unconsciously travels down with little effort and awareness.
This metaphorical highway represents anger patterns that have become all too familiar and easy to slip into. Because we’ve traversed this route so many times, it becomes increasingly difficult to change course.
It’s challenging to forge a new path when the old one is well-established and immediately accessible. However, understanding this pattern is the first step towards making that change and finding healthier ways to manage anger.
What is the Physical Toll of Unhealthy Anger Over Hours and Days?
Unhealthy anger can have long-term physical impacts on our bodies:
- Anger can prompt an intense adrenaline rush that can momentarily feel invigorating as a feeling of power and confidence.
- But this deceptive sense of power and control is detrimental in the long run.
- The energy that unhealthy anger generates is not sustainable and depletes the body’s energy reserves.
- Once we deplete these reserves, which can happen quite rapidly, they can take an extended period to restore fully.
How Unhealthy Anger May Damage Your Body Over Weeks, Months and Years
Results of sustained unhealthy anger could include:
- Overwhelming physical exhaustion that can affect a person’s daily functioning.
- Our reserves may not be fully restored, leading to immune system weakness.
- Damage to vital organs, especially the heart. The emotional stress of anger increases heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of stress hormones, which can lead to numerous heart issues. These complications may include but are not limited to heart attacks, a severe and potentially fatal condition.
Hence, managing and controlling unhealthy anger is crucial to maintaining optimal physical health.
The Vicious Cycle of Unhealthy Anger and Victimhood
Harboring unhealthy anger can lead to the development of a skewed, distorted worldview.
- You may perceive the world through a discolored lens of victimhood, where it feels as though everyone else around you is deliberately trying to make your life more challenging than it needs to be.
- Victim mentality can lead to feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and self-pity. You might even start believing that you cannot change or improve your current situation.
- Unhealthy anger can lead to a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle of victimhood, which can be incredibly difficult to break free from without the proper guidance and support.
Breaking the Cycle of Unhealthy Anger
Overcoming the recurring cycle of unhealthy anger is challenging, especially when one tries to tackle it without help. The first step is acknowledging and identifying when one falls into one’s habitual anger pattern. The more awareness one brings to an unhealthy anger pattern, the more easily one can interrupt and reverse it.
A key aspect of recognizing your anger pattern involves carefully observing and understanding your thoughts, physical sensations, emotions, and behaviors associated with anger. It requires a conscious effort to notice these signs and know how they contribute to your anger pattern.
Once you have recognized the pattern, you are armed with the knowledge to begin interrupting it. With this awareness, you can seek and implement healthier responses to situations that previously would have triggered your anger. Doing so is a significant step towards managing unhealthy anger, leading to a more peaceful and balanced life.