Rage Addiction

There are certain unhealthy mental patterns that I find myself returning to over and over. They bubble to the surface when I’m not paying close enough attention to my thoughts, when I’m letting my brain stumble around unsupervised. Sometimes, my conscious mind suddenly awakens and observes where my thoughts have wandered and I’ll find myself in a very negative state, unsure of how I got there. All I was doing was riding my bicycle to work and suddenly I’m seething with anger.

If certain thoughts come up often enough, they become habits and then addictions. In his book, “How To Change Your Mind” psychologist Michael Pollon describes the mind as a snowy hill. If certain paths are traveled over and over, they become slippery and well-worn. As the mind goes about its daily functions, it’s easy to slide down the hill into a lower form of consciousness via the predictable paths. For me, this usually means practicing some angry speech. Maybe it’s a snappy response I should have delivered or what I’m planning on saying next time the subject comes up.

Is this a common experience? I think it must be, based on what I see on my facebook feed: a lot of angry rants insisting on the one and only true perspective with any alternative being stupid and inferior.

A study published in Science called “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind” showed that when we allow our minds to drift away from the present moment, the thoughts we come up with are usually negative. I think of social media as the collective wandering mind, it’s where we go to distract ourselves from the present moment. The things we choose to dwell on collectively also tend to be negative. This study on which emotions go viral the fastest showed that no emotion moves speedier than rage. As researchers followed certain emotions being shared on social media, they saw that “In many cases, these flare-ups triggered a chain reaction of anger, with User A influencing Users B and C, and outward in a widening circle of hostility”

I’ve heard it called outrage porn before. I’ve gotten off on it, haven’t you? When Kavanaugh got confirmed I found myself scrolling and scrolling, searching for more anger and pain to consume. Skipping past the baby pictures and nature panoramas to get to the good stuff: the wrath, the conniption, the trauma.

Rage is a seductive demon. It’s an addiction, literally. There’s even a chemical high associated with it. In the enraged state our brain releases cortisol, the stress hormone. When the neural synapse is flooded with cortisol, certain regions of the brain become more sensitive to dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for pleasure and satisfaction. It’s possible to get addicted to the euphoric high from a rage-induced dopamine rush. This is why there is something inherently gratifying about ripping into one’s enemies, at least temporarily.

In some sense, when humans are enraged, this is us at our best. We are the latest link in a long evolutionary chain that has left us with the traits we need in order to best ensure our survival. It’s evolutionarily favorable to assume the worst about people and perceive them as a threat. This activates our fight or flight instincts that kept us alive when others were eaten.

Rage can be a great motivator. It fills us with a desire to take action and change things. Just look at all the activism that’s launching in the wake of Trump’s presidency. Liberal Americans are pissed. There is a lot to be pissed about. It’s tempting to ride this wave of cortisol as far as it will take us and fuel an entire revolution with it. However, like any addictive substance, motivation from cortisol is unsustainable and it has quite severe negative side effects. A stroll through Wikipedia taught me that prolonged exposure to cortisol reduces bone formation, depletes the immune system, inhibits memory retrieval, and damages cells in the hippocampus, resulting in impaired learning. In other words: constant rage is making us weak and dumb.

I’ve been spending time meditating lately. During meditation, I try to watch my own thoughts pass by without attaching to them or identifying with them. I concentrate on feeling all the sensations in my body, noticing what my breath is doing and where I’m holding tension. I’ve noticed that rage starts in my  body and then my brain starts desperately grasping at thoughts to rationalize the rage I already feel. This kind of reminds me of Libet’s spooky experiment in free will, where it was shown that the body is preparing for an action before the brain has made the conscious decision to execute that action. My body has already decided it wants that rage high before I come up with the thoughts to justify it. Once I get my mind riffing on something that’s sure to get me all spun up, I start grasping around for other things I can also feel mad about. My boyfriend and I have a joke about it where we shout “And another thing!” like George from Seinfeld. I think I can recognize this rage addiction behavior in my ranting Facebook friends as well.   

I’ve been living in Europe for a little over a year now, but I’ve been watching what’s going on back home in the USA through the distorted lens of the internet. I have a lot of angry, liberal friends (myself included) who’ve been announcing their uncompromising positions and digging themselves into foxholes, ready for battle. I’m certain this is happening on the other side as well but I see it less due to the selection effect of my friend group. In addition to keeping a vigilant watch on the news and my friends’ reaction to it, I’ve also been reading a bit of Buddhist literature and considering the notion that things can only exist in contrasts. There is no space without matter, no dark without light, no far right without a far left. As we move further and further into different extremes and sink our heels into the mud of our own self-righteousness, we are defining and creating an opposite. We generate the monsters we detest by becoming them. The angrier and more rigidly inflexible we become in our position, the more our opponents mirror our behavior. This is why the celebratory nazi punching videos terrify me.

No one is right when they are so self-assured. Each of our perspectives are incomplete and flawed, they always will be. We can only see the world through our own eyes and understand a tiny sliver of all possible experience.

From what I can tell, what’s going on in the USA right now appears to be a competition of who is the biggest victim. I have to laugh and roll my eyes at the notion that men are able to convince themselves that false accusations of sexual assault are a real threat to their safety. However, I must acknowledge the fact that if they honestly believe this, we have serious force to be reckoned with. A group of people firmly identified with victim mentality makes for a powerful weapon. This activates the fight or flight instincts, it gets the cortisol flowing.

I understand what it’s like to be consumed by the angry feeling of victimhood. I have it whenever I think about what a painful insult the Trump administration has been to women. I have it as a woman in science and engineering when I walk into meetings where I am the only woman. I have it when I stay quiet while someone makes a sexist joke so I'm not seen as a humorless bitch. I have it when I nod along while everyone in the room directs all the questions about my work to my male colleagues. I have it when people assume I’m not going to be able to play the drums, or when they are surprised that I can, or when they make a big deal about the fact that I can play the drums AND I’m a woman. I have it when men assume they have more outdoors experience than me. I have it when I think about groups of men legislating what I can and can’t do with my own body. I have it when I think about how I want to travel the world and go on big solo adventures but there are places I can’t go because the world is less safe for women.

See? Even now I’m getting spun up. I could keep riffing on this and spiral even further into angry vehemence, surfing the cortisol wave. My brain could keep snatching up justifications for as long as it takes until I find something to ground me back into the present moment. I’m not saying these aren’t legitimate things to be angry about. I’m saying that reacting to these things with anger is not strategic. It’s hurting me mentally and physically and it’s usually makes things worse.

If you want to change the behavior of someone who cares about you, an alternative approach that is sometimes more effective is to show vulnerability about how you are hurting rather than anger. Personal anecdote: My boyfriend doesn’t really like it when I talk about sexism. This is partly because it’s not fun to be around me when I get all pissed off and partly because he feels victimized when I point out male privilege. One time, in a moment of openness and vulnerability, I told him that it really hurts me when people suggest that women are inferior and that we don’t matter. He seemed to have a light-bulb moment where he was like, “Oh, all I see is the anger.” As though he had never considered there was hurt behind the anger. Like it’s just some irrational rage spiral that I slip into from time to time because I like feeling that way. Which is true, in some sense. Rage gets me high, as I explained above. That doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate things to be angry about that are hurting me and negatively impacting my life.

I read a story about a domestic violence support group for women in India. One women sat down with her husband and openly expressed to him how it makes her feel when he abuses her. He had never had to confront the fact that his physical violence hurts her spirit and her emotions in addition to her body. He was so moved by her honesty and vulnerability that he wept and promised to change.

However, while occasionally more effective, reframing the argument from anger to a vulnerable expression of hurt comes with greater risk. It’s not a safe bet that the inflictors of pain care whether or not they are hurting you or that they will believe you that it hurts. We saw this in the senators who voted yes on Kavanaugh after hearing Dr. Ford’s testimony. Everyone believed that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Dr. Ford, I can’t convince myself otherwise. They just didn’t care. It wasn’t important to them.

This is a horrible feeling, it’s worse than the original trauma. You show someone your open wound and ask for help and they kick dirt into it. I experienced this years ago when I opened up to my older sister about some childhood trauma and she called me crazy and egomaniacal and insisted I stop talking about it. She probably doesn’t realize it, but my relationship with her never fully recovered. It put a distance between us that didn’t exist before. I learned from that interaction that there are certain things that aren’t safe to share with her. However, she was right. I was being egomaniacal. I was consumed with victim mentality and this is the domain of the ego, even if the trauma behind it is real. 

So how to stop suffering when we face legitimate injustices?

So far the best solution I’ve found is to disconnect from the identity I’ve created around this story of victimhood. Disconnect from all identities. Any story that we tell ourselves and others about what makes us who we are is just an illusion created by the ego. There’s no story that could accurately explain what we are because the truth is that each one of us is everything. We are all effervescent waves in a vast ocean of one-ness. We are all expressions of God*. It embarrasses me to write cheesy platitudes like that, but this is a failing of language. As Michael Pollon says, deep truths are “notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable.”

To me, God is consciousness itself. Consciousness is, for the moment, expressing itself in biologically evolved bodies that have certain mechanisms in place to help us survive. Notably, an ego. And the ego has indeed kept us alive throughout many generations for hundreds of thousands of years, but we are arriving at a time in history when we no longer need the ego to survive. We’ve developed the technology to feed, shelter and care for every member of this planet. We have everything we need and more. It’s time to let the ego go, it doesn’t serve us anymore. As the ego dissipates so does the notion that I’ve been wronged. There is no “I” to wrong and there is no “other” to wrong me.    

As Russel Brand says, “There is no benefit to establishing an imaginary judicial system in my own mind where I carry out punishments to people who have wronged me”. Better to focus all energy that would go to victim mentality on servitude. Help and lift up others, you will be helping yourself when you do this because the person you are helping is you. The people who are inflicting pain are also you. If, in each moment you ask yourself “how can I be of service here?” and you think of how you can improve the experience of the grocery store checker or the lady at the bank or whoever you happen to be interacting with, your experience of reality is greatly enhanced.

I’m mainly saying this to myself because I need to put this into practice more than most people. I’ve scowled at plenty of TSA agents and muttered “your job sucks” as they search my bag and throw away my fruit salad. As if they don’t know their job sucks! Sometimes I’m convinced that every other person in the world is just an annoying obstacle in my way. Embodying the one-ness is hard work, but it’s good work and it’s much less exhausting than convincing myself I’m a victim and constantly being on the defense.

There is no point in being a victim. If I’m being honest here, my life is pretty damn great. I’m an extremely lucky person that’s had a privileged life and good things happen to me all the time. Compared to most other people in this world, I don’t have a claim to victimhood at all and neither do my angry Facebook friends, as far as I can tell.

I think humanity is undergoing a big spiritual change right now. Expressions of ego are changing, they are becoming larger and uglier and we move into late-stage individualism. Social media provides a platform for an exaggerated and grandiose expression of ego that is separate from our physical bodies and can therefore be artfully designed and magnified. This is the first time in history that the ego has been given such a powerful tool. Our vanity and selfishness has been able to grow to a completely unprecedented size.

I think this is a good thing. The ego has always been a problem but never before has it been so demonstrative. Social media makes egotism and self-obsession much easier to diagnose, which is the first step to a cure.

Perhaps as humans merge with technology more and more, the digital world will be the sole container for all egotism and it will be something we are able to compartmentalize, power off, and disconnect from entirely. Without a mechanism for expression of the ego, it will disappear completely and leave us with nothing but connectedness.

* Whatever that word means to you. There is a ton of baggage around the “God” word and I used to avoid using it at all costs, even when I talked to myself. Even when I was praying, I would say things like, “please universe…let this plane land safely” or whatever request I was making back when I thought that the point of divinity was to dole out favors to me as long as I promised to be good. I’ve come to a place where I’m comfortable using the God-word without evoking a childish image that was instilled into me in Christian day camp of some bearded man in the sky. I now understand that God is much vaster and all-encompassing then Christianity seems to think.