How to Transform Anger Using Compassion with Dr. Russell Kolts

In reality, anger is a threat emotion, just like fear, just like anxiety. And when people are struggling with anger, they're struggling with the threat emotion they haven't yet figured out how to manage. And so I think that it's a much more useful thing to recognize that as a struggle rather than to get into judging and shaming and things like that.

Yeah, but also not waiting until you have to have a diagnosis to see someone about it, right? When it's that low-level irritation to work on that. But it takes a little self-awareness.

It does. And it's one of those things that sometimes it doesn't externalize at all, but it, it compromises your own happiness on the day to day.

Welcome to the Mind Body Space Podcast, where you can stress less and boost your performance and wellness down to the cellular level just by listening. Hi, I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD, a mom MD passionate about sharing evidence-based tips to keep you and your family well. For the past 10 years, I've been teaching the science of resilience to high-achieving individuals at many different schools schools and organizations. And currently I'm on faculty at the Juilliard School Pre-College Division, teaching gifted students how to stress less and perform at their best. I started this podcast because I wanted to share what I learned with my students, fellow parents, educators, and anyone who's interested as I explore fascinating topics like neuroscience and meditation with experts in education, medicine, and psychology. Your support makes this possible.

Today I'm so excited to have Dr. Russell Kolts. He's a renowned clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Eastern Washington University. He has gained international recognition for his groundbreaking work in compassion-focused therapy, particularly in addressing anger. Dr. Coates is the author of 6 influential books, including The Compassionate Mind: An Approach to Managing Your Anger and An Open-Hearted Life, which he co-authored with Buddhist nun Thupten Chodron. Dr. Coates' innovative approach combines elements of cognitive behavioral therapy with mindfulness and compassion practices, offering a unique perspective on emotional regulation and personal growth. His work has not only contributed significantly to the field of psychology, but he has also helped countless individuals develop more compassionate and resilient approaches to life's challenges. Thank you so much for being here. I know you're here before work, which is incredible to me. I'm so grateful to you for being here.

And it's, oh, you're welcome.

It's only taken us about 10 years to get together.

It has been. Yeah. It's been a while since we've been corresponding.

Yes. And I remember you were so generous with me at the time. I had 2 little kids and I was having some anger issues, like mommy anger issues, probably normal, but maybe a little more than normal. Anyway, you were so generous with your time and I still have this workbook that I, oh, there's a new one out.

That's much better.

This is my, uh, one with all the notes. And this is the one that I used to use and my kids would come in and be like, do your little anger sheets. Oh, that's awesome.

And they would do it with me.

Yes. And yes, you have a few books, right? Yes. Yes.

6. 6. Although if you count the co-authored ones and actually 7, if you count the True Strength Manual has been published in Japan, but I can't read it because you have to get it translated. Yeah. I, I actually just sent it to a colleague I was doing a workshop with in Japan and he said, Hey, could we publish this as a book in Japan? I'm like, fine. Yeah.

That's amazing. Let's tell the audience what your expertise is in. So Russell, you are a PhD and you've studied compassion and the way that compassion can help with anger issues. Is that mainly your specialty?

Yes, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm a clinical psychologist and have applied compassion-focused therapy to help people work with anger. Yeah.

And do you mind telling us why you got so interested in anger?

Yeah, it was a couple of things actually. Initially what happened was I had been struggling with some of my own anger. And I mentioned this in a TEDx talk I did a number of years ago. And so I had struggled a little bit with anger and irritability historically, never so much that I lost jobs or relationships, but enough that it disturbed my life a little bit. I wasn't always the version of myself that I wanted to be. And I'm still not, but I'm much better than I was.

I'm with you on that.

It's a process, right? You get things dialed in and you start feeling pretty good and then life gets wacky and you get to practice a little more. And then my son came along and I saw two things. One, anyone who's had infants and toddlers understands that there are a lot more triggers for irritability because they're little chaos machines. Uh, and the second thing is that I saw myself modeling for him behavior I didn't want to pass on to him. I didn't want to teach him the same anger problems that I struggle with. So I started thinking about that in the background, and that really led me to compassion work generally and to Compassion-Focused Therapy. And then it just so happened right after my first Compassion-Focused Therapy trainings, I was doing some volunteer work at a local prison. And I'd been leading a meditation group and I was trying to think about, there was an opportunity to write a book for this series, the Compassion-Focused Therapy series of books. I was trying to decide between 2 or 3 topics and I was in the prison setting. And at the end of every meditation session, we'd have 10 or 15 minutes to chat. We always ended up talking about anger. The guys, because when you're in prison, a lot of people who are in prison don't necessarily have the best sort of anger management skills anyway. And in prison, there's a lot of triggers, right? There are a lot of things that are difficult that are activating. And so we talked about that a lot, and I thought, that's it. 'Cause compassion-focused therapy and compassion generally was such a good fit for anger.

Amazing.

Kind of falling backwards into, to really thinking about this deeply in terms of how you apply compassion to anger.

I want to just dial back to what you said about not losing a job or having real issues, quote unquote. And that was the same with me. I never lost jobs or anything. But when your anger is a common go-to emotion, when that low level of irritability is always there and it could always snap when you don't want it to, but that's unfortunately in our medical system, we don't treat people unless you have lost your job or you're having serious relationship problems.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's actually one of the really tricky things about anger, right? When we see someone who's anxious. We are sympathetic around that, I think, and we want to be helpful to them. When we see someone who is sad or depressed, I think there's some cultural space for validating that. But I think a lot of times when we see someone who struggles with anger, we just think, oh, what an asshole, right? I don't want to be around them. That's not a very cool person. And so I think we're less sympathetic to that as a struggle and see it more as a, like a character defect. Or someone just being a problematic person. When in reality, anger is a threat emotion, just like fear, just like anxiety. And when people are struggling with anger, they're struggling with the threat emotion they haven't yet figured out how to manage. And so I think it's a much more useful thing to recognize that as a struggle rather than to get into judging and shaming and things like that.

Yeah, but also not waiting until you have to have a diagnosis to see someone about it, right? When it's that low-level irritation to work on that. But it takes a little self-awareness.

It does. And it's one of those things that sometimes it doesn't externalize at all, but it compromises your own happiness on the day-to-day. I teach a lot of undergraduates in psychology. And when I used to teach abnormal psychology, I'd have students coming in saying, do I need therapy for this? They learn, they're like medical students. They learn about a new disorder and they think, oh my gosh, I've got some experiences that seem like that. And they self-diagnose, right? They come in and they say, do I need therapy for this? And my answer for that was always the same. It was like, only you can answer that. And the way to answer that is to look at these different areas of your life and look at your job and look at your relationships and look at your general level of contentment. And are these things going the way you want? Or is this stuff you just told me about getting in the way? Is it getting in the way of you being the version of you want to be with your family or at your job? Is it getting in the way of you not being happy all the time? Because that's not really a very good goal. None of us is happy all the time, but is it disturbing your contentment? Is it interfering with the kind of emotional life you'd like? And if the answer to those questions is yes, then it's probably a good time to get some help. It doesn't mean you have to be diagnosed with something, right? You don't have to check all the boxes that says, oh, he's severe enough. If it's getting in the way. Probably worth looking into and do some, doing something about.

Yes.

But so you can use these books that you have, these workbooks before you even get anywhere. Like, I think that it's a very excellent preventative tool or to just educate somebody about anger. 'Cause it's a human emotion and you can work on it.

Yeah. And we all have it. Yeah. And beating ourselves up for having it doesn't work.

And sometimes anger is an emotion that gets you motivated to to get going.

Actually, sometimes people ask me, is anger good or bad? And that's a silly question around emotions because we just have them. Emotions, our feelings are not good or bad. They evolved to serve a purpose. And anger is a threat emotion. It's designed, it's the fight. When you hear about fight, flight, flee, flight, fawn, anger is fight. You freeze. It's early.

It's very early and I still can't believe you got on here with me before work.

So, oh, it's all right. Mm-hmm. But so it organizes us in this way. But when people ask me that question, my response is always anger is a wonderful signal, but a terrible life strategy. Anger is really good at pointing us toward things that violate our values or our boundaries or things that we probably need to attend to. But if we act out the energy of anger without stopping and thinking, is this going to be helpful or not? It can get us into a lot of trouble. But the energy of anger can fuel assertive behavior. It can give us the courage to speak out or to get moving in a situation that isn't the way we'd like it to be. So we, it's not bad. We just need to learn to harness it in helpful ways.

Yes. And so how would you, let's say, train yourself or like you spoke about with your child, that was basically my motivator to change because I didn't want my kids acting in a frustrated manner anytime they felt like time pressure or things were happening all at once. I wanted them to have different tools of reacting to the stressors of life really, because it is, it is detrimental to your health physically. And I always say down to the cellular level because you're literally releasing hormones and chemicals that are gonna have wear and tear on your body. So when you are training someone, what would be the ideal time to start? I would say with the mom when they're pregnant, but what do you think about helping kids to understand anger and being able to just sit? Because anger motivates us to do something, right?

Yeah.

It's one of those do something emotions. So how do you get them to understand that you can have anger, but you don't actually have to act on it and that you can respond differently?

I think a lot of times when it comes to teaching children about emotions, the first is a lot of people just don't. I can't tell you the number of people I've met, clients and other people who said, I don't even remember my parents using emotion words when I was growing up. I'd see it acted out, but they never said, oh, this is anxiety and this is how you handle it, or this is anger, this is what you do. Right? The other thought I had is a lot of times I think if as parents we're anxious about something, our tendency is to try to compartmentalize it and say, okay, this is uncomfortable. So now I'm going to have the sex talk on Tuesday afternoon at 3, right? Or I'm going to do it, get it out of the way so I can say, oh, I checked that box, whatever. And I think in terms of teaching our children about emotions, and for that matter, teaching them about sex or other tricky things, I think it's a kind of a continuous thing. So I think when our children come into the world, we teach them a lot, even from infancy, about emotion by the way we interact with them, by the way we engage with them, by the way we behave when these emotions come up in us. And so I think you're exactly right. If you're someone who's noticed, I've got some hostility or some anger, a lot of irritability that gets in the way for me, and you're planning, or you're having children or planning to. The best time to start working on that is before you have the kids. So when they come in the world, you've developed ways of responding that you want to model for them.

But sometimes we're not perfect. So maybe you can say, hey, I am having anger right now.

Absolutely.

Well, which is what I learned to do with your book. And I said, look, I'm working on my anger right now.

That's a really important point, Juna. We, when I say model. Part of what we're going to model for our kids is imperfection. We don't want to be a perfect model because no one can relate to that. And no one's like when I'm training therapists. As a therapist, you don't want to speak in a way that seems perfect. Your clients can't relate to that. But what we can do as parents is we can model just as you said, oh, I'm feeling really angry right now. You know, I'm going to go cool down for a little bit and then we're going to continue this conversation. So the second best time to decide to work on it is whenever it occurs, right? Whenever you find it occurs.

All the time, your whole life.

But I think what we can do is even from when the point our parents are, or our children are born, we can try and model how to handle emotions in as healthy a way as we can. And then as they grow and when we help them name emotions, they learn to put language to their feelings, then we can begin introducing, oh, what are the things that make you angry? What are the things that make you scared? And what do we do when we're angry? What do we do when we're scared? We weave in. Just like a normal thing, like a normal part of life. We've been being able to talk about feelings, being able to observe our own experience and to consider, oh, okay, what do I want to do when these feelings come up? I think curiosity is a superpower. And if we can shift from judging our experience to just noticing it curiously and going, oh, okay, this is what's going on for me. What might be a helpful way of engaging with this. So we can talk about it and model it. We can do that in an ongoing way rather than just compartmentalizing it into one conversation. It works a lot better.

So it's your whole life journey really. And with your child too, you basically bake it into your everyday life.

You weave it in.

I love that.

You bake it into your everyday life because we all have feelings in this ongoing way. And we all have days when we handle them really well, and we all have days when we don't. And all of those are good experiences for modeling for our kids. It's a good model. Sometimes we'll speak to our children in, in ways that we don't want to. And then we get to model apologizing. And we teach them, what do you do when you behave in a way that doesn't fit with your values? And because they're going to do that sometimes too.

Of course.

And when we, that's a valuable lesson to normalize that. On the other hand, what we don't want to teach them is apologizing and then doing the same thing again and again. So when we apologize, we want to apologize. We want to acknowledge what I did wasn't okay. I'm very sorry about that. And I'm going to do better. And then we need them to see us doing better or working to make those changes because otherwise they learn that apologies just don't mean anything.

And then just having the plan. To get better or even share what you're gonna do to change your behavior. Maybe easy sometimes.

Exactly. And, but you even mentioned, you, you said you're holding up your book to your child. You were, you were showing your child, yes, this is what I'm doing.

I'm working on this.

I'm not perfect, but I'm working on it. And in doing that, you modeled something really important.

Yeah. And then I wanna go back to when you said as new parents, sometimes you're triggered. Yes. Because that lack of sleep too. The emotional regulation in sleep is so strong that—

it's all of it. The sleep, you sleep a lot less. You don't have a lot of times like quiet time to yourself, decompress. I've never cherished going to the bathroom as much since I was a little kid, because that was the time when my wife would take him over. Clearly I couldn't hear.

And I was like, oh, I think a lot of parents can relate to that. You're lucky a lot of kids could just come barging in anyway. But yeah.

And that is true.

But it's like such a huge responsibility when you become a parent. But I also wanna say you can parent your own brain too. So even if you don't have kids, you can become the parent of your own brain because you might be an adult without children and still have irritations because you didn't sleep enough or you're not taking care of yourself in some way. And that's when that parent should come online. And it doesn't have to be the parent you grew up with. It could be the parent that you learned to be.

I'm so glad you said that, Juna. In Compassion-Focused Therapy, we have a concept called the compassionate self. And the idea is when people are caught up in an emotion or a motivation, it's not just what we feel. Like when we're angry, our anger doesn't just affect our, how we feel in our bodies. It also shapes how we pay attention, how narrowly or broadly we pay attention. So when we're angry, our focus narrows down to just the thing we're angry at, right? How we think, how we reason, the mental imagery and fantasies, all that's going on in our mind. So it's, there's an angry version of us and we all have these, an anxious version, a sad version that has to do with how our mental experience is organized by these different feelings and emotions. And so what we try to do in compassion-focused therapy is help people develop a compassionate version of the self we call the compassionate self. And we can start doing that by just pausing every so often when we're in a pretty good space and asking, if I was at my most compassionate, if I was kind and wise and confident and I just wanted to help, what would I pay attention to? What would I think about? What would I be motivated to do? And after we reflect on that a little bit, we can then ask, what does the angry version of me need? What could the compassionate version of me offer to my angry self that would help them settle a little bit, that would help them feel understood? When you said we can parent our own brains, we can, right? We can, instead of condemning or feeling ashamed of the parts of ourselves that we're not so comfortable with, we can recognize how those parts— my angry self didn't choose to be angry. That's just the way anger works. But I could ask, what does that angry version of me need? What would be helpful to the version of me that's scared or that's angry? So for example, my angry self, if I'm walking into a situation that's frequently triggering for me, I can just say, okay, this is that situation. This thing that always gets under my skin is probably going to happen. I wonder if there's anything I can do that can help me from getting caught up in this. And so if I can frame things in my mind before the trigger happens, it makes it a lot easier because then when the trigger happens, instead of just reacting to it, I have some awareness. I can go, oh, there it is. That's happened. Now, what do I want to do? Do I want to spiral off into the same old irritable narrative that I always do that's going to ruin my afternoon? Or is there something else that might be helpful that I could do?

And then just like sitting and doing the meditation, being still, like you meditate, right? So that can help on a daily basis, build up your resilience towards those triggers.

Right?

I think what meditating really does is it helps us become more increasingly familiar with the movement of our own minds. So I think meditation and particularly mindfulness practices can make it so that we get a lot better at noticing the anger before we're lost in it. We can see the train start up before it leaves the station and we're on it before it's too late.

Or you can watch it leave the station and go through the whole thing. And at least you saw it, right? You saw it happening and maybe next time.

That ability to watch it gives us a choice. Many people who struggle with anger in problematic ways will say, I just got caught up in it. It just gets over. I lose myself in it. And the difference between that and what we're talking about is if you can have some awareness, oh, I'm getting really angry, then you've got a choice. Most people I know who struggle with anger, they don't describe their experience as I was sitting there and I started to get angry and I thought, oh yeah, I'm going to go with this. This seems like a good idea. I'm going to get really pissed off right now. That's not how it happens, right? We just get swept up in it. But if we can notice, oh look, I'm starting to get swept up. Do I want to roll with the energy of anger or do I want to go for a walk? I'm sitting in my music room in my basement right now. And so for me, it's do I want to go put on a record or pick up a guitar or do something that's going to help me work with this energy in a way that's not going to cause problems in my life or my relationships.

And there's also that feeling that when you have that voice that says, I'm going to go with this anger. That's still your anger talking.

Yeah, that's your angry self. But that's really true because our angry self, this is really important and we shouldn't feel ashamed of that either.

Shame is good sometimes because it might dial yourself back, right? Like shame is also a good emotion sometimes because otherwise we'd all be running around doing shameful things.

It was an interesting, I find, I think these days shame is good for the herd. Not so much for the individual because shame is about, I feel bad, I'm a bad person. And so shame can, as you say, keep certain behaviors under control or at least under the radar. But in compassion-focused therapy and in terms of the health of the individual, I would say that shame is generally not helpful. The fact that I did that—

I think it's stuff you identify as a person that's bad. That's what I've behaved badly.

So that's what you just described is guilt, which we're completely fine with.

Okay.

Shame is I did something that I feel is bad and that means I'm a bad person or I'm broken or flawed. Yeah. Guilt is I did something that I'm not okay with and I feel bad about it and I wanna do better.

Mm-hmm.

So that's the distinction. Shame shuts us down because we identify with whatever the problem was.

Uh-huh.

Guilt, it, it doesn't feel pleasant, but it motivates us to do better. I don't wanna talk to my partner like that. That's not okay. Hey, I love them. I'm not gonna do that anymore. So I'm gonna figure out how to work with these feelings before that happens.

So as far as kids are concerned, just training them from a very young age, understanding that they could sit still and not act on every emotion. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that about teaching kids or modeling kids or sitting with kids just for a few minutes, taking a deep breath or just looking at nature and just not saying to them, oh, we're gonna sit down and still our feelings, but like doing activities with them that help them reach that sort of—

I do think that for the first thing, it's you've got to gauge the temperament of your kid. There are some kids who will sit and meditate, who will do those things and they like them and they work really well. So I think that's always great. This was not the case with my son. My son was go. If I would try, and I did try, I did get him to just sit down and do some mindfulness meditation. It just didn't fit with who he was as a biological being. But what we can do is model curiosity for them. We can say, when we start to get angry or when we see them start to get angry, we can observe it. Oh, it seems like you've got some big feelings coming up. What's that feel like in your body? And when we do that, what that does is it prompts them to shift out of the immediacy of the emotion and into sort of that observing space where you go, oh, what is this? And there's a lot you can do from that space. When you're in the middle of the emotion, and this is very important, right? Anger is the fight response in fight, flight, freeze, right? It's the fight response. And so it motivates us to go. It's, and there's a sense of urgency that comes with it. Because if you're a human being 10,000 years ago and there's a tiger or something that you actually have to fight, you can't pause, right? You have to be able to activate with conviction. And that's just what anger is prompting us to do. So if we feel anger, we don't want to stop feeling anger because our brain is saying, I'm in threat. There's a threat. I got to fight it off. But if we can shift into that observing space and go, okay, I'm feeling a lot of urgency to act right now. Is that about the situation? Do I, does the situation really require an action from me? Or is that about the energy of the anger?

The anger itself focuses you on what is threatening you. So that means that you can't really learn when you're angry. And you also, because anger wants you to make a snap decision, sometimes it's not the right decision, especially because we're not in harm's way most of the time when we're angry in modern society.

Oh, Juna, it gets worse. Not only with anger do we feel critical thinking go offline, right? And we're just focused on defending ourselves from the self, from the threat. And not only do we feel this urgency to act, there's also a felt sense of certainty.

Yeah.

There's research studies that show when I'm angry, I know that I'm right. So think about this. When we're angry, we're not good at thinking critically. We're not good at empathy. We're not good at mental flexibility, and we're completely certain that we're right. We're more likely to be wrong and more likely to be convinced that we're right. Yes. And that's why politicians work so hard at getting us mad, getting us angry, because if they can feed us a narrative and get us angry, we're not gonna question it because critical thinking goes offline when we're angry. That's just anger trying to do what it's designed to do.

Yeah. And it's good when you're running out of the way of a bus coming at you, but it's not great, right? In most other scenarios, but I know you have to go soon, so I have a question for you before you go. It's great when you train yourself and everything and the things that are gonna trigger you, but what about those moments when you don't expect it and you're surprised? Let's say you go into a classroom and the teacher all of a sudden is, uh, being racist towards you. This happened to me recently. One, this teacher handed me Purell and started talking about COVID And she had not asked anyone else in the room. I'm the only Asian person in the room. Oh yeah. Or if you go into a store and somebody's in line and they just all of a sudden rip into you for no reason because they're having their anger issues. What do you do when you're surprised like that? When you're in scenarios where you don't expect it?

Two things. The first comment I have, it doesn't answer your question. But I would just want to, I just want to comment on something you said. If you are, for example, a person of color or a woman or—

Anyone.

Anyone, really. Any kind of person. Um, there will be many situations in your life where you're appropriately upset. The situation of racism that you described to me, does it make sense that you would have been angry in response to that? It does to me. So you can say my anger is justified and that doesn't mean we want to act out on it, but I also want people to understand that anger isn't wrong. Anger, sometimes it comes up because, hey, it's not okay for people to talk to me that way. Yeah. But to get to your question, what do I do when it just captures me? I think if you find that's the kind of thing that does happen in your life, which I think for many of us, that's exactly how it works. I think it can be really useful to try and come up with a ritual or just something you do in that moment that you practice before it happens. If I know, and what we want to do is train our brains to notice when this trigger hits, when, because people say, I'm speaking from the perspective of someone this happens to, oh, sometimes people say racist things or engage in racist microaggressions towards you. If you know that something. That's gonna happen to you. And you wanna be able to center yourself so you can respond assertively and not emotionally, because when you're emotional, then they use that as a way to marginalize you. Oh, you're an emotional woman or whatever. What you can do is when you're not in that triggering situation, think about how do I wanna handle when this happens? Cuz I know it's gonna happen. And then you might even imagine it. In your mind, imagine, bring to mind the last time it happened and then practice. Okay, I'm going to slow down my breath for 30 seconds before I respond or whatever the routine is. I like slowing down the breath because it helps soften the bodily energy that fuels anger.

Or maybe just lower your voice.

Yeah.

Like maybe even have a script. I could write a script.

Absolutely.

Honestly, I think everyone should do this because people are so angry. I've seen other people, not racist situations, just yelling at each other in the streets or like drivers being so angry lately. And it's just happening more and more in public arenas. Like I've just seen it more over the past decade.

The other comment I wanna make, and I didn't really hit this very well in the first Anger book. I talk about it a lot more in the new, the Anger Work that just came out. Externalized anger, acting anger out in problematic ways, isn't the only kind of anger problem. Some of us were raised in households who, and we were taught, you can never be angry. You can never express anger. You can never be impolite. You can never be rude. Da da da da. That's bad. And what if a child learns they can never express anger? It doesn't take them long to figure out that maybe I shouldn't feel it either. And so I think we've got a lot of people who go around and you don't see this and people don't come in saying, I've got an anger problem. They come in complaining of depression or anxiety. But a lot of times when we look, what we find is that when anger comes up in them, they immediately think, oh, this is bad. I shouldn't be feeling this. And then it's replaced with anxiety. And in those cases, you can have someone, let's say they're in that situation and someone makes the sexist or the racist comment. The thing you really actually want to respond assertively to, the thing you want to be able to say, why would you say that to me? Or how is that funny? Or why am I the only one being asked about COVID But for that person who notices the anger come up and they get anxious and push it down, oftentimes they end up saying nothing and then feeling ashamed about it later. And so for some people, it's not about controlling the externalized anger. It's actually about helping themselves recognize that this anger isn't a bad thing, right? That the anger they're feeling is a normal emotion to being, in this case, maybe treated poorly. And how can we use that energy rather than beating ourselves up for feeling it? How can we use that to fuel assertiveness so that we can stand up for ourselves when we need to?

Yeah. And it's tricky though, because I did speak up. And my classmates also spoke up for me to the teacher. And then we did make a formal complaint and I, I handled it pretty well. There's a certain extent to where it starts to wear you down because I was talking to the administration and so on. And then they want you to talk to this person and the next person. And before you know it, you've spent hours talking to admin and this is your life. You're busy too. So it takes a toll. And at some point you have to let it go or do something a little more in the realm of legislation.

We've meandered into how do systems respond well to complaints of things like racism and sexism. And the way a system responds is by taking the burden off of the person, by taking the initial report and saying, okay, now we're going to handle it. This is our problem. It's not your problem. This process you described is actually a way to keep things the same, right? Because if we make the process onerous enough, you won't do it.

Yeah, they kept, yeah, they kept asking me to send more emails and send this and it was nuts.

I, I'm, I just wanna say personally, I'm very sorry that you have to put up with that and that so many people have to put up with stuff like that.

We all have to put up with things. So I guess we all need a script and also to train our kids earlier so that it doesn't hurt them. Really, anger, I think hurts you, hurts you physiologically.

Yeah. People, I think I read a study, people with trait hostility. Die like 7 years younger.

Also, like you said, people don't want to be around you when you're angry, so you might be lonely too.

And that's honestly, that's probably one reason for that because social support on the other hand is related to longevity.

Yeah. Everybody has to remember that we all have neuroplasticity, so we can train ourselves and nobody's stuck in their angry self. It's not an identity that we should identify with. And everybody has the chance to use your book, for example, and practice. It's a skill, right?

Although the one thing I do want to say that I think is really important, we all have these different sort of temperaments, right? By temperament, I just mean most of us have one emotion or more that we feel pretty easily and others that don't come up so much. So some people, for example, don't experience a lot of irritability or anger, but it's really easy for them to feel anxiety. Some of us feel irritable and angry and don't feel anxious very much. So if you're someone whose temperament pulls you one way or the other, it's almost certainly the case that you're not going to spend, you know, a month reading an anger book and do some practices and then that fixes it forever. So for me, one of the things I've found and our election cycles and things like this have tested me in this way. I find that If I want to maintain as the kind of the version of myself that I want to be, it's not a one and done kind of thing. New triggers invent themselves all the time. And then I get to figure, oh, what am I going to do with this situation? How are you going to respond to that? So for example, my son is now an adult and he just started his first year at university. And some of his choices I'm real proud of. And some of them vexed me very much. And so now part of what I get to figure out is what do I do when my son is this kind of newly minted adult? Does stuff that I really don't like. How am I gonna handle that? So the idea is that we, we're continually working with ourselves, but as it moves on, it gets a lot easier because we get a lot better at it. We get better at recognizing the triggers. We get better at soothing ourselves or doing whatever's gonna be helpful. But I don't want people to naively think, oh, I'll just spend a month thinking about this and practicing this, and then it's golden forever because that's not really how it works.

Right.

And you said the, the magic word, curiosity, just stay curious. Curious about your evolution.

Yeah. And to check in and go, how am I doing? How am I doing this week or this month? Am I the version of myself I want to be? What are the tricky things and what would be helpful? That question is pretty magical to just look curiously at the situation and go, what would be helpful right now in terms of helping me? And sometimes when you say what would be helpful, people think what would fix the situation. But a lot of the things that really rile me up, and I suspect a lot of people, are things that in an immediate sense I can't fix. We've touched on a bunch of them today. Racism, sexism, our kids making difficult decisions, raising kids. These, there are no easy fixes for these. So sometimes the answer to the question, what would be helpful, is what would help me be like the best version of myself as I go through this difficult situation?

And that takes practice.

But if we can get in the habit of asking ourselves that and get in the habit of curiosity, it makes it less likely that we'll get swept away by these emotions.

Absolutely. And I could talk to you about this forever. I need you back on here, but I know you have to get to work. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. This was an amazing conversation.

You're very welcome. And I'm always happy to come back if you can put up with my technological challenges.

Oh no, it wasn't you. Believe me. I can't believe I'm still having issues, but thank you so much, Russell. Have an amazing day out there.

Thanks so much. It was great getting to chat with you.

Yes, it was so awesome. We're going to do this again.

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