Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life by Margaret Moore

“I get ticked off sometimes.”
    This, I learned, was an understatement: Mitch’s anger could be quite obvious. He was doing his share of cursing out loud, slamming phones and pounding on the desk of his newly appointed home office. But the other kind of anger, perhaps the more insidious type, had revealed itself after he had to do his taxes.
    For the first time, he was filing as an independent business person. To save money, he didn’t go to an accountant and tried to do it himself—just as he’d done all the years he was working for his previous company and filing one W-2 each year. Now, he had a drawer full of new and unfamiliar forms, some spotty records and lost papers. He’d always had an efficient secretary to keep the voluminous amounts of paperwork associated with his work. Now, he had to do it on his own, and it turned out he didn’t do it well. Important documents had been lost, he ended up making a mistake on the tax form and it cost him time and money to rectify it. Mitch was angry. Very angry. But here’s the key part of his anger that we learned only after subsequent sessions. While Mitch had been filling out his tax forms and working out of his home office, he had been seething with anger as he thought about the circumstances that had left his firm bankrupt. These angry ruminations were under the surface but still a major problem. He began to think about things that happened in the past: If it wasn’t for his greedy old boss, the firm might have stayed solvent, and he wouldn’t be home right now. He’d still have Marge, his trusty secretary, to take care of things. He’d still be free to concentrate on his strength, which was working with clients, not these damndetails and paperwork. It wasn’t just his old boss—it was the guy at the bank, former clients, the people at the IRS, two U.S. presidents, you name it. The more Mitch thought about it, the more people he found to get angry with and the more situations he could find to replay and rekindle his anger.
    What’s happening in Mitch’s brain—and what are we going to do about it?
----
    THE BRAIN IN ACTION: ANGER IN EVERYDAY LIFE
    Anger and frustrations occur, and quite often the overt, in-your-face anger is what people key in on; that kind of anger is typically a brief, time-limited response. Very often, the anger that I see in my office arises in the context of an irritating, challenging situation, like when the person feels they are faced with a task that is not possible or reasonable. Or the anger may have arisen, as was the case with Mitch, because a mistake was made. Errors and poor decisions are often made by people who are disorganized at home or on the job. Because of this, we consider anger as one of the emotional “primary colors.”
    You realize that you lost an important document, forgot to return an important call or made a real gaffe because you were too distracted by other things. You’re angry! So what is the brain doing at that moment—and even more importantly, what does it do afterwards? Are we aware of these angry ruminations?
    In one recent study on the subject, researchers analyzed the responses of healthy college students to anger provocation. First, by asking some background questions, they found subjects who tended to act with displaced aggression (taking out their anger later) as opposed to showing anger in the moment. What they found in the subsequentbrain scans was surprising. You could see patterns of brain activity showing persistent angry ruminations when provoked. Further, activity in the hippocampus—the memory area of brain—right after the anger provocation was associated with these subsequent ruminations. So while these students were not reacting with anger in the moment, their brains appeared to be dwelling on angry memories, like Mitch did.
    So how can this below-the-surface anger be managed? A psychologist at Harvard