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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I wanna talk about anger today. I recently heard from a friend who said she just woke up angry, and whenever I hear things like that, it always makes my mind just go in these different directions. I have a problem solving mind and a mind that always wants to know why.
Now, if you are an astrology, girly like me, then you know that there are six or seven planets in Aries right now, and Aries is a fire sign. So all the astrologers are telling you to be on the lookout for these explosive bursts of temper in yourself and others. But I thought I would take this opportunity to really discuss anger from a few different directions, mind, body, spirit.
Because when my clients come to me with anger, it's often not the most obvious thing that's causing their anger. We have [00:01:00] to go much deeper and start connecting the dots and connecting the patterns. So I have a system to do that with my clients, but I just want to let you know what some of the possibilities might be from a mind, body, spirit perspective.
And it's a big joke out in the world, but no joke if you're experiencing this, is that when you hit a certain age, and I typically see this in the late thirties or forties, sometimes in the early fifties, you can call that that perimenopausal menopausal stage. You do have hormone imbalances.
These hormone imbalances can lead to anger. So from a body-based perspective, when it comes to anger, as a former physician, I'm going to be looking for things like, have you spoken to your doctors or healthcare practitioners about hormone testing, [00:02:00] cortisol testing? Because if you have had uncontrolled stress for an extended period of time, feeling overwhelmed.
Then what that does is it leads you to be less stable in your blood sugar and your cortisol will spike, and then you're going to have some emotional dysregulation that looks like anger. So from a body-based perspective, imbalances in cortisol, blood sugar, and hormones are often responsible for anger outbursts.
Now, when it comes to mind or mental emotional, it's a little bit more complicated because the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper. You will have a default stress response, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. If you're not familiar with fawn, it's people pleasing as a means of survival. Now, I know that [00:03:00] how you react depends on any given situation, but I want you to really think about what is your default response?
Where do you find yourself more often? Is it fight as in lashing out at others, feeling like others are attacking you in some way? Feeling that you have to get your point across, and the other person might interpret it as aggressive. So there's the fight response.
It can be quick bursts of temper, which is what you see in Aries. Or it can be a sustained irritation. You can have flight, which manifests a lot like anxiety, overwhelm, overstimulated, and then you have freeze, which is low motivation, low activity. It often mimics depression, and there's a bit of mental apathy involved.
So that's just to give you an [00:04:00] idea of what the different defaults are. But if you are a fighter and you know that fight is your default response, when I see that among my clients, and I do see it in a higher proportion among high achievers or type A personalities, that does tend to be their default. When you are a fighter, you do worry about coming across as a bad person.
Coming across as too aggressive, and you worry that if you can't control your temper, you're going to drive away the people that mean the most to you. Or you could lose your job, or you could even turn physically violent, but that's not really who you are.
But you're worried that you can't control the snap. That somehow your buttons will be pushed and you'll just lose it. That is a real fear and that is more about mental [00:05:00] emotional dysregulation, and that dysregulation can be because you are never taught how to cope. You were thrown into traumatic situations and just had to figure it out.
And however you coped, whatever those tools were, eventually they need to be updated because they're just not going to work the same anymore. And it's kind of a, like a comorbidity we would say in medicine, but multiple things happening at once is that you can be overwhelmed, stressed. Cortisol and blood sugar could be off. You could have a hormone imbalance and you could have these lowered barriers to emotional control.
And it sets up this perfect storm situation that the end result looks like anger. Both things are true at once. It's not an either or situation because we don't [00:06:00] live in isolation. We are doing all of the things at once, and I think knowing your default stress response is incredibly important because your recovery tools, how you bring stability and balance back to your life will depend on what your base response is.
And that is something that I help my clients determine as well. But when you are a fighter, your natural inclination might be to keep fighting or you walk away to get over it, that can be great, but you wanna make sure you're using the right tools in the right situation.
And what some people will accidentally do is keep the fight cycle that sympathetic nervous system cycle going longer than it needs to. Like for example, if you're already feeling angry. This is not the time that you put on angry music or angsty music, and you might have a tendency to do that because you choose music that matches your [00:07:00] mood and that logically makes sense.
But unfortunately, it keeps the nervous system riled up and it doesn't help you calm down or stabilize. So if you are a fighter, I often recommend classical music like Mozart, something with no words, because you need something to bring down the intensity of your reaction. You also need to burn out this adrenaline and quick bursts of physical activity can help you do that. I call it rage cleaning, but if you could just go vigorously scrub something for 15 minutes or less.
You'll be so surprised at how you can burn that out. Or you do jumping jacks for two minutes or vigorously run in place. It doesn't take very long to burn this out, but when you're trying to calm down anger, you need to burn the adrenaline out and quick bursts of activity are how you do that. And you also need to monitor your [00:08:00] thoughts so that you are not continuing to think angry, thought after angry thought after angry thought. And you're just perpetuating the cycle.
So this is also something that I help my clients do, is to develop better tools to regulate both their emotions and their nervous system, while also mentioning these body-based things to help them speak to their physicians or healthcare practitioners to bring all of that back into balance.
Now when it comes to a spiritual perspective on anger, we all have an inner warrior inside of us. That inner warrior doesn't like it when we're disrespected . It doesn't like it when we disrespect ourselves. It doesn't like it when we fall too much into that people pleasing or fawn state, or that we're overgiving to the point of our own detriment.
And when you are not making necessary [00:09:00] changes for your own health and wellbeing, it's like you insult the warrior within your own soul. And eventually that warrior will rise up. To try to get your attention or to try to protect you or defend you when you are not doing it yourself.
So there are always signals. But we ignore them either because we don't know them at all, or because we're so inside the experience that we have lost all objectivity.
We don't see red flags when red flags look normal, and this is where getting an outside perspective, that objective guidance can really help you. And that is what I do for my clients as well.
But that inner warrior, wants you to make changes, wants you to have a good life, wants you to be respected and to respect yourself. Sometimes you are the one that's aggravating that inner warrior by [00:10:00] your inability to make changes, by your thoughts, by your subconscious beliefs. The negativity. If you're really down on yourself or self-critical, this is insulting that warrior, that highest version of yourself, who knows that you are an incredible being.
Also, when it comes to anger, anger has multiple expressions. It is definitely an emotion that lets us know something is not okay with our mind, body, or spirit. It is a symptom to be recognized and dug into. Mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, energetically, because something is causing that anger.
It didn't arise out of nowhere, and you are not always able to see it because you're inside it. Sometimes this is a subconscious belief or identity that you've outgrown. And if you keep doing the same old things that warrior inside of you, that [00:11:00] higher self perspective is aggravated at you.
And sometimes we have what I call a godsmack. If you are getting signs to change your life and you are not doing it out of fear, out of comfort, you prefer safety over growth, then the universe has only so much tolerance for that. And whatever you wanna call it, God, source, universe, spirit, eventually it gets tired of your BS and will destroy the safety, the secure thing.
Maybe that's a job or a relationship or some thing in your life that you are counting on that worked well for you, just will not work anymore. This is a huge flashing sign from God, source, spirit, angels, your guides, whatever you wanna call it. This is your smack. This is your godsmack that says, okay, change is no longer optional.
It never was, [00:12:00] but we tried to gently go at your pace and that's not working anymore 'cause you weren't moving. And now it requires big movement. So if you don't want to rebuild your relationships, your jobs, your identity in major ways, and unfortunately this is what happens when it comes to body. If you don't deal with your stress or your health, there's a health crisis that comes.
And then that forces people. That's the godsmack that forces people to pay attention and change. When it's your mental, emotional health. If you can't irregulate your emotions or your mindset, it tends to drive people away or it hurts you painfully, and that is the collapse. It could be burnout. That is the collapse.
That happens when you need to make changes, but you aren't when it's your spirit, there's something called the dark night of the soul [00:13:00] where you are being called to do this kind of work. To really dig into this subconscious and to drag all the things you don't like about yourself, your identity, your belief, other people, drag it to the surface and take a look at it.
And heal it and let it go or to accept it. Anybody who does spiritual work will tell you that is a necessary part of being human and doing human life well, is to really look at these hidden, subconscious pieces of your personality, of your thoughts, your emotions, your behavior, and to integrate so that you can align with the highest and best version of yourself.
It's decluttering all across the board. We have to get rid of that mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, energetic garbage that is weighing us down, and it's acting like lead shoes when we are meant to soar.
So if any of this resonated with you. That anger has become more [00:14:00] of an issue. I hope you have gotten some new directions from this podcast that you can take with you.
And if you think I am the right guide for that, then you can book a consultation call at aprildarley.com. It's free. It's 20 minutes, and we're gonna help you identify at what level or what layer that some of this anger may exist for you. Why this is challenging and we're gonna satisfy this curiosity, is I want to know why it's there and how to release it so that you can go do life better, happier, more abundant, more fulfilled like you are truly meant to do.
So you can find that on aprildarley.com I am here to answer your questions and I so appreciate your likes, your shares, your listens. Thank you.
And if you know someone who can benefit from this episode, [00:15:00] please share it with them. I would be so grateful. Okay, my friends, until next week, don't let anger get to the point where it boils over and affects your life, your relationships, or your health.
It can be solved, it can be healed, it can be released. Until next week. Bye-bye.
