Dr. Nicole Cain explains anger anxiety, where the fight response triggers irritability and overwhelm instead of physical aggression. Childhood adversity and trauma can wire the amygdala to stay hyperactive. Cooling foods like cucumber and cilantro, plus brain re-patterning, can help settle it.
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Your results indicate that your primary manifestation of anxiety is anger anxiety. You feel irritable or overwhelmed, over taxed, and like there's a lot of frustration. When we think about autonomic arousal, you've probably heard the terms fight, flight, freeze, fight is the anger anxiety. Fight is an empowering state that can help you get unblocked or get out of the situation that's dangerous to you. And so, in a sense, anger anxiety can be a very empowering emotion. It's a natural response when we experience surges of adrenaline or surges of cortisol. Our body is trying to keep us safe and to protect us. The key is to make sure that the anger anxiety is something that's empowering you as opposed to holding you back from really deeply connecting with people. Feeling calm when you need to be calm, and feeling like you can manage whatever comes your way. You may be a higher risk of anger anxiety if you were exposed to, to violence or anger when you were growing up, or if you had to fight for survival during childhood or adolescence. People who've gone through a lot of conflict, socioeconomic instability, war, tend towards more of that anger anxiety. And if you have had emotions other than anger, like sadness and fear, maybe those emotions weren't respected in your household when you were growing up. And so anger is the main way that, that you were taught to express all of that stress that you experience. And when we see all of these adversities and all of these traumas, they can actually result in your amygdala. This is the emotional part of the brain to become more activated. And we see a dialing down of activity in the logical or the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which would stop you from engaging in more impulsive behaviors. And so when, when you go through trauma, it can make you more emotional and less logical. And so you might find that you deal with anger outbursts. Ayurveda also speaks to anger anxiety, and they teach about if your body is out of balance in such a way as they describe as pitta, that when you're hot and agitated, you're more likely to be in a pitta state, which predisposes you for anger anxiety. Maybe you've heard of this in Arizona in the summer, we have a thing called heat rage. People are all pitta, they're all hot, they're all agitated, and their anger levels go up. There are a ton of things that you can do to make anger anxiety better, and there are things that you could do to make it worse. And so what we see in Ayurveda is that we tend to lean into the imbalance. And so if you're in a pitta state, if you're more hot and agitated and fiery, you may crave things that intensify that, like spicy foods. But we see that you can actually combat that with cooling foods like cucumbers or cilantro and peppermint. And that can actually start calming the body, putting you back in balance, and then making it easier for you to manage and actually heal from anger anxiety. I have a ton more information on this. We could speak for days on this. It's inside of the Holistic Wellness Collective. And so if you want to learn the root causes of anger anxiety, how to re pattern your brain so that you feel calm and in control, and if you want to learn how to change your diet and what supplements can help anger anxiety to get you the results you want, definitely check out the Holistic Wellness Collective.
