Is Blue Monday a real thing?
January 17, 2025
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Often clients will come to see me for managing their emotions, especially anger.
Anger is one of our basic human emotions, and is one of the most easily recognisable ones. It is part of our reaction to an event, and is a part of our flight/fight/freeze response and more recently added fawn (whereby the individual tries to avoid conflict by trying to please them). When our mind senses that we are in danger of some kind, it needs to jump in and react – and quickly! When this happens all of the body’s attention is moved to the extremities, in the case of anger the arms and the legs so that we can throw a good punch or kick, in the simplest of forms. We need to puff ourselves up and be loud and intimidating to our predator/assailant. Cortisol and adrenaline and noradrenalin, (stress hormones) start to course through our bodies, and we are ready for action!
Obviously, as rational human beings, we know that this is unlikely to be the best outcome for many situations in our lives, but our more primitive area of the mind doesn’t understand this. It senses are stress levels starting to rise and jumps in to try and help us out! Often our minds can pattern match to past events that have triggered the anger response and repeat it. commonly, when we are under stress, feeling anxious or depressed we can notice that anger is more prevalent, whether that is anger towards others, or anger turned inwards towards ourselves.
It is rarely the situation itself that causes us to react in this way, rather the way we have interpreted these events and our thought patterns around them.
It’s not a pleasant feeling, and can take the body up to an hour to return to a normal state. Prolonged exposure to the he stress hormones associated with anger can actually destroy neurons in the brain in the areas that effect judgement and rational thought, and can actually shrink the brain!
Higher cortisol levels also have an impact on:
• short term memory,
• decrease your serotonin levels (one of your happy chemicals),
• the cardiovascular system in a negative way (blood pressure/stroke/arterial tension etc.)
• your digestive system
• your immune system
When should you seek help?
If you find that anger is negatively affecting your relationships with your partner, children, relatives, friends, colleagues then it’s time to address it.
Help can come in many forms from visiting your GP, peer support groups through mental health charities such a mind or through the NHS, or even finding someone to talk with that is outside of the situation such as the Samaritans can be useful. (https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/drugs-and-treatments/peer-support/finding-peer-support/).
Other useful tools may be through self-help books or apps such as mindfulness, mediatation or anger management apps. (AIMS, Pacifica, Simple Habit, Calm, TemperTab, LifeArmor, Aura, Concussion Coach, Headspace, Breethe, Happify, Moodpath, Wysa, Youper, Self-help for Anxiety Management)
You may also decide to go down the 1-2-1 therapy route and try something such as hypnotherapy which is extremely effective in helping to address anger.
A good hypnotherapist will help you recognise the sources of anger in your life, and allow you to identify more useful ways of expressing your emotions. This may be by teaching and identifying some self-help tools that have worked in the past, or perhaps new ones that you can use if you can feel your anger rising. Such tools will also encourage healthy communication, and perhaps work on boosting your confidence and self-esteem amongst other things, allowing for calm responses and measured assertiveness to be there when you need it, instead of reactive anger. The use of the trance state itself can be extremely useful to calm down the nervous system, and give you increased access and focus to the part of your mind that makes the good, balanced, decisions, assessments, and reactions to the world around us.
This article was published in the hypnotherapy directory September 2020 https://www.hypnotherapy-directory.org.uk/memberarticles/anger-management
