Tim Arrigo explains how anger addiction floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol, the same stress hormones that come with fear or hurt. Staying angry conditions your nervous system like a drug habit, leading to shame, guilt, and legal consequences.
When it hits you, it gives you a sense of power and control like you've never had in your entire life. But yet, its power, its control you feel, the rush that you get from it disappears almost as quick as it came. Its anger— anger is the most dangerous drug on the planet. How many people are in prison because of a flash of anger? The real reason that you're angry is because you're addicted to it. Did you know that when you get angry, the same chemicals are released in your brain as when you do cocaine? Cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and adrenaline. It gets your blood pumping through your veins. It's coursing through your veins and you feel in control. You feel high on life. You feel unstoppable. But see, there's a difference between being angry and being in that experience and actually watching somebody get angry. See, when you're angry, you feel like you're in control. You feel the power. You, you feel like you're on top of the world. You feel unstoppable. But see, when you see somebody get angry, that doesn't look like a person who's in control. That looks like a person who's out of control. The real reason you're angry is because you're either hurt or you're afraid. Anger is a secondary emotion. It can only exist if you feel fear or you feel pain. And a lot of you are addicted to anger. You use anger to mask the sense of powerlessness that you feel. So you revert back to the anger. The anger is addictive. It produces a chemical response, a rush throughout your body of hormones and chemicals that keep you addicted to basically staying in the experience. A lot of you guys don't give up the anger because it's the only coping mechanism that you have. It's a defense strategy. You're only defensive if you have something to defend. So a lot of you resort to anger because it gives you a— it allows you to live in the facade the illusion of control, right? But how many times, just like other drugs, have you used the anger and that has resorted to the same feelings of shame and guilt afterwards? You blow up, you lose your cool, you break character in anger, you say things that you later regret, that you can't take back, and then you feel the same shame and the same guilt that you felt at times in your life when you engage in other behaviors. The anger is an illusion, right? Anger is not power, right? We're told a lot of times that the person who gets angry, you know, or who acts tough, you know, they act hard, you know, that that person's in control. No, that person's not hard. They're hurt. That person's not hard by getting angry. You're hard by managing your anger because that's what's harder to do is to manage your anger. It's harder to stay composed, be confident, breathe through the experience, not give away your power. A lion doesn't need to prove that he's a lion. People resort to anger because it's an illusion. They have an inability to control their own emotions. They're giving away their power to the external environment. They're resorting back to anger and they get the rush from it. They get the rush from it. The adrenaline, the cortisol courses through their bloodstream. And I'm going to tell you right now, there's so many men that I've known that have, you know, gotten in a lot of trouble from their anger. A flash of anger has put many men in prison for life. And trust me, you don't want to ask for what you don't want from an emotion that you can't handle. You don't want to ask for what you don't want unintentionally from a behavior that you can't handle. So manage your anger, right? Manage your anger and realize that you're only truly angry because you're either A, hurt, or B, afraid. Anger is a secondary emotion. Manage that anger before that anger creates consequences in your life that you can't take back.
