Everyone freaks out from time to time and blows their top. But why?
What causes anger, and why does it cause us to react the way it does? Let's find out, on today's episode of Colossal Questions!
Anger might seem like it's totally a bad thing, but it's a perfectly natural emotion. In general, we tend to get angry for two basic reasons: violation of expectations and blockage of goals.
A blockage of goals happens any time something gets in the way of something you really need or want, like if you wait in line for tickets, only to find out they're sold out. And a violation of expectation happens whenever we detect a disturbance in the natural order of how we expect things to be, like when someone breaks the unwritten rules of society, like cutting in line.
Anger isn't just mental. There are physical effects, too.
Getting mad releases adrenaline, which makes your blood pressure rise, your face flush red with blood, and causes your muscles to tense up tight. Almost instantly, we try to assess who is to blame, how badly it's hurt, and what happens if we act with anger.
And maybe most importantly, we try to understand why the person did what they did to see if it's worth getting angry over. For instance, if a friend accidentally hurts you while playing a game, it's probably not a big deal.
But what if they did it on purpose? Well, then you're much more likely to get angry about it, even though the pain was the same.
Inside your brain, the amygdala, which is the part that deals with emotion, will start to react within a quarter of a second and start freaking out. But another part of the brain spins into action too, the frontal lobe, which controls logic and reason.
That part of the brain attempts to jump in and keep the emotional amygdala from having an overly angry reaction. So while anger might seem like the stupidest human emotion, and oftentimes it can be, it's actually quite a complicated balancing act to try and react the right way to anger-inducing situations.
