Episode 12
· 19:10
Hello, and welcome to Moving Minds Forward. Today, we're talking about anger. People aren't broken, and whatever they're carrying, there's always a way forward. I didn't come to that belief through a textbook. I came to it through my own life, and through years of sitting with people who thought they were stuck for good, and found out they weren't.
Gary Johannes:I'm Gary Johannes, solution focused hypotherapist, founder of Inspired to Change, and a lecturer. And that belief that people aren't broken, and there's always a way forward, ones through everything on this podcast. One condition per episode. What's going on? What's keeping it going?
Gary Johannes:And what actually helps? Anger is something we see with many people, and I've felt it myself. But why? So today is everything I know, from lived experience and from the neuroscience of what's actually happening in your brain when it takes over. If you've said or done things in anger, or you know you've got a seemingly short fuse, this one's for you.
Gary Johannes:If you know someone who has, send it their way. And if you're getting value from Moving Minds Forward, hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening. Let's get into it. So anger. You know the moment something tips you over, a comment, a look, a car that pulls out in front of you.
Gary Johannes:And before you've had a single useful thought, you've already gone. The heat rises, the jaw sets, the words are out of your mouth before the sensible part of you has even arrived. And then, twenty minutes or so later, when it's too late, the calm version of you turns up with all the right things you could have said. Maybe you've apologized more times than you'd like to admit. Maybe you've watched the people you love go quiet and careful around you, and hate that you're the reason.
Gary Johannes:And maybe a part of you has started to wonder if this is just who you are now. So, here's the first thing I want you to hold on to. Anger is not a flaw in your character. It's one of the oldest, most useful tools your brain has. The problem isn't that you feel it.
Gary Johannes:The problem is that, right now, it's firing too fast, too hard, and at the wrong things. And that, unlike your character, can change. We're going to cover what anger actually is, what's happening in the brain when it kicks in, What causes it? What keeps it going? And what actually helps?
Gary Johannes:And I'll leave you with one thing that you can take away today. If you find this useful, hit subscribe wherever you're listening. There's a lot more to come. Let's get into it. Let's start with what anger actually is, because we get this wrong almost every time.
Gary Johannes:Anger is a normal, healthy human emotion. We all feel it. It's not bad. It's not shameful. And it's certainly not something to get rid of.
Gary Johannes:Anger is a signal that tells you something matters. It flags injustice. It gives you the energy to stand up for yourself, to defend something you love, to say, no, that's not okay.' Used well, anger is one of the most honest emotions you've got. So when we talk about anger being a problem, we're not talking about the feeling. We're talking about what happens when the feeling runs the show.
Gary Johannes:There's a difference between anger and aggression. Anger is the emotion. It happens inside you. Aggression is the behavior, what you do with it. Plenty of people feel intense anger and never raise their voice.
Gary Johannes:Others feel a flicker, and it's out the door before they can stop it. So when anger becomes a problem, it's usually one of two things: it fires too often, or when it fires, it takes over, and the behaviour that follows does damage to your relationships, to your work, and quietly, to you. Because here's the part people miss: anger doesn't only get pointed outwards. Some of us turn it inwards and sit there as resentment, as tension, as that low simmering frustration never quite switches off. Either way, it's exhausting.
Gary Johannes:And either way, it can change. Let me give you a couple of numbers, because I think they matter. A third of people in The UK say they have a close friend or family member who struggles to control their anger. And nearly half of people admit that they regularly lose their temper at work. Sit with that for a second.
Gary Johannes:This is not rare. This is not you being uniquely broken while everyone else sails through life calm and composed. This is one of the most common human struggles there is. You are in very ordinary, very large company. And the reason I lead with that isn't to make light of it.
Gary Johannes:It's because shame makes anger worse. And knowing that you're not alone is the first crack of light in that. So what's actually happening in your brain when anger takes over? Anger is the fight half of the fight or flight. It's your survival system doing exactly what it's built to do.
Gary Johannes:Deep in your brain sits a small almond shaped structure called the amygdala. Think of it as your smoker lung. Its only job is to scan for threat and to react fast. Faster than thought. When it detects danger, it doesn't wait for permission.
Gary Johannes:It floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol. Your heart speeds up. Your muscles tense. Heat rises through your chest. Your fists clench.
Gary Johannes:You are, in that instant, a body preparing to fight. And that system is brilliant if a predator is charging at you. The trouble is your amygdala can't tell the difference between a saber toothed tiger and being disrespected in a meeting. It can't tell the difference between real danger and being caught up at a junction, ignored by your kids, or criticised when you're already running on empty, to that ancient alarm, a threat to your status, your fairness, your sense of control, are always the same: danger, fight. And here's a bit that explains everything: when the amygdala takes over, it sidelines your prefrontal cortex The thinking, reason, perspective taken part of your brain.
Gary Johannes:The part right behind your forehead. The part that weighs things up. The part that knows shouting won't help. So when you're in the grip of anger and someone says, Just calm down, it doesn't work, and now you know why. The part of your brain that could calm down has effectively been taken offline.
Gary Johannes:You are, for those few seconds, running on the oldest software you've got. That's also why the clever, measured response arrives twenty or so minutes later. By then, the alarm switched off, and the thinking brain has walked back into the room. None of this is a character flaw. These are learned patterns.
Gary Johannes:And learned patterns can change. So where does it come from? For a lot of people, it starts early. Not because everything was dramatically wrong, but because we learned how to do anger by watching. If you grew up in a house where anger was the only emotion that got heard, where it was the way to be safe or seen or to get your needs met, your brain learned that.
Gary Johannes:Equally, if anger in your home was frightening, your system may have learned to be permanently on guard, primed to fire first. Then life adds to it: accumulated stress, exhaustion, disappointment, feeling unheard for years. Anger rarely turns up alone. It usually sits on top of something softer underneath. Hurt, fear, shame Anger is often the bodyguard for a feeling we don't want to look at, because anger feels strong, but here's what I want you to hear, and I mean it.
Gary Johannes:You don't need to excavate all of this to move forward. Understanding where your anger came from can be interesting. It is almost never necessary. The way out doesn't run backwards through your history. It runs forward.
Gary Johannes:So if anger is so uncomfortable, why does it stick around? Why does it keep coming back? For a few reasons. The first is rehearsal. After the moment passes, we replay it.
Gary Johannes:We go over what they said, what we should have said, how unfair it was, and every time we run that loop, we're not letting the anger settle. We're rehearsing it. We're keeping the alarm warm. The brain gets good at what it practices, and rumination is practice. The second is the payoff.
Gary Johannes:This is the uncomfortable one. In the moment, anger works. It gives you a hit of energy, a surge of power, a sense of control when you felt powerless. The relief is real and it's immediate. And that's exactly what makes it so hard to let go of.
Gary Johannes:Your brain has learned that anger gets things done. The long term cost arrives later. The short term reward arrives now. The third is what it does to people around you. As anger takes hold, those closest to you start to tread carefully.
Gary Johannes:They go quiet. They stop telling you things. Maybe they start pulling away. And the lonelier and the more isolated you feel, the more wound up and on edge you become, which makes the next outburst more likely, not less. It's a cycle that feeds itself.
Gary Johannes:Add to that broken sleep, which lowers your threshold for everything. Add the good things dropping out of your life, the exercise, the laughter, the easy time of people, because anger crowds them out. And add the narrowing of your thinking, where everything starts to look like a threat or a slight. There's a lot keeping it going. But cycles can be broken.
Gary Johannes:That's exactly what the solution focused approach does. Now, before I go on, two honest things. If your anger is frequent, intense, or affecting your life, please start with your GP. Because anger can sit alongside things worth checking. And if anger has ever spilled over into harming yourself or someone else, or you're frightened it might, that's a moment to get proper support quickly.
Gary Johannes:That's not failure. That's looking after the people you love, including yourself. With that said, here's how we actually work with this. And it's probably not what you expect. We don't spend our time digging back through every time you've lost your temper.
Gary Johannes:Going over the old ground tends to keep the brain rehearsing the very thing you want to change. Instead, we look forwards. We start with a question: What does a normal day look like when anger isn't running the show? Not a perfect life. Not sainthood.
Gary Johannes:Just normal. Just a normal Tuesday, where the junction doesn't ruin your morning. Where you can hear feedback without your chest tightening. Where the people you love relax in your company instead of bracing themselves. We get specific about that.
Gary Johannes:Because the brain moves towards what we focus on. Spend your days scanning for threats, and the brain gets better at finding it. Point it at a life you actually want, and it starts building towards that instead. Then we build on three simple pillars. Positive interaction, the connection with people that steadies your nervous system.
Gary Johannes:Positive actions, doing things that genuinely lift you, not just numb you. And positive thinking, not forced optimism, but a more accurate, less threatening way of seeing your day. And when those three things are in place, your baseline drops. And the calmer baseline means the alarm has further decline before it goes off. Small steps, repeated.
Gary Johannes:That's how the brain lays down new pathways. The same way it laid down the old ones, just pointed somewhere better. And this is where the hypnotherapy comes in. In trance, we keep the prefrontal cortex engaged. The thinking, calmer part of your brain stays online.
Gary Johannes:And we use the relaxed state to rehearse a different response. We help the brain practice the pause, the gap between the trigger and the reaction, because that gap is everything. And it can be widened one rehearsal at a time. This isn't wishful thinking. The brain's ability to rewire itself in response to repeated experience, neuroplasticity, is well established in neuroscience.
Gary Johannes:The brain can change. People can change. I've watched it in my own life, and the evidence backs it up every time. Before I close, one thing you can do, just one, your body tells you you're getting angry before your mind does. The heat in your chest, the clench in your jaw, the fist, the quickening.
Gary Johannes:Today, I want you to start noticing the early signal, The very first flicker, before the explosion. And the moment you catch it, do one thing. Breathe out slowly. Longer on the out breath than the in breath. That's not a trick.
Gary Johannes:A long, slow breath physically nudges your nervous system out of fight or flight. It tells the alarm there's no longer a tiger. It won't dissolve the anger, but it buys you half a second. And that half a second is the gap where choices live. Catch a signal.
Gary Johannes:Breathe out slow. That's it. That's where it starts. So let me speak to you directly. If you're the one struggling with this, you're not broken, you're not weak, you're not a bad person, and you're not the only one.
Gary Johannes:You have a brain that's learned somewhere along the way to reach for anger to keep you safe. It did its best with what it had. And the very same brain, the one that learned that, can learn something different. That's not me being kind. That's neuroscience.
Gary Johannes:It starts with understanding what's going on. You've just done that, and that quietly without any fanfares is a step forward. If this episode has helped, please do hit subscribe and leave us a review if you can. It helps more people find the podcast. Every episode, one condition, the same honest lens.
Gary Johannes:What's going on? What's keeping it going? And what actually helps? There's a lot more to come. And if you'd like to find out whether Inspire two Change can help with anger, we have a nationwide network of solution focused hypnotherapists across The UK.
Gary Johannes:You can find your nearest therapist, read more about how we work, and book a free initial consultation at inspiretocange.biz. The link will be in description below. Thank you. See you on the next one.
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