Aargh!!
Anger isn't a pleasant feeling. But it can help push you to overcome obstacles and achieve challenging goals, so don't try to avoid, suppress or ignore it, but harness its power for your purposes, says Heather Lench, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University.
Writing in the popular-science magazine Scientific American, Lench says anger is a signal that you've encountered a challenge to a goal you care about. When it hits you, she says, you should "stop, orient to what’s happening and consider the best way to respond" to achieve your goal. Then act accordingly.
She gives an example: "In an argument with a romantic partner, if your long-term aim is to improve the relationship, anger can motivate appropriate next steps, including expressing your needs, working to a compromise and listening."
Focusing on reaching the more immediate goal of winning the argument, however, may cause you to raise your voice, ignore your partner's perspective and act aggressively - to the detriment of your relationship.
Another example: You're working on an important project and your computer keeps crashing. Your anger could motivate you to take the device to a repair shop, or to smash it on the floor. Both actions remove the obstacle, but only the former furthers your long-term goal, namely completing the project.
To test the effect of anger on achieving challenging goals, Lench and her colleagues designed a series of experiments in which some of the more than 1,000 participants were given tasks meant to make them angry, while others were given tasks that weren't. All of them then completed tasks involving a clear goal, along with a challenge to that goal.
Lench says the research team repeatedly found that the participants who got angry quickest were more successful than the others in mastering the challenges - they were more persistent, for example. When the goals weren't challenging though, getting angry didn't improve outcomes.
The findings don't mean you should deliberately get yourself riled up in order to achieve a goal, clarifies Lench, because anger can lead to actions having serious negative consequences. But whenever you do feel anger, "don't push it away," she says. Make it work for you.
