What too much anger does to you — and how to stop it

Consider this: You’re driving home from the grocery store and another driver blatantly disregards a stop sign and juts out into oncoming traffic, cutting you off in the process. You narrowly miss rear-ending them and now your heart is racing, adrenaline pumping. So you lay on your horn and tailgate them, just to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Or picture another scenario: It’s the end of a long workday and you’re scrolling through your social platform of choice and happen upon a post that is so ridiculous, so irresponsible, that you draft a response informing the original poster just how much of an idiot they are.
Or maybe you’re patiently waiting in line at the world’s most crowded coffee shop and some entitled customer waltzes to the front of the queue — how dare they? — and you snap.
In this world, there’s plenty to be enraged about if you know where to look.
Anger, righteous indignation, and outrage is quite literally everywhere. It’s in the air when passengers melt down; it’s online when digital brawls erupt in neighborhood discussion groups; it’s in once-sleepy school board meetings, where parents and administrators duke it out; it’s on the ballot when candidates make grievance the backbone of their campaigns.
The rising social temperature isn’t going unnoticed. In a 2019 NPR-IBM Watson Health Poll, 84 percent of the 3,000 respondents thought Americans were angrier compared to a generation ago. This year, a McCourtney Institute for Democracy poll of 1,000 American adults revealed that twice as many felt extremely angry (46 percent) compared to those who felt extremely proud (22 percent). Baby boomers were the most likely to fall into the “extremely angry” category, with 57 percent of respondents claiming to feel enraged; 48 percent of Gen X, 38 percent of millennials, and 32 percent of Gen Z claimed to feel that level of anger.
While anger can be useful, it can also curdle into something wholly unproductive that has a slew of negative consequences, including how you view the world and relate to those within it. But you don’t need to buy into the story your anger is telling you: It’s possible to learn where the line is between constructive and destructive anger — and how to walk away from it.
All of this fury didn’t materialize out of thin air. It’s a product of a hyper-connected world, where more news, content, posts, newsletters, and videos to consume means more to be potentially enraged by than ever before. Moreover, anyone with an internet connection can share an opinion or a hot take. Previous generations never had to contend with their cousin’s worst opinions outside of holidays. Now, they’re fed directly to you. Nearly everyone — from a powerful politician all the way down to that cousin — has a soapbox from which to offend and to be offended. While some things are genuinely infuriating — the atrocities of war or the burden of high prices, for example — some information is curated specifically to incite rage.
Anger is a natural human response to a wrong that needs righting, an injustice that needs justifying. It can be motivating, research shows. In the past, villagers may have banded together to rid their community of a thief or a murderer, says Kurt Gray, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the forthcoming book Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground. When threatened, anger is the tool humans use to respond.
The issue is not with anger itself, but its chronic presence. Given the vast array of anger’s triggers — from interpersonal slights all the way to systemic unfairness — you might come to think the cards are perpetually stacked against you, according to Brett Ford, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Anger, ideally, should be short-lived, Ford says, and motivate people to respond to specific events. (Like vouching for yourself if you’ve been overlooked for a promotion.)
But if you’re angry frequently enough and your anger is general and diffuse instead of triggered by a specific event, it starts to become a part of your personality, she says. For some, the experience of anger may even be pleasurable. (More research is needed on this front, Ford says.) That’s when you need to start paying attention to whether your anger is really serving you.
In an uncertain world with no clear answers, anger can be a north star. Outrage is righteous, Gray says, and reinforces your good intentions. This affects your worldview more acutely than, say, road rage.
When you’re maddened by a political candidate’s stances, for instance, you know fairly quickly who the enemy is. “Outrage has a target,” Gray says. “They’re doing evil things. They’re evil people. Let’s all get angry so we can band together and stop this threat.”
Knowing who is wrong (them) and who’s right (you) is one of anger’s prime features. “Moral anger” is what drives people to protest, organize, and write to politicians in order to make the world a better place. This sort of outrage is righteous, Gray says, because you’re levying your feelings to fight the enemy.
The view from that moral high ground can be alluring. “If your anger is rooted in some sort of moral superiority, if your anger is rooted in ‘I’m better than other people,’ then for some people, that can be a comfortable place to be,” says psychologist Ryan Martin, author of How to Deal With Angry People and Why We Get Mad: How to Use Your Anger for Positive Change.
Even small infractions can be seen as indicative of a world rife with injustice. The feeling of indignation when someone ditches their shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot — a relatively minor harm — isn’t just about the shopping cart, Gray says. It’s about the compounding effects of everyone failing to return their carts, of a society that can’t possibly be considerate because the parking lot is littered with shopping carts.
“There’s all these mental associations you have to suggest this is not just the small thing. This is the broader indicator of society going down the tubes,” Gray says. “This one thing happened. Well, it’s a trend that we should be panicked about.” Aside from being mildly enraging, when people don’t follow these social norms, it makes it harder to trust them.
All this anger isn’t healthy, physically or emotionally. Because anger arises in response to a threat, the emotion helps spring the body into action, Ford says. “Blood is pumping harder through my heart,” she says. “That’s helping my hands and feet get more blood flow, which is going to help me move more efficiently.” In the short term, these physiological responses are protective. Over time, prolonged anger contributes to a higher risk of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke. Coping mechanisms like excessive drinking and smoking also have negative health consequences, Martin says.
Rage has interpersonal ramifications, too. The anger that people experience throughout their day has a trickle-down effect: Work frustration follows you home and you might snap at your spouse or kids. Over time, loved ones might pull away, tired of being on the receiving end of aggrieved outbursts. “People are less likely to reach out to us for support,” Martin says, “because they think, ‘that’s just how they are’” — an angry person.
What’s worse is when people are blind to the fact that their irritability is alienating, Ford says: You might think your anger is under control, but your colleagues, friends, and family who bear the brunt of it don’t. “Anger does not serve goals that involve being sociable and collaborative and friendly,” she says, “and those are often important goals in our day-to-day lives.”
However, when channeled effectively, anger can help you identify a goal and work toward a solution. Maybe you’re pissed you failed a test. Your anger may inspire you to study harder next time. But anger’s superpower as a motivator can also make harnessing the emotion counterproductive or even dangerous. Lashing out at an airline customer service rep because your flight is delayed probably won’t make you feel better and certainly won’t get you off the tarmac any quicker. “That creates what we call a spiral of incivility, where the anger just begets more anger,” says Dave Lebel, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh. “People respond in kind.”
To determine whether you’re harnessing your anger for good, Martin suggests thinking about the consequences. Do you channel your anger into positive actions, like reaching out to the city council to request a street-sweeping program? Or do you yell at people, try to get revenge, or experience physical effects like nausea?
Then, consider the frequency and intensity of your anger. “Even if you’re handling your anger relatively well,” Martin says, “if you’re angry all the time or much of the time, or so intensely that you’re experiencing that kind of cardiovascular activation, you’re going to suffer consequences,” such as stress, health problems, or issues with your relationships. Similar to many of life’s other virtues and vices — like ice cream or anxiety — experiencing high-intensity anger too often isn’t a great idea.
The goal isn’t to eliminate anger entirely, Ford says. A population without anger is one that is disengaged, complacent, and less politically motivated. But people could stand to be more intentional with their outrage.
The first step is identifying what you’re truly angry about, Martin says. Is your sister really that annoying or does she call right as you’re putting the kids to bed? (A general rule of thumb is to give yourself as much time as possible to cool off after an anger-inducing incident before you respond. Perhaps you ignore your sister’s call and return it when you’re less annoyed — and less busy.) If you’re generally, chronically angry, Martin suggests interrogating what aspects of your life put you face to face with anger so frequently.
Sometimes people opt into situations they know will make them angry, Martin says: Scrolling through X looking for opinions they disagree with, for instance, or tuning into news programs just to scoff. Perhaps you aren’t doing it purposefully, but it’s hard to break out of that spiral. In order to avoid plummeting further into the rage-bait wormhole, you might want to limit your time online. “I’m going to choose not to go looking for things that make me mad,” Martin says. “It’s not that different, honestly, from choosing not to see scary movies.” Curbing your news and social media intake to the point where you feel reasonably informed is a good way to minimize anger, experts say.
Because anger is usually targeted at someone who has wronged you or those you care about, you might be motivated to “defeat the evil,” on the opposing side, Gray says. Instead of trying to “win” in a disagreement or moment of outrage, attempt to understand the other party, Gray continues. Share a personal anecdote about how a policy or comment hurt you or ask the other person why they’re mad. “A personal story seems truer,” he says. You don’t necessarily need to agree, but to try to have some grace instead of lashing out.
Ultimately, anger is mostly situational and you have to decide whether you can change the situation, Ford says. Sure, you can avoid all people who evoke fiery rage within you, but there are some you simply can’t ignore, like a boss. Maybe you try to talk to them to squash the beef. If you find yourself mad at the state of the world, it’s a little trickier. Elections come around every so often and lawmakers don’t necessarily have to listen to your concerns. You can respond to your anger in more effective ways, Ford says, by getting involved in local politics and activism.
And if you can’t control your situation, you can change what you’re paying attention to and how you respond to it, Ford says. You don’t need to stand in front of the fire hose of potentially enraging information online or read the comments in a heated Facebook debate. You can also reframe anger into something less personal, less unfair, less threatening.
The true challenge lies in interpreting anger not as a sign of something being stripped away, but as a signal of what truly matters.