دار بيبليون
Anger: Its Physiological Effects and Treatment, Lecture of Lwiis Saliba on Zoom, Wednesday, March 12, 2025
The Negative Effects of Anger
Anger is a powerful and hurtful emotion characterized by feelings of hostility, excitement, and frustration. Like fear, anger can play a role in activating the fight-or-flight response. This is an instinct that humans share with other animals. When feelings of anger arise, we may be inclined to ward off danger and protect ourselves.
Anger has numerous psychological and physiological effects. Recent research has revealed that anger has a profound effect on the heart, brain, and digestive system, especially if it persists for a long period of time. According to the Wall Street Journal, the effects of anger go beyond the psychological and seriously affect various organs in the body.
The Effects of Anger on the Heart
According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, anger can increase the risk of heart attack because it impairs blood vessel function.
Researchers studied the effect of three different emotions on the heart: anger, anxiety, and sadness. Participants were divided into three groups, the first of which was provoked by the researchers to make them angry. The second group was induced by anxiety. The third group was triggered by feelings of sadness.
Researchers tested each participant’s blood vessels using a blood pressure monitor.
Blood flow in the angry group was worse than that observed in participants in the other two groups. Lead researcher Dr. Daichi Shimbo, a professor of medicine at Columbia University, concluded:
“We believe that extreme anger puts pressure on a person’s arteries and puts them at risk for heart disease.”
The Effect of Anger on the Digestive System
When a person becomes angry, their body secretes several proteins and hormones that increase inflammation in the body, and chronic inflammation can increase the risk of many diseases.
Dr. Stephen Loeb, director of gastroenterology at the Cleveland Clinic, points out that anger “activates the body’s sympathetic nervous system, or ‘fight or flight’ system, which shifts blood from the intestines to the major muscles, slowing its movement through the digestive tract, causing problems such as constipation.”
Furthermore, according to Stephen Loeb, anger doubles the distance between cells in the intestinal wall, allowing more food and waste to pass through these spaces, increasing inflammation that can cause symptoms such as stomach pain, bloating, or constipation.
The Effect of Anger on the Mind
Joyce Tam, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, explains that anger can impair our cognitive performance. It affects neurons in the prefrontal cortex, the frontal area of our brain that can influence attention, cognitive control, and our ability to regulate our emotions.
Joyce Tam adds: Anger can cause the body to release stress hormones into the bloodstream, and high levels of stress hormones can damage nerve cells in the brain’s prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. This damage to the prefrontal cortex can affect decision-making, attention, and executive functions. Joyce Tam goes on to point out that the hippocampus is the main part of the brain used for memory. Therefore, when neurons are damaged, it can disrupt the ability to learn and retain information.
For our part, we previously mentioned that several psychologists consider anger to be a “temporary insanity,” and this term alone is enough to visualize and predict the damage anger can cause to a person’s physiology and mind.
Tips for Managing Anger
Antonia Seligowski, assistant professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, explains in her study on the brain and the heart that the first thing to do is to examine the degree of anger—that is, to determine whether the anger is exaggerated. Indeed, temporary anger differs from chronic anger: “If you occasionally have an angry conversation or feel annoyed or upset from time to time, that’s part of the normal human experience,” she explains. “But when negative emotions are prolonged, when there are many of them, that’s when the negative impact on health lies.”
Antonia is looking into whether treatments for Mental health treatments, such as certain types of talk therapy or breathing exercises, can also treat or reduce some of the physical problems caused by anger.
Other doctors recommend anger management strategies. Dr. Stephen Loeb of the Cleveland Clinic says hypnosis and meditation can help, as can changing how you react to anger. He advises slowing down, understanding what you’re feeling, and learning how to express it, while being careful not to repress your emotions, as this can backfire and lead to worsening them. This is what the Sage Tenzin Palmo calls embracing our anger and negative emotions, instead of repressing them.
New Research on Anger Management
Japanese researchers advised angry people not to take it out on colleagues or loved ones, but to vent their anger and rage by writing down their angry thoughts and then throwing the paper they wrote them on into a trash can or a shredder.
Professor Nobuyuki Kawai of Nagoya University in central Japan said in the study, recently published in the British journal “Scientific Reports”: “We expected our method to alleviate anger to some extent. However, we were surprised to find that this emotion regulation technique almost completely erased anger.”
Kawai continued: “This study showed that the physical act of throwing away a piece of paper containing written (negative) thoughts about the causes of an anger-provoking event calmed anger, while simply holding the piece of paper did not have this effect.” About 100 students participated in an experiment in which they were asked to give their opinions in writing on social issues such as banning smoking in public places and others. The responses were then reviewed by doctoral researchers, but they deliberately gave each student poor marks in terms of intelligence, writing quality, logic, and rationality, sometimes accompanied by very harsh remarks.
After receiving their graded assignments, the participants were asked to write their feelings on a piece of paper. Half of them were then asked to tear it up and throw it away, while the other half kept the paper.
The researchers observed that all participants became angry when they saw the derogatory comments, but that the anger of the group that threw the paper diminished to almost nonexistent, while the anger of the group that kept the paper remained high. The researchers concluded that the results of this study are important and significant because controlling and managing anger, whether at home, at work, or elsewhere, can mitigate many consequences in a person’s life.
Anger Management: Ancient Yoga and Modern Psychology
This modern scientific experiment reminds me of a story told by our Sage and Guru Ma Ananda Moyi, which Swami Vijayananda passed on to me: A man was angry and furious with a friend after a heated argument between them. So he wrote him a letter expressing his anger and resentment toward him. He went to the post office to mail it. He arrived late and found it unopened. He returned home and thought, “Perhaps the tone of this letter is harsh and bitter, and this man is, after all, a dear friend of mine.” So he tore it up and wrote another letter with a more neutral tone. The next day, he went to drop it off at the post office, unaware that it was a holiday, and returned home disappointed, thinking, “How can I write a letter to a dear friend in such a cold tone?” He tore up the second letter, wrote her a loving one, sent it to her, and they reconciled.
Ma used to comment on this story by saying, “If you have a quarrel with someone, write to them, and tear up what you write until the anger, bitterness, and resentment fade and transform into feelings of love and respect.” Isn’t this the same lesson we can learn from the scientific experiment mentioned above? Consider how ancient wisdom is often the precursor to science. The results of this scientific experiment are also reminiscent of certain yoga exercises and practices, particularly in certain Vedic rituals such as Puja, where the practitioner is asked to write on a piece of paper the events that have upset him or her and that have aroused anger, resentment and rancor, and then throw the paper into the fire to burn or throw it into the sea or river and watch it disappear and feel how feelings of anger and resentment disappear as it burns or disappears. In other rituals, the seeker or yogi is asked to throw behind his back, into the river or sea, the papers he has written about events that aroused his resentment or things that made him angry or saddened, and then to move forward without even looking back to see the fate of the pile of papers he has thrown away, signifying that these events and issues are now part of the past, that they are past and can no longer be returned to, thus freeing him from these negative and old influences.
This Vedic ritual recalls a fundamental commandment of the Buddha: “As a snake sheds its skin, we must continually shed our past” (Saliba, Lwiis, Thus Taught the Buddha, 2nd ed., 2024, 33/2, p. 326). Our past often weighs on us, and our memory becomes as full as a computer’s, and we must empty it to be able to live in the present moment.
The similarities between these ancient yogic methods and modern psychological methods are evident. Thus, ancient yogic traditions and modern scientific discoveries converge and intersect once again.
Writing Therapy
In any case, this scientific experiment brings us back to a very important question, one we’ve already mentioned: writing therapy.
There is a difference between verbally expressing anger and what provokes it, and expressing anger in writing. Talking about our anger, its causes, and its triggers will only aggravate our crisis. On the other hand, complaining with a pen and paper can help calm anger or at least reduce it.
If you are angry at or with someone, write them a letter explaining the reasons for your anger and what needs to be done to dissipate and erase it. This doesn’t mean you have to send him this letter, but rather that it’s a subjective and psychological way to vent your anger, as was the case in the story told by Ma Ananda Moyi. Anger, like resentment, spite, indignation, revenge, and resentment, are emotions, or rather, synonyms for the same emotion. Anger wounds, tortures, and corrodes the human soul, eating away at it like rust eats away at iron. The negative effects of anger are exacerbated if a person keeps it inside, and it transforms into resentment, grudges, and discontent. In the New Testament, we find a golden commandment in this regard: “If you are angry, do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26). The interpretation of this verse is as follows: “Do not be controlled by anger, but keep it under control.” We must not allow anger to linger and take root in the heart, lest it lead to death” (The Bible, Pastoral Reading, Ephesians 4:26, p. 366).
The New Testament Scripture continues: {Put away all malice, resentment, anger, shouting, cursing, and other evil. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ has forgiven you} (Ephesians 4:32).
In conclusion, writing is an effective way to relieve and mitigate outbursts of anger, “temporary madness,” and to prevent them from turning into resentment and grudges, which are feelings and emotions that exhaust the human soul and body and, over time, turn into illnesses.