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Brooding is what keeps anger going
How thought feeds anger
Take someone who is angry and rehearsing all the reasons they have every right to be, and what they will say to the person when they see them. Until they notice that they are thinking, they are helplessly as angry as the course of their thinking, brooding, and telling their wife about it allows, for as long as it runs.
The minute spent lost in thought about what is making them angry is what drags through the physiology of anger. Noticing the connection between the thought and the anger is a tremendous relief to the one being mindful, and at minimum it is a degree of freedom: how long to stay angry, one minute, two, five, or ten.
Stepping off the ride
Diverting attention to something else, like rewatching a favorite show for the third time, is sometimes a good thing to do. Mindfulness, even the kind that still feels like someone aiming attention, adds the capacity to observe the mechanics of the anger and get off the ride whenever that is wanted.
What anger is for
Anger and fear are useful as salience cues, orienting a person to an emergency or a potential emergency. In dealing with the emergency they are almost never the best state to be in, and calm is better.
Why does venting keep anger going?
In a 2002 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Brad Bushman angered participants with critical feedback. Some then hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who had angered them, and others sat quietly. The group that hit the bag was more aggressive afterward, and the bag-hitters also reported feeling no better. Bushman's results ran against the popular idea that venting drains anger away.
Why do anger and fear arrive so fast?
The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux found a pathway in rats that runs from the thalamus straight to the amygdala, skipping the cortex. That route lets a threat response begin before the animal has fully identified what it saw. Walter Cannon described the resulting fight-or-flight response in 1915, with adrenaline raising heart rate and sending blood to the muscles. The speed comes at the cost of detail, since the cortex's slower reading of the scene arrives afterward.
What does anger do in the body?
In a 1983 study in Science, Paul Ekman, Robert Levenson, and Wallace Friesen asked actors to recreate emotional expressions while sensors recorded their bodies. Anger and fear both raised heart rate. Anger raised finger temperature, while fear lowered it. The study was among the first to show that different emotions produce different patterns of bodily activity.
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