Cabrearse no es tan malo

How to be happy in life: let out your anger


* Amelia Hill, social affairs correspondent
* The Observer, Sunday 1 March 2009
* Article history



The Pogues. Dirty old town. Una canción irlandesa por parte de unos "cabreados"

Conventional advice about keeping a stiff upper lip and staying cool can damage your career and lower your satisfaction in life, according to new research. If you want to be promoted and attain true happiness, you should get angry.

According to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a piece of research that has tracked the lives of 824 men and women since 1965, those who repress their frustration are at least three times more likely to admit they had hit a glass ceiling in their careers and have disappointing personal lives. On the other hand, the study found, those who learned to harness and channel their anger were far more likely to be professionally well-established, as well as enjoying emotional and physical intimacy with their friends and family.

Professor George Vaillant, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, has spent the last 44 years as director of the Study of Adult Development, based at the Harvard University Health Service. "People think of anger as a terribly dangerous emotion and are encouraged to practise 'positive thinking', but we find that approach is self-defeating and ultimately a damaging denial of dreadful reality," he said. "Negative emotions such as fear and anger are inborn and are of tremendous importance. Negative emotions are often crucial for survival: careful experiments such as ours have documented that negative emotions narrow and focus attention so we can concentrate on the trees instead of the forest."

Vaillant criticises the boom in anti-anger, mood-stabilising drugs and the growing market for anger-management counselling and classes. He believes that, while uncontrolled exhibitions of anger are destructive, learning to positively channel our anger serves a vital role in our wellbeing. Internalising the emotion can cause depression, health problems and communication difficulties.

"Psychologists, having dealt for generations with damaged psyches, should now be engaged in the psychological equivalent of reverse engineering," he said. "We all feel anger, but individuals who learn how to express their anger while avoiding the explosive and self-destructive consequences of unbridled fury have achieved something incredibly powerful in terms of overall emotional growth and mental health. If we can define and harness those skills, we can use them to achieve great things."

Dr Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and author of Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, agrees. She believes properly expressed anger can help to clarify relationship problems and also clinch business deals, fuel political agendas and give people a sense of control during uncertain times. More globally, she said, it can inspire an entire culture to change for the better - as witnessed by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the earlier women's suffrage movement. "To paraphrase Malcolm X, there's a time and a place for anger, where nothing else will do."

Dr James Averill, a University of Massachusetts Amherst psychologist, believes anger has a bad name because it is erroneously associated with violence. In a study of everyday anger, Averill found that angry episodes helped strengthen relationships about half the time and only lead to violence in less than 10% of cases. "Anger can be used to aid intimate relationships, work interactions and political expression," said Averill. "When you look at everyday episodes of anger, as opposed to those that have more dramatic outcomes, the results are usually positive."

Dr Howard Kassinove, co-author of Anger Management: The Complete Treatment Guidebook for Practice, recently published a study of more than 2,000 adults in the Journal of Social Behaviour and Personality in which more than 55% said an angry episode produced a positive outcome.

Almost a third of participants also admitted that the episode helped them see their own faults.

"People who are targets of anger in these studies will say things like, 'I really understand the other person much better now - I guess I wasn't listening before'," said Kassinove. "While assertive expression is always preferable to angry expression, anger may serve an important alerting function that leads to deeper understanding of the other person and the problem."

The philosopher and author Alain de Botton agrees that anger is a misunderstood emotion. "Though philosophers have traditionally been concerned with the pursuit of happiness, far greater wisdom would seem to lie in pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy," he said. "The stubborn recurrence of anger means the development of a workable approach to it must surely outstrip the value of any utopian quest for happiness."
Let it out

Constructive anger...

... involves both people, not just the angry party. In a best-case scenario, the angry person expresses his or her anger to the target, and the target hears the person and reacts appropriately.

... is framed by the injured party in terms of solving a mutual problem rather than used by them as a chance to vent their feelings.

... increases people's sense of control, provides a sense of certainty and prepares people for action.

La frase del día

9. I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.
W. C. Fields