Conversation with Anger Professor Dr. Ryan Martin — The Science of Anger

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1:49Welcome to the 330 episode of the Prof G Pod. What's happening? The dog is back. Home in London. So I'm dealing with... Okay, first off, I'm running on empty. I got back here, I'm jet lagged. I'm a night person to begin with, so I typically stay up till four. And unfortunately, I am with, or fortunately, I'm with my 14-year-old who has to be up at seven for this whole just awful shitty construct called school. And I get up with him and I make him a bagel, which he doesn't eat. He doesn't like my cooking. And then we hang out for a little bit and then he's off. And I've been up too long to get back to sleep.

2:22And then it is chaos in my house with the dogs, the dog walkers. I moved into basically a home that we're redoing and it's not done. So I'm literally running on empty right now. Like I cannot, I can't see anything. I'm so, I'm so tired. Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Dr. Ryan Martin, an anger expert, psychology professor, and author of How to Deal with Angry People and Why We Get Mad, How to Use Your Anger for Positive Change. We discussed with Ryan why we get mad, how to deal with anger in a better way, and how to model healthy emotional habits for the next generation. Okay, moving on.

2:55And just a reminder that we recorded this on Tuesday, TikTok pulled a dramatic disappearing act this weekend and just as quickly came back. Let's break down what happened. TikTok shutdown lasted about 14 hours. During that time, users couldn't access the app or download it from Apple or Google Play stores. The app showed a message that it was offline due to a law banning TikTok unless it sold to a non-Chinese owner. TikTok posted a pop-up message asking users to stay tuned. Then, early Sunday, Trump announced he would issue an executive order delaying the enforcement of the ban once he takes office.

3:28Within hours, TikTok was back online. TikTok welcomed its 170 million American users back with a message that read, as a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S. Okay, great. So what's going on here? So first off, I think this is kind of a part of a much bigger picture. and what I loosely refer to is we are no longer a serious people. So the ban, they had six months to try and figure out what to do or come to some sort of accommodation. And you know what they said to us? Hold my beer, we don't believe you. So what did we do? The most powerful nation in the world? We blinked.

4:08Instead, just kidding, just kidding. We're gonna give you another 60, 75, 90 days. Folks, what do you think is gonna happen now? Now that we have even less credibility? Oh, and by the way, by the way, what is evidence? What is the best piece of data I can give you for why TikTok should be banned? Within 24 hours, they were able to rally, inspire, light up on demand, tens of millions of people within the U.S. to apply political pressure that resulted in the president of the United States going back on a law, a law upheld by the Supreme Court. Why? Because whether it's TikTok, a Singapore-based company, or the CCP, which legally mandates any company in China, give its data over or comply with Chinese interests, essentially they were able to spin up propaganda and inspire action to put political pressure on the president, the administration, and lawmakers, which is exactly why it should be banned.

5:07What happens when they invade Taiwan? What happens when they think of issues that divide us even further and they can just spin up and elevate content such that we either divide each other or do things that serve their interests and not ours. For God's sakes, would we let the Kremlin control CBS, NBC, and ABC in the 60s? What's Trump's plan? He floated the idea of a 50-50 joint venture between ByteDance and American owner, though it's unclear if that would satisfy lawmakers. So there's a term for this. I know TikTok's an amazing company. He said it's worth a trillion dollars. The U.S. is going to be a joint partner with TikTok.

5:41We're going to own 50 % of it, said President Trump. There's a word for that. There's a word for that public-private partnership in business. Socialism. That's literally the definition of socialism when the means of production is owned by and controlled by the government. And we have decided through centuries of capitalism, and it has been proven over and over, that the government is shitty at owning businesses. They're okay at running the Navy and the National Park Service and running operations where there's no profit incentive. But when it comes to a traditional media company with a profit incentive, when the government gets involved, it's just not a good idea.

6:18It wasn't a good idea when the U.K. decided to invest in this hot new automobile company. Was it Tesla? No, it was a company called DeLorean. Was it a good idea when Obama invested a ton of money in Solandra or gave low interest loans to Tesla? Probably not. Generally speaking, the government is not good at running for profit enterprises. And we've come to the conclusion that in America, we let the full body contact violence of competition decide who the winner is. and hopefully implement a progressive tax structure, which we have not done as corporations are paying the lowest taxes since 1939, such that we can pay for our Navy and our seniors and food stamps.

6:52But instead, we're gonna have ownership. We're gonna do a deal of 50 % with TikTok. That just makes absolutely no sense. We are not a serious people here between the kleptocracy of the Trump meme coin, where now basically anybody can transfer money to the president without anybody knowing, without any SEC filings. Hey, here's an idea. This is Vlad, dear President Trump. Congratulations on your victory. What if I bought 600 billion rubles worth of the Trump coin, which would make you one of the wealthiest men in the world? And by the way, in unrelated news, could you please seize arms shipments to Ukraine?

7:28That is literally where we are. We've decided that on certain issues, the government, we've embraced socialism. But at the same time, we're just with this weird fucking mix, this soup, if you will, this melange, this palate cleanser, although it's not a palate cleanser. It's more like indigestion. It's more like swallowing a big, jagged pull. It's more like an awful peanut, rancid peanut butter and the worst fucking chocolate you've ever had combination of a kleptocracy and socialism. We are not a serious people. We'll be right back for our conversation with Dr. Ryan Martin.

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10:33Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Dr. Ryan Martin, an anger expert. See above my views on TikTok. Jesus Christ, little angry? How about a little dog with your anger? Psychology professor and author of How to Deal with Angry People and Why We Get Mad, How to Use Your anger for positive change. Professor Martin, where does this podcast find you? I am in Green Bay, Wisconsin in my office. Let's bust right into it. In your book, Why We Get Mad, How to Use Your Anger for Positive Change, you broke down all things anger, including how to both cope with and use anger to your advantage. So let's start there.

11:09What is anger and how does it affect us and the people around us? Yeah, so anger is an emotion. It's everything from the mild frustration we feel when we can't find our car keys in the morning to the intense rage we might feel when we are treated just truly, truly terribly or poorly. And as an emotion, though, it, of course, affects our behavior. It encourages us to do, you know, sometimes positive things, but also sometimes negative things. So the way it affects the people around us is that, you know, we can end up hurting people when we're angry. We can end up criticizing people when we're angry.

11:53We can end up engaging in dangerous behaviors that either may accidentally harm us or someone else or just are unhealthy, right? So people use alcohol and other drugs when they're angry and so on. So it affects people in all those ways. So I often say that I struggle with anger and depression and I'm curious, well, I'll describe how I register anger. Maybe I'm mislabeling it, but something triggers me, something dumb. Sometimes it's something on social media or I don't know, something upsets me. and I get so pissed off. And oftentimes, I'd say most of the time, it's anger at myself. And then it's like my blood turns to acid and I have this burning sensation and then it stops and I'm exhausted and then I go into this depression.

12:50Like acid has run through my veins, tired me out, and now I'm just down. It goes from anger to depression. You know, I think that what you're describing is a relatively common phenomenon that, you know, our emotions don't happen in a vacuum. We have a tendency to talk about them individually. And I think because that's the simplest way to think about them. But the truth is that we are angry at the same time. We're sad or depressed or scared or guilty or a host of other things. And so what ends up happening is moments like what you're describing. We come across something, we don't like it either because we find it to be unfair or we find it to be poor treatment or because it gets in the way of our goals, being able to achieve those goals.

13:43And so we react negatively to that. Now, of course, if you just take one of those types of provocations, I just meant, you know, not being able to achieve our goals or having our goals blocked. Of course, that's going to lead to feelings other than just anger. And it makes sense that another emotion that can stem from that is sadness or depression or fear or some other feeling. And what was interesting that he said there, too, is that, and I don't know if this is what you meant, so if you meant something different, definitely correct me, but, you know, this idea of acid running through your veins, for me and for a lot of people when they're angry, it becomes this lens that they're looking at the world through, right?

14:24And so all of a sudden, a lot of other stuff that happens in their life is interpreted in a very negative way. It's that sort of phenomenon. I've had a bad morning, and because I've had a bad morning, all of these little other things that are happening are sort of filtered through that experience. And this sort of negativity begets more negativity and more negativity, and it just kind of keeps going that way. And so, yeah, it makes sense that there's this sadness or depression that follows. My father used to say that anger is fine as long as it's planned. And it reminds me of that photo of Khrushchev at the UN banging his shoe on the table.

15:01And the photo is the aperture on it or the perspective is broad enough that you see he's still wearing two shoes. So he brought a shoe with a plan to bang it on the table. What are your thoughts? And it leads to in your book, you discuss the concept of good and bad anger. Say more. Yeah, I mean, anger can absolutely be used for good. I mean, ultimately, if we think about emotions from an evolutionary perspective, which is how I tend to think about them, then they exist in us because they solved some sort of adaptive problem. And the same way sadness alerts us to loss and fear alerts us to danger, anger alerts us to injustice.

15:43And it provides us energy that we can use to confront that injustice. And I think the question of whether or not your anger is good or is bad in some ways has to do with the consequences of how you use it. And so if I get angry over, let's say, politics, and because that anger drives me to drink or be depressed or do a host of negative things, things that are bad for me, well, then those consequences, that anger isn't healthy in my life. If that anger drives me to work towards particular social change, works towards particular positive outcomes, then that anger, we can think of that as being healthy in my life.

16:30You recently wrote a HuffPost piece where you discuss how the state of politics evokes feelings of anger, especially in men. Can you break down what you meant by that? Yeah. So, and I should actually credit you with this in some ways that ultimately, maybe the day after the election or two days after the election, I was scrolling through TikTok and I saw a post from you where you were talking really about how this election might have been influenced by male anger more than I guess I was expecting it to be. And it really gave me pause. It helped me realize some things that I hadn't necessarily been thinking about.

17:10And then coupled with that, I was at a basketball game, my son's basketball game in a relatively small town in eastern Wisconsin. And a stranger came up to me, said they'd seen me on Theo Vaughn's podcast, and he wanted to talk to me about his anger. And, you know, this was a person who I suspect is very different for me politically, if I'm just guessing based on demographics. And the two of us had a really thoughtful conversation. It got me thinking about all of the ways in which I need to be talking to and engaging with young men in particular who might be really angry about the state of affairs to help them work through that anger in a healthy way.

17:54I dug a little deeper into the research after that. And what I saw is that, OK, men are reporting getting angry almost twice as much as women in their day to day lives. They're experiencing more negative consequences as a result of that anger. And when you look at why they're getting angry, it's a host of reasons. But one of the biggies is feeling like they didn't get what they wanted, right? That they're not getting something that they are desiring or having their goals blocked in a significant way. if you've decided you have too much anger in your life and like i really go down a rabbit hole i role-play in my mind confrontations with people or topics and it's unfair to them i imagine them you know i imagine myself in an argument with somebody and that's unfair to them it's like when you're i don't know if you've ever waked up woken up and your partner is angry at you because of the way you behaved in their dream it's just not it's just not cool right it's not fair to them so say you decide for whatever reason whether it's your own mental health or the way you treat other people or it's reducing your productivity that you want to reduce the amount of anger in your life.

18:59Across all of the different practices in behavioral therapy, what do you find are the two or three most effective ways to try and address your anger other than pharmaceuticals? I start with a real big picture look at this and, you know, understanding, okay, so why am I getting angry? What are the patterns here that we're seeing? And you can, anytime you feel something, you kind of map it out. I sometimes diagram this the way you might diagram a sentence or something that it includes really three things. There's some sort of provocation. There's some sort of thing that happened, unfair treatment, you know, injustice or goal blocking.

19:41Then there's my mood at the time of that provocation. You know, was I stressed? Was I whatever? And then there is my interpretation of that provocation, like how I, what I thought it meant, what I decided it meant in my life. Did I, did I think I could cope with it? And so on. Once you figure that out and you can see those patterns, then there's actually sort of infinite ways you can intervene. We can be more aware of what provocations we're inviting into our life. We can manage our stress, make sure we're staying hydrated. We can exercise, do a host of things there. We can think about how we're interpreting those things and focus on the appraisal.

20:26And then ultimately, we can try and deal with the emotion itself when we experience it. And so through deep breathing, through meditation, those things like that, to try and bring it down. As far as what do I think are the best things, I do think that focusing specifically on that appraisal element. I think what people need is to figure out how to have a realistic understanding of the consequences of a particular situation. And, you know, we find all the time, I mean, we'll use driving as an example. You know, you get cut off, you get angry, and, you know, your interpretation of that is sort of a, he shouldn't have done that, or they shouldn't have done that.

21:12That was unsafe. That was dangerous. And all of that may be true. But then the next question is, okay, so what were the consequences? The consequences are that this person cut me off now. What do I do next? And so often, people switch into like sort of vigilante mode. And it's like, well, I need to get revenge in some way, but we know that that doesn't actually really help or solve the problem. Oftentimes it makes it worse. And so I think thinking through, okay, how bad was this? Can I cope with it? What do I do next? Is a good sort of problem focused way of dealing with it. So I'll just go forward a thesis and you tell me, and I think you'll agree with it, but I find that I'm much less prone to anger the more social I am.

21:54What do I mean by that? when I'm around coworkers or in the office and I'd say, oh, this was a shitty job. They or people around them have a chance to go, well, it was shitty because we didn't get this edit done in time because the power went out. Or I get angry at my partner and they will remind me, well, actually, no, this was your responsibility. Or the more I'm around people, I hang out with Republicans. And instead of getting angry about, well, how could you elect this guy? I sort of get some context for why they think the people I'm supporting make no fucking sense either. It just helps me to be in the company or the presence of other people and to have those guardrails.

22:38It's almost like a solvent for my anger because it helps me have different perspectives and realize a lot of times my anger is more about my gut or that I didn't have lunch or some weird chemical running through my brain than anything I should actually, or that justifies my anger. For me, the key is human contact. That is my neosporin for anger. Yeah, I think that's fascinating. And it's really part of what I was trying to communicate in that HuffPost piece too, is this idea that interacting with other people who see the world differently from us can help provide different ways of interpreting those provocations.

23:16And so if I'm only looking at the world through my lens and I'm not listening to other people to try and understand, uh, you know, that broader context. Yeah. I'm, I'm likely to get angry because, uh, I'm, I'm doing probably a lot of mind reading, uh, about, I mean, it goes back to what you said before about, you know, you sort of role play those interactions with people. If you could actually have those interactions with someone, you would, they would probably surprise you as far as how they, they react to things, So maybe they would surprise you about how they react to things. So those conversations that we have, that human contact, it really does shift two things.

23:56One, it shifts that, what we call the pre-anger state, right? Your mood at the time of the anger, of the provocation. It also shifts your interpretation. It gives you a new way of thinking about whatever this provocation is and helps you see things a little bit differently in a way that might lead to less anger. We'll be right back.

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