What better way to begin exploring my emotional journal on Empath than with the emotion no one likes to talk about: Anger!
I do not consider myself an angry person. In fact, I generally avoid conflict and tend to feel guilty on the rare occasions when I lose my temper - perhaps the product of growing up in the midwest where I was socialized early and often to be “Minnesota Nice.” But we all have our limits, and just because I seldom express anger doesn’t mean I don’t feel it like everyone else.
So what makes me angry? What causes me to feel furious vs. just frustrated?And when and where do I most often start seeing red? Let’s find out.
A quick glance at the word cloud above highlights the biggest offender: Work! Big surprise, right? But this analysis doesn’t tell the whole story.
After moving from California to Colorado in 2016, I transitioned from an ivory tower venture capital career to an in-the-trenches product manager role. I missed being part of a team and building real products, and my new gig gave me the opportunity to do both. Most days I loved my work, but a big part of my job was being “the glue” and that can be frustrating. Sure enough, when I analyzed the intensity of all my angry posts vs. work-related angry posts (which also included words like “meeting” and “project”), I found that an outsized share of my anger at work was of a more mild variety.
The next largest source of irritation in my life is sleep. I’m someone who needs a full eight hours at night to be my best self - when I don’t get it, life gets rough in a hurry. Unsurprisingly, sleep was one of the first things to go after my wife and I welcomed our first daughter Kinley into the family last April, which is around the time when my journal saw an explosion in sleep-related posts (many of which conspicuously include the word “baby”). These were all on the low end of the anger spectrum - chronic low-grade frustration as I sleep-walked through six months of life in a daze. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat - I love being a dad, and Kinley will play a starring role when we get to all of my positive emotions later this week. But no one said being a parent is easy!
After “work” and “sleep,” we get into a long tail of tantrum-triggers ranging from mildly obnoxious to absolutely infuriating, but none that are really worth getting into. What’s more interesting is looking at patterns in when and where I most often feel angry. A few noteworthy trends:
- I over index on angry posts in the early morning.
- I over index on angry posts in the middle of the week and on Sundays.
- Nearly all of my angry posts occur at home or at work vs. while traveling.
Taking these findings together, while I may not generally be an angry person, there are some clear and predictable patterns to when, where, and why I feel angry. “Work” and “sleep” are my primary drivers of anger, which helps explain why I tend to feel most upset in the early mornings (after a poor night’s sleep) and in the middle of the week (when work stress usually peaks). Sundays are also a bit more anger-inducing, likely driven by negative feelings about having to go back to work on Monday. Finally, nearly all my angry emotions occur at home in Colorado, which makes sense given that I rarely travel for work and am generally enjoying vacation when outside the state.
So why is any of this relevant? How can I use these insights to live a more happy and fulfilling life? Given that I’m rarely angry, there aren’t as many obvious actions I can take based on this information as I can for other emotions that we’ll get to later, but there are still a few clear opportunities:
- Given that work has been my primary stressor, I can find a new job.
And I already have! Not so much because I didn’t like my old job as a product manager, but because I love my new job building Empath : ) - I can take steps to better understand and improve my sleeping habits.
This feels like a huge opportunity. I’m never going to be someone who can thrive on four hours of sleep, but I can learn how to more consistently get the rest I need. Especially now that Kinley is sleeping through the night! - I can accept that my anger naturally ebbs and flows, and that’s okay. My anger is often rooted in stress, which spikes in the early mornings and the middle of the week when I feel the most pressure to be productive. Exercising consistently in the mornings has helped to mitigate the former, while meditation and mindfulness is helping me accept the latter.
So that’s me angry. Now that we’ve explored my inner neanderthal, we’ll spend the next two days delving into fear and sadness and drawing a few common connections between thoughts and behaviors that may be preventing me from living the happiest and most fulfilled version of my life. Stay tuned!
