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How does anger affect your body?

Anger is an instinctive human emotion, a warning sign that something is not ‘OK’, you are being blocked in your goals or your beliefs are under threat. Anger is natural, ranges from annoyance to deep rage, manifested in body and mind and filtered through the soul. There are many triggers for anger that are universal to mankind, but some are soul based, that part of you that is unique, where your character, cultural experiences or religious beliefs and feelings come together. Triggered in the limbic or instinctive part of your brain, it affects your body and energy levels.

Anger causes a heart rate increase and tense muscles creating an energy surge in your body. The adrenal glands produce stress hormones (adrenaline and cortisol). The brain is activated in the right hippocampus, the amygdala, both sides of the prefrontal cortex and the insular cortex. You could feel sick.

This is because, in anger, your body is triggered into a ‘fight or flight’ response. You are no longer using the slow thinking logical (cortex) part of the brain. The amygdala, the instinctive emotion centre has taken over triggering the adrenal glands to release the adrenaline hormones into your body, preparing it to act, such ‘fight’ or ‘flight’.  In extreme anger, you can react with involuntary violence with words or physical blows to others or yourself, causing damage. Here are seven ways anger works in your body. 

1. In Anger, your body acts from the amygdala in brain

Anger arises in your brain, in the amygdala, the area that identifies threats and works so fast that it can prompt the body into action before your cortex (the part of the brain responsible for cognitive thought and judgment) has time to process the information. In his book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, Daniel Khanneman notes that the more overloaded your brain is, the more likely you are to revert to his term for thinking ‘system 1’, the instinctive thinking from the amygdala than ‘System 2’, the system for our logical thinking in the cortex.

System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy… People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

2. Anger is triggered faster when your body is under stress

When your brain is overloaded, anger tends to be triggered by the smallest of things and you can find yourself overreacting to something quite irrelevant that would not normally induce your anger.

3.Neurotransmitters cause a surge of energy

Neurotransmitter chemicals known as catecholamines, which include dopamine epinephrine (adrenaline, also defined as a hormone) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline) are released in the brain causing a surge of energy in your body. It is also known as the adrenaline rush. Your attention narrows as your brain is solely focused on the target or your anger. Your memory can be blocked. As the heightened sense of emotion subsides, some do not recollect the event.

4. Anger affects your stomach, heart and muscles

As the amygdala in your brain is activated, the anger hormones (adrenaline and cortisol, also known as stress hormones) flood through your body. Your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, your breathing accelerates, your face becomes flushed, your muscles tense, you might get a feeling of being sick (through thousands of years of human development to survive in the wild, your body is triggered to empty the stomach so that you can run faster, oxygen is pumped to the muscles away from your stomach). Your body fully prepares to fight or run and you get what is called an ‘adrenaline rush’. Your jaw clenches, your facial muscles tense, your lips tighten, your eyebrows frown and your eyelids may be pulled down, all instinctive reactions designed to demonstrate ‘strength’.

Understanding Anger

For more information about Anger you might be interested in these other articles:

Understanding Anger/Anger Explained

How does anger affect the mind?

How does anger affect the soul?

What hormones are connected to anger?

5. Different types of anger impact your body differently

Anger can range from mild annoyance, which hardly affects you physically or mentally to outright rage, which can be dangerously out of control. It has many different facets: frustration, argumentativeness, bitterness, vengefulness, hostility. There are three types of anger reactions:

  1. Passive Aggression is used to avoid confrontation, you become silent with the target of your anger, sulk and procrastinate while pretending everything is OK. This can be annoying to others. However, it can be useful to take time out when you are in a heightened state of aroused anger to avoid causing verbal or physical damage to yourself or others. Always avoiding and internalising anger can be unhealthy as you never find a release and all the associated stress hormones, such as cortisol fester in your body, which over time causes damage such as heart issues or muscle tension. 
  2. Open Aggression is complete confrontation when you act on anger, fighting, attacking, accusing, letting your body launch into physical or verbal attacks on the target of your anger or yourself. Though ignoring anger long term is unhealthy to the body, hitting out can be equally disruptive.
  3. Assertive Anger is when you can express your anger in a measured way which limits the damage to others. Understanding your triggers, finding ways to get your cortex in your brain active into more logical thinking or to calm the hormones in your body before confrontation can be a much more successful way of facing your anger and limiting damage to your body. 

6. Anger and the related emotions in your body

Anger, grief, fear and stress or a feeling of being overwhelmed are closely related emotions, activating the same physiological reactions in the brain and other organs in your body, from heart to muscles.

Fear and anger

Much like anger, fear is a response to a ‘threat’ and triggered in the amygdala part of the brain and activating the ‘fight or flight’ response. With fear, the same hormones adrenaline and cortisol as anger are released into the body. Your heart rate goes up and your muscles tense.

Grief and anger

One of the several emotional stages that grief generates in you is anger. Your instinctive emotion anger is triggered as your brain tries to make sense of what can be perceived as an injustice in the world, particularly if it is an unusually sad event. Your body goes through all the physical symptoms of anger.

7. Sustained anger can make you ill

Living in a sustained state of anger can eventually make you ill. Anger triggers a physiological ‘fight or flight’ response. The stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline are released into your body, which in elevated levels are damaging to health, as are permanently tensed muscles.

The risks to health of prolonged anger include:

  • Increased blood pressure and heart attacks as heart rate and blood flow are increased through cortisol and adrenaline production.
  • Increased abdominal fat as excess cortisol stimulates glucose production which, as a general rule, is converted to fat.
  • Weakened immune system as overproduction of cortisol causes few receptors to be produced in immune cells and generates chronic inflammation
  • Anxiety if there is no outlet for the cortisol and ‘the fight or flight’ mechanism is not deactivated, this causes a continued sense of anxiety, cortisol levels remain elevated, and this becomes a vicious cycle.
  • Tension headaches as the muscles are tensed, poised for ‘fight or flight’ this can cause pressure in the head
  • Back pain from tensed muscles, putting pressure on parts of the body.

Instinctive emotions are like the weather, beyond your conscious control. For a balanced life, the first step is to understand human instinctive emotions, how they work and practical steps to take to avoid situations that are destructive to emotional wellbeing. Not every instinctive emotion that is acted on has positive consequences. Sometimes, it may be best to take shelter from the storm, for example, if you are so angry, it may be best to take time out to allow your body to relax from the ‘fight or flight’ mode and your mind to figure out what is going on.

Anger arises when our goals or beliefs are blocked.

Anger is a basic human emotion triggered when our goals or beliefs are blocked. We all feel it, wherever we come from. For a happy balanced life, the first step is to understand our emotions, our triggers, practical steps to take in order to avoid destructive situations.

For more information about Anger you might be interested in these other articles:

What is Anger? Understanding Anger/Anger Explained

How does anger effect the body?

How does anger affect the mind?

How does anger affect the soul?

What hormones are connected to anger?