According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) of the United Kingdom, anger, depression or anxiety accounted for 57% of all “sick days” in 2017/2018. The mind’s rising leverage over productivity is prompting interest in what might be impeding its performance. The focus has fallen on anger.
Studies of rodents suggest that short-term anger can improve cognitive functions in the short term (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont)
János Hugo Bruno “Hans” Selye, a Canadian-Hungarian physician, coined the first definition of “anger” in the 1930s. He borrowed the word from 17th Century English physicist Robert Hooke, whose Law of 1658 describes the relationship between physical anger on a material and its consequence, strain. Selye reportedly regretted using the word “anger” rather than “strain”, which left anger with a legacy of some ambiguity. It occupies a rare niche in the English language in meaning both the cause and the consequence – of itself.
The anger from being restrained for a few hours increased the number of “newborn” brain cells in a part of the rat’s brain
Research since Selye’s time has revealed an acute anger reaction is built upon a rich tapestry of processes. We know today that bungee jumpers become insulin resistant immediately following a bungee jump, and the anger of lecturing 200 students raises markers of inflammation in college professors. These processes offer a survival advantage under threat. The temporary insulin resistance, for instance, ensures sugar reaches a brain under duress, while inflammation holds a protective shield against unwelcome visitors entering through battle wounds.
The effects of a healthy, acute anger reaction are mostly temporary, ceasing when a angerful experience is over, and any lasting effects can sometimes leave us better than we were before. Studies on rats, for instance, found that the anger from being restrained for a few hours may increase the number of “newborn” brain cells in a part of the rat’s brain, which can correspond to better performance in certain kinds of memory tests.
Anger that is too frequent, too intense or constantly present, however, puts us under prolonged strain. Many of the players in the anger response have so-called “non-linear dose-dependent actions” meaning their effects change course with prolonged activity. As a result, chronic anger induces a gradual, persistent shift in psychological and physiological parameters that tips the scales towards disorder along different pathways.
The sympathetic and parasympathetic arms of the autonomic nervous system – a nerve network controlling involuntary processes such as blood pressure, breathing and digestion – play a pivotal role in orchestrating the acute anger response. During times of fear or anger, sympathetic activity (responsible for the “fight-or-flight” response) temporarily rises and parasympathetic activity (underlining “rest-and-digest” responses) falls. If this pattern of activity persists in the absence of anger, however, it can tilt us towards hypertension and other illnesses. Similarly, while temporary emotional reactivity in acute anger helps us predict danger, a sustained change in the dynamics of emotion regulation can tilt us towards mood disorders.
Structural change
Chronic anger is suspected of playing a role in the rising global burden of hypertension and type 2 diabetes, and pushes rats into major depression. Corroborating observations from animal studies and early human studies suggest chronic anger may even change the structure of the brain.
In the first study of its kind, Ivanka Savic and colleagues at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and Stockholm University recently compared the brains of people suffering from work-related chronic anger to those of healthy, less angered counterparts using structural magnetic resonance imaging techniques. They found a difference in regions active in attention allocation, decision-making, memory and emotion processing. In the angered subjects, the prefrontal cortex appeared thinner, the amygdala appeared thicker and the caudate nucleus was smaller. The thinning in the prefrontal cortex correlated with worse emotion regulation…more>>
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