Hello friends.

My name is Erick Cloward and welcome to the Stoic Coffee Break.

The Stoic Coffee Break is a weekly podcast where I take aspects of stoicism and do my best to break 'em down to the most important points I pull from modern and ancient wisdom, psychology, neuroscience, anything that I can get my hands on to help you think better.

'cause I believe when you think better, you can live better.

This week's episode is another interview with Donald Robertson.

He's one of my favorite guests on here.

This will be his third appearance.

And last time we were together, uh, it was, I was still living in Amsterdam at that time, and now I'm back here in Portland.

And we had a great discussion about one of my favorite books by him called How to Think Like Socrates.

Uh, he's the author of, I think, what 10 books now.

I don't know.

Nine.

I think it's nine.

Nine books.

Nine books including How to Think Like A Roman Emperor.

Um, also a, a graphic novel about Marcus Aurelius's life, uh, kind of runs the spectrum and he's also a CBT therapist and he, uh, posts most of his stuff on Substack.

So we'll make sure that we put a link in here.

So if you want to follow Donald Robinson on Substack, um, I think it's Stoicism philosophy as a way of life is the name of your sub substack.

And yeah, so today we are going to be talking about something that influences all of us, and that is anger.

So anger is something that is one of our primal emotions.

And so we're gonna be kind of jumping into this and seeing if we can, I dunno, dissect it and have an interesting conversation about anger.

So Donald, starting off, uh.

I guess what is your perspective on anger?

And I know that you've been doing a course on anger and talking about that a lot and um, I know that anger is just very complex and how it relates to, in our society.

Um, for example, there's the idea of like righteous anger.

You know, people feel like if they give up their anger, it's gonna take the fire out of doing the things that they want to do.

Um, but the stokes teach a lot about how anger is probably one of the most destructive emotions that we have.

So let's kind of jump into that and talk about some of the, I guess the paradoxes of anger, maybe where anger comes from, kind of wherever you wanna start with that.

It's quite a big subject.

Like most things.

There's complex aspects and then there's maybe aspects of it that are simpler.

think it's a very important subject to talk about because it's the forgotten emotion in some ways.

In psychotherapy, there's far less research on anger than there is on depression and anxiety, for example.

also.

Anger's an externalizing emotion.

So when we're angry, we, one of the key features of it, if we're angry with other people, we typically attribute blame to them.

know, so we, if I'm really angry, I'm gonna think it's you guys that need to go and have therapy, like sort yourselves out, not me.

Right?

So I, people who primarily have anger, don't tend to self-refer for treatment.

Although where you often see them is in prisons, in schools, and in the military.

Because in institutions they're often referred by other people.

Someone else says, Hey buddy, you need to go and see somebody about your anger.

Right?

So there's something about it that makes angry people, therapy dodgers, if you like, Except, you know, for example, in a relationship or something like that, they tend to be told that they need to go and have it.

So for that reason, it's kinda neglected and particularly.

I would say we live in a kind of self-help, self-improvement culture.

Nowadays, people consume vast amounts of self-improvement stuff over the internet.

When I was a kid, you go to the bookshop and there would be like a few self-help books.

Now we're inundated with self-improvement courses, videos on YouTube, podcasts.

There's more books than ever before.

But angry people tend not to be addressing their anger.

They tend to have a blind spot for it.

So I'd say culturally, but very simply, uh, people are working on other stuff, but they're not working on their own anger as much.

And we can see.

On the internet how anger is manifesting.

Once you take away, uh, the consequences of behavior and you let people listen on social media and they maybe have anonymity to hide behind, they su people are surprised how aggressive and hostile and rude, how much trolling and bullying and stuff there is online.

there's a clue there, which is that maybe people were angrier than we realized before, but they were suppressing it masking it.

And now on the internet they can let loose what was already inside.

Like, to some extent they're probably making it worse as well.

But we, we can now see anger probably was always there, but not fully acknowledged and not really being addressed properly.

And you're right, it comes in many different forms.

Um, so I think of it in some ways is the royal road to self-improvement.

'cause for many people it's the area where there's most opportunity, most room for improvement, if only because it's often the most neglected area.

And in fact, research tells us anger responds pretty well to psychological interventions.

So in psychotherapy there are some things that have a much higher success rate than others.

Like treatments for phobias maybe take in three hours.

Like an animal phobia, you might have like a 90% success rate doing standard exposure therapy.

Um, whereas clinical depression, it's harder to treat, you know, it can take a dozen sessions or longer.

You know, success rate's lower, maybe it's like 50, 60%, something like that typically.

but anger has a pretty high success rate in a relatively short space of time with the majority of people.

Right.

So it's something that we could potentially be working on, but we tend not to be that much.

And, and again, the other reason that we might want to work on it is apart from the effect that anger has on us individually, obviously it also tends to have quite a big interpersonal impact so it can destroy relationships.

I don't think it's any coincidence that we see a lot of young guys in self-improvement communities.

Like I'm thinking of the manosphere and stuff like that, obviously.

And they're consuming hugely.

They, they love their Jordan Peters and they love their Andrew Tate.

They're consuming all the self-improvement stuff, but often they seem to be getting.

Angrier as a result of doing it.

and they often go on and on about blaming other groups of people, like it's feminists and cultural Marxists.

And you know, anyone that doesn't agree with them's fault.

Like, so there's a lot of blaming, lot of anger.

and I, a lot of those guys don't have girlfriends, like, and a lot of them are, are angry because they're not in relationships.

But I mean, you don't need to be, you know, a genius.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out, maybe buddy, your anger has something to do with the fact that you don't have a relationship.

I think there, you know, you see your anger as a consequence of that, but maybe it's also a cause maybe the, there could be a circular relationship there between the anger and the lack of satisfying relationships.

Those, those are some of the reasons that I think it's important.

Yeah, I know for me it definitely, so my anger and, and inability to work with that, uh, definitely was caused of the ending of my two major significant relationships.

So my marriage and also, uh, my last long-term relationship, which was about nine years.

And it was, for me, it wasn't that I was angry at them per se, it was that my anger stemmed out of fear.

So I grew up in a very traumatic childhood, so my dad was, was randomly angry and it, it, there was no real rhyme or reason for it.

And so there was always this feeling of, if, if my partner or the person who was supposed to provide love was disappointed, annoyed, frustrated, upset, then I would feel this fear.

And so my reaction, rather than being, Hey, I'm scared, you know, it was, I've gotta protect myself.

And so I would get angry and try and convince them that they shouldn't be angry with me.

And so then we get in a, a big fight and we would never talk about what they were upset about.

And just the cycle just kept repeating over and over and over.

And it took me really the last two years of just kind of being alone and just really diving deep into that and trying to understand that and doing a lot of writing on that.

And, and that was where I kept, I kept.

As I would think back through that, I was like, okay, the emotion wasn't, I wasn't mad, like I wasn't trying to be malicious or I wasn't mad about these things.

It, the emotion was fear you.

And that was the core emotion of it.

And so the anger was that protective mechanism for me.

And I found that really interesting.

And it took a while for me to, you know, you know, dig down and keep digging, keep digging, keep digging.

And then finally it was like, ah, there's the root of that.

well, we might as well at that, you know, and dig into it because I think it's something that can help a lot of people.

we said earlier, the angle's complicated and I said, you know, it's what I like to call simple, complicated, like the simple bits to it, and those complicated bits as well.

One of the simplest things that we find about anger is we right out the gate, our big, one of our biggest problems, I think, particularly when we're doing self-improvement or self-help, that we're lumbered with what psychologists call a folk psychology.

So we inherit a way of understanding the mind, and particularly a way of understanding emotion that's built, baked into the language that we use and the culture.

when it comes to emotions, and particularly perhaps when it comes to anger, our folk psychology preconceptions are.

certainly wrong, you know, and, and definitely not very helpful either.

So we're, we're quite handicapped right out the gate in terms of our own psychological self-awareness because we, we don't have good language or concepts for really understanding what's actually going on anger.

And so we usually say, Hey, anger's an emotion.

There's emotions like fear and sadness and stuff like that.

We think of them as kind of fitting on a level playing field.

But there are reasons to question that anger might be functionally quite distinct from things like fear and sadness and other emotions.

Um, apart from the fact that there may be different, as we mentioned earlier, maybe there's different types of anger that we'd have to distinguish from one another.

So one of the reasons it might be functionally different is that psychologists have often said that anger, in most cases, maybe not in all cases.

But particularly interpersonal anger of the type that we are talking about.

So we could call that stereotypical anger, like when we get upset with other people in our relationship and so on.

Uh, it often functions as what psychologists call a secondary emotion.

So, typically another emotion that precedes it.

Now, in the ancient world, curiously, as far as I know, all schools of philosophy and they disagreed with each other about a lot of things.

But all of them seem to define anger as a desire for revenge, which a little bit different from the way that we think about it today.

Now, one interesting implication of that is that if anger is a desire for revenge, implies that something preceded it.

'cause you must be taking revenge for something.

And so the story spell that out pretty clearly.

They say there's a sense of injury.

That precedes anger.

So anger very much in their eyes is a secondary emotion that responds to a preceding sense of injury.

And that initial emotion might be fear, it could be shame, it could be frustration, but that you're responding to the thing.

It has, it comes with a few different flavors.

It's like a selection box there of types of anger, but there's usually some kind of pain, painful emotion, and then anger is a response to it.

Now, would make anger a sense, what we tend to refer to as a coping strategy.

Uh, so anger could be viewed as a form of ego defense or a coping strategy.

And that would also imply that in some ways now, obviously there are, you know, one of the, let's come back to the folk psychology, the, the folk psychology of anger and other emotions we can describe very simply.

It's got, I guess, two main qualities.

one is that by default we tend to think of emotions as homogenous, right?

And we usually think of them using what's come to be known as the hydraulic model.

So people tend to think of anger and other emotions as like a force that wells up within them, and it can be sort of pushed down they can vent it and kinda get out the system like, or they can kind of channel it or redirect it into other things.

Like it's, you know, a build up a water pressure or something like that, right?

and they're wrong, right?

That isn't how it functions.

But that's baked into our language and our, our popular understanding of it.

So the first thing you might say is like, in reality, anger is more like a recipe.

It's like a cake that's baked from sugar and milk, you know, and flour and eggs.

Like, there's a bunch of things that get mixed together and that collectively they combine and they bake the cake of anger.

And that's why there are different forms of anger.

There's different recipes for anger.

And anger varies cross-culturally like, and actually it's in the ancient world, the way that Romans experienced anger is probably quite different from the way that modern day Americans experience anger.

I think in some ways Americans experience anger differently from the way that British people and Canadians, you know, and people in other fuss world, English speaking countries like experience anger.

There might even be, you know, uh, differences regionally within the us.

In terms of the way that that people process and experience anger.

But definitely if you look around the world, there are quite big differences between East Asian countries or indigenous societies and, you know, first world, uh, English speaking countries like America and Canada in terms of the way they experience anger.

And Mediterranean countries like Greece, spoon, Italy, uh, anger is experienced a a little bit differently.

So it's like a cake and there's different recipes for it around the world.

So we might want to go, okay, what are these different ingredients?

Well, the first thing you'd want to do distinguish, I think in a, a familiar stoic fashion between the bits of anger that are voluntary and under your control, and the bits of anger that are involuntary, not under your control.

So when you get really angry, your heart might beat faster.

That's largely involuntary, right?

You can't just kinda like make it stop by directing your teeth.

Um, and your blood pressure might increase more with anger typically than with any other emotion.

That's why it's highly correlated with cardiac problems, like, uh, quite, quite serious aspect of it.

Um, so.

Anger raises your blood pressure.

You might feel flushed, you might start to tremble and stuff.

That's all involuntary stuff.

There might be even automatic thoughts that flash into your mind when you're angry.

Like if somebody walks up to you and spits in your face in the street, you're probably gonna have a kinda reflex like reaction to that.

But then there's also voluntary aspects.

There's what you do with your arms and legs and your mouth.

Like, so what you actually say, do you actually punch the guy or not?

Like, do you walk away?

These things are voluntary.

Ultimately they can feel like you've lost control of them.

in principle, they're voluntary behaviors.

And so we, I'm I, I'm spelling that out because one feature of anger is that we actually tend to lose sight of that.

So people when they get really angry, tend to feel and talk and think as if they've lost control temporarily.

And there are probably psychological reasons for that.

But.

It's kind of an illusion in a way.

Uh, and we can regain control, like, and we can, you know, can start to change the direction that our behavior takes, uh, when we're getting angry, I think.

So one of the first things we wanna do is kinda recognize that anger to some extent is voluntary, and it's being used in most cases, is a way of coping.

R and t Beck, like Tim Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, wrote a really good, uh, book and anger, I think it's called Prisoners of Hate.

And then at Beck said that when he began studying anger, one of the things that's distinctive about BE'S approach is he got people to keep a meticulous record their automatic thoughts and their feelings each day when they were having episodes of anger or depression or anxiety or whatever, and be said that initially.

Some of his clients didn't recognize a preceding emotion, like fear.

You mentioned earlier they thought, I just get angry at people in events.

But when he got them to carefully track and record their automatic thoughts, almost all of them began to notice that there was a preceding emotion.

it might be that in virtually all cases there's some kind of emotion that precedes anger.

Now that has quite profound implications actually, for the way that we understand anger, because it may be, you know, that it's not a particularly good or healthy way of coping with the preceding emotion.

It really changes a lot of the implications for how we understand the pros and cons of allowing ourselves to get angry and the consequences of, of doing so.

I.

I never thought of it as being a coping strategy, but I, I think that makes a lot of sense.

So,

Well, here's a clue when people are frightened, one of the correlates of that, in most cases, is it activates schemas of helplessness, as we put it.

people that have high levels of anxiety, we can rephrase this in a bunch of different ways, but often they feel temporarily helpless when they're anxiety speaking.

When you get angry, it often does the opposite.

It makes you feel temporarily more empowered,

yeah.

it compensates.

It's a form of, you could also say in, in psychology, it was a warning.

Like in psychology, we have to have at least six different ways of describing the same thing, right?

So, I apologize if I'm using a little bit of jargon, but, uh, anger can also be viewed as a form of overcompensation.

So I feel really helpless.

I have to overcompensate for that potentially, you know?

So I do something that makes me feel much more powerful.

So, you know, often the strange thing about anger is.

It's compulsive as well usually.

So, and again, acknowledging there's some variation to this, like when people feel angry, they often perceive themselves as being compelled.

So they'll say things like, I had to punch that guy.

I had no other way of getting the kids to listen to me, except by yelling at them.

So there's a lot of, had to do this, must do this no other way, no choice in people's descriptions of what they're experiencing when, when they're angry.

So the way they're kind of disowning responsibility for their actions, like they temporarily feel more focused and more powerful 'cause they've narrowed down what they're gonna do to like a single option, but they usually do it with excessive force in a way that tends to backfire.

Basically, and in a way that's not very adaptive to what's going on in the, around their environment.

So they do it in an overly aggressive and forceful and rigid manner.

That's typical of anger.

That's why it causes, tends to cause relationship problems and, and stuff like that.

So it might be a good, it might be a good idea to communicate your opinions and set boundaries with your wife and your kids.

But the problem is when you do it angrily you, you're, you're doing something that could potentially be useful, but doing it in a rigid and aggressive way that will tend to make people defensive.

And so it will often backfire.

Anger is the emotion of shame and regret.

Like, you know, people, like the angrier they get, the more likely they are later to think, oh man, what an idea am I wish I had done that.

And the angry people often look back with regret.

And what, and here we're touching on something that else, that's integral to it.

You talked about righteousness earlier.

Angry people tend to feel justified again with some exceptions, but often they'll feel an inflated sense of justification of righteousness in what they're doing.

Um, so in the angry mode of thinking, you, you, you can be convinced that what you're doing is right, but a day later or half an hour later, you might think that was dumb.

wish I hadn't done that.

And suddenly it doesn't seem righteous or justified In retrospect, it seems like maybe it was a, a stupid idea.

So it shows how said anger is temporary madness.

Like I, and I'll, I'll touch on, we're getting a bit, we we're getting into all sorts of territory here, but, uh, the, one of my kinda pet peeves is there's a, another problem with our folk psychology, I believe.

And it it's linked to a theoretical debate that happened in ancient Greek philosophy between the stoics, for example, and the other schools of philosophy.

Plato said there are three parts of the mind here.

The famous tripartite model of the mind.

It compelled it to a chariot, uh, controlling, uh, a team of two horses.

And they represent appetite and or anger.

the charioteer is reason.

Um, later generations of Platonists simplified it and said, those two horses, appetite and anger really are the passions.

So it's really a dichotomy between reason and the passion is like a charioteer controlling these animals.

I think this metaphor is extremely misleading and potentially unhelpful.

It's baked into our folk psychology, and I'll explain why.

The stoics explicitly rejected that idea.

And they proposed what's called a monistic theory, or you could say a holistic theory of the mind.

thought the passions are a mode of reasoning.

Basically, it's something that infects the whole of consciousness rather than something that can happens over there.

And reason is observing like two different parts of the mind and conflict.

Now, I'm not pretending this is a conclusive point to make, but just as a kind of a side, we had.

Pretty much the same debate in the 20th century.

'cause Freud adopted a tripartite model of the mind that was influenced by Plato.

Freud said, there's an ed ego and superego, and your mind is fundamentally divided into these separate functions or parts of regions of the mind called it the structural model of the mind.

own followers began to reject that because they thought it was overly kinda mechanical and sort of rigid.

It didn't really match the lived experience of our emotions.

And by the 1950s there was a whole movement in psychology called the Humanistic Movement, um, that explicitly was reacting against this kinda structural model of the mind and trying to regain the unity of consciousness and the lived experience, the phenomenology like of the emotions.

got people like Jean Paul re saying, you know, the emotions are a mode of consciousness.

They're not like, you know, over there and reason is over there.

So this idea of the cha trying to control it, what's missing from that?

And I think the easiest way to, to cut to the chase here and highlight where the problem lies, is it kind of implies the charity like rational.

And he's trying to kind of control these two horses.

Nobody, the charioteer is angry too.

Like anger infects the whole psyche, right?

The, the problem is runs deeper than that.

It's, 'cause otherwise you might think, man, when I get angry, I should be able to just kinda try and control it or reign it in.

But the problem is you feel justified in your anger often at the time.

It's more like trying to pull yourself up by your own bush bootstraps.

'cause your brain is already thinking in an angry way.

Like, so to talk yourself out of anger when you're already thinking angrily is kind of tricky.

Like, you know, it's harder than it seems at first.

I think that's why people are kind of puzzled, why they're struggling to control their anger because they have this image in their mind that the rational part of them should be able to control the angry part.

Like this charioteer uh, Jonathan Het describes it as like a, an elephant rider trying to control the elephant.

But the problem with all of these metaphors is that the elephant rider or the cha himself is angry.

And, and that's what the stoics really wanted to emphasize.

The whole psyche, the whole of consciousness becomes infected by anger potentially.

And so it is possible that you can get yourself outta this hole, but it's a little bit trickier than that metaphor might imply at first.

And also the, the change, um, the temporal change is more significant than it might seem at first.

The fact that you can look back on it afterwards and think, I was kind of out of my mind like, yeah, what was I thinking?

Like, you know, when I, I, you know, I lashed out.

People end up in prison that way and you know, and then they've got years to sit in a little room and contemplate, you know, what was I thinking?

So, you know, the, the problem's more nuanced and runs a little bit deeper than that.

Metaphor implies, again, the folk psychology is letting us down.

You know, we need a more accurate, more nuanced understanding of what we mean when we use the word anger, unfortunately, in order, and, and having a clearer understanding.

We've given us more control.

Knowledge is power.

Like if we're a little bit more, uh, insight into what's going on with anger, we'd be able to do more about it.

But you, what you said about fear preceding it, that very fact, like allows us, um, I said, I, I highlight what I think is simple here, and that is many people benefit just from the following advice that you could write in the back of a business card, Sport, the early warming signs of anger.

Learn to notice situations, that typically make you angry.

So, and then be self-aware.

spot the initial signs of your emotional response as early as you can notice the preceding emotion, and then just sit with it for longer than normal, even if it was only 10 seconds.

Like, just allow yourself to accept the fear, experience it, be aware of it.

because although anxiety and fear can take a lot of work in therapy, you know, sometimes we're anxious, we're frightened, and in most cases we're naturally able to process it.

Now put it to you that because anger maybe is a crappy emotional coping strategy, it might actually just be getting in the way and preventing you from doing something about the preceding emotion.

And maybe you're perfectly capable, like of dealing with the anxiety or fear, or more so than you realize.

But, you know, allowing yourself to get angry as a way of responding is actually sabotaging your own emotional coping skills.

So just accept the feeling, sit

No.

a little bit longer than normal is that that alone is enough to benefit a lot of people.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, and as you were describing it, I can 100% relate to it.

I, so with my last partner, I would get, you know, I would get angry and, you know, start acting in anger.

And I, I felt like I was completely outta control.

Like, I would try to do this and sometimes I'd deescalate a little bit, and then she would say something and then boom, it would be right back up again.

And it was just, you know, and then afterwards I would look back and I'm like, why couldn't I just stop myself?

You know, that rationality that I have, I mean, I've been studying STOs this point, I've been studying stoicism for five or six years, and I was like, I know this.

I know these things, but I'm still out of control.

And it wasn't, it wasn't, like I said, until I was able to identify that preceding emotion, that core emotion, which was fear that.

I felt like I was actually able to make some progress on it.

You might be

so a lot of that, yeah, and fear is something that I could do something about.

I could, like you said, sit with that, but it took, I mean, unfortunately the relationship was ended when I finally made some of these discoveries.

But for me, I look back on it now and I'm like, okay, if I had been able to, you know, understand what the root cause of this was before and take care of that root cause, it would've been so much easier to do that.

And so understanding that root cause definitely has allowed me going forward to be a lot less angry about a lot of things because I try to go to, okay, what, what is it that I'm feeling?

Rather than, you know, responding like a guy ripped me off for an apartment in Amsterdam, 5,000 euros.

And I didn't, I didn't really get that angry about it because I, I recognized that I'd made some bad choices, and it was, I could be very rational about that and recognized that me getting angry about it was just gonna put myself in a bad mood for a few days.

And so why would I choose to do that?

Yeah.

know, I was, I was annoyed, I was frustrated, I was disappointed, all of these things.

And so I just sat in that.

I was just like, God, that was really stupid.

Um,

Wow.

and so I find that I'm much better able to deal with anger because I've worked on dealing with the root causes first, rather than just trying to stop the behavior in the moment.

And now that, now that you've kind of had that, that that insight of anger is just a very poor coping mechanism that makes a lot more sense.

And it kind of, once brings me back to, I did an episode a few weeks ago.

You're talking about masculinity and, and one of the things that I noticed after my divorce was that I, I took some time because I was like, okay, my definition of masculinity is really kind of messed up because the masculinity that was modeled to me from my father was angry.

So to me, masculinity and anger were basic, and violence were, they were equal.

And so for me, I didn't want that.

And so I'm like, I have to figure out my own definition of masculinity'cause this isn't working.

And as I, as I was noticing things, one of the things that I noticed about myself and plenty of other men was that the only emotions that we seemed allowed to display in public are we can be, we can be happy, we can be laughing about things.

We can, you know, or at least, at least be good, you know.

That we're in a good mood, if you will.

Uh, we could be okay, we're just, eh, everything's fine, not a big deal.

Or we could be angry.

Those were the only three emotions that, that men were really allowed to show.

And so all the negative emotions just kind of got swept up into anger because if you say, I'm really sad, or I'm grieving, or I'm, I'm scared, I'm hurting all of these things, you know, all the responses are, well, you know, it could be worse, or I'll give you something to cry about.

Or,

Oh

you know, or you're, you're just a coward.

I mean, the fact that you're crying about this, that means you're, and so all of these negative things about man expressing any kind of negative emotions, the only one that's acceptable is anger because it's powerful.

Because it seems like you're taking control.

It seems like you're doing something.

It's, uh, so basically what you're saying is that if you express other emotions, it makes you weak in the eyes of many people.

People say you hear a lot nowadays in the culture war sort of stuff, that there's no such thing as toxic masculinity.

People like to say, well, whatever, let's forget about that term and just say, men are taught a lot of crappy and stupid and unhelpful things about processing emotion, and, and maybe we could all agree about that.

Even if we don't call it toxic masculinity, which is the term that it was, was originally used to describe it, but for sure, men are taught a lot of crappy emotional coping strategies.

Um, you know, they don't have, we've, we've just talked about all these crappy ideas that we have in our folk psychology that get in the way.

so you're right.

I mean, you sound like Marcus Aelius.

I was gonna say, because Marcus Aelius says we should ask ourselves what does is more harm or anger or the thing that we're angry about.

So that's very insightful.

The stoics were incredibly insightful, about I mean, I, it sounds like I'm exaggerating, but really they genuinely were way ahead of their time.

It really is incredibly impressive.

So Mark, that's, uh, so for example, we know now that when people get angry, their capacity for consequential thinking gets impaired.

So all the research shows that people who are angry tend to behave recklessly.

They underestimate risk, they behave impulsively.

You know, sportsmen who are angry, commit more fouls like penalties, uh, people get, are angry and get more injuries and they're in more accidents.

You know, for example, it all, the research currently clearly shows from many different angles converging that angry people are reckless and impulsive, and they don't think about the consequences of their actions clearly.

So asking yourself.

The stoics advise, like Marcus really says, you know what doesn't mean more harm my anger or the thing I'm angry about?

Restores consequential thinking.

It forces you to get back into your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's actually capable of looking at the bigger picture and thinking.

You know, afterwards, when you think about anger, you're, you're thinking using your, your brain properly, your prefrontal cortex.

And the next day you might think, man, the consequences of getting angry really sucked.

But when you're in anger, you become blind to that.

The sense of empowerment that you get from anger is partly because you don't think about the consequences of your actions, so you're only seeing the immediate effects of it.

And so the weird thing is you're doing something that's clearly not gonna work.

So angry.

I like to describe angry people as being experts at achieving the opposite of what they want.

They really are like anger's paradoxical.

It has, this creates this paradoxical sense of power.

'cause you only feel power.

Because you're kidding yourself about the consequences of your actions.

It's like you're saying, I can totally get these kids to listen to me by destroying my relationship with them.

Like I can totally get my wife, you know, to do what I want by getting divorced as a consequence.

You know, like, so anger blinds us to the wider consequences.

But if we saw the consequences, we'd think, oh, I feel powerless again.

'cause clearly anger isn't an effective strategy.

But by blinding ourselves, we trick our brain into thinking we, we've got an effective strategy.

It's a, a con psychologists call it the illusion of control, It's one of the weird paradoxes about the nature of anger.

So you said one, how is it that you feel sort of out of control of your own behavior?

We feel like we've gained control of the, over the situation, but we've lost control of our own behavior.

We're acting compulsively.

And then the next day we realized that we didn't really achieve control over the situation either.

so at the time.

Let me break this down.

'cause there's some very simple things going on here you go from feeling afraid.

When people are afraid, they tend to focus more attention on themselves.

So they see the key, the core of the problem to a large extent, as being their own vulnerability, right?

Particularly in a social situation, if somebody's criticizing you or whatever, you think, oh, like maybe I'm weak, or like, I've made a mistake, or I've done something wrong, or there's something about me that I'm unlovable or or something like that.

So you tend to be focusing on yourself, and that hurts, right?

But anger says, hang on a minute, maybe it's your fault, right?

And so all of your attention gets projected out.

Was one of the main characteristics of other directed anger, is that our focus of attention shift dramatically outwards, you know, onto the perceived source of the problem, So we go, wait a minute.

Maybe it's not me that's a problem.

Maybe it's you.

That's the problem, buddy.

So I go from fear or anxiety or shame to anger.

And anger is a kinda mindlessness as opposed to mindfulness, right?

So it, it takes, it projects our attention.

Outwards blames other people, it's all their fault.

It does that at the cost of draining all of our self-awareness, all of our mindfulness away.

but when you do that, it's like you're taking your hands off the steering wheel because when you drain self-awareness away completely, and all of your attention goes over there on, you know, what's gonna happen next and how I'm gonna deal with this guy like.

You are no longer in control of your own actions.

You, you feel more in control of your own behavior when you're self-aware and mindful, like when you're observing what you're doing and how you're doing it, when you're aware of like whether you're raising your voice or not, the way that you're using your voice, like your facial expression, your actions and things like that, you're more in the driving seat and in control of things.

But when you lose all of that self-awareness, then you tend to have less control over your actions.

It's one of the costs, the, the biggest price that we pay for allowing ourselves to get that angry about things.

So, I mean, if you don't mind, you know, completely, uh, abdicating control over your own, uh, actions, then by all means get angry.

Like, 'cause that's potentially the price that you're gonna pay for it.

that's also in, in ancient philosophy, they often talk about this idea of holding up a mirror.

The people that are angry.

Seneca talks about this as a possible remedy for anger.

'cause they intuitively recognized that angry people lack self-awareness.

And that's part of what, part of the dynamic.

Now, that's a, that feels like a great thing when you're angry because self-awareness is, is making you painful.

Particularly if somebody insults you, then for a split second, you have a self-image.

Like you think about maybe I look like an idiot to this person.

how am I coming across to them?

So you have a painful sense of your social self-image.

Like you, you get anxious or afraid about how you come across, how you look to other people.

In some situations, especially if you feel shame, shame is all about a painful sense of your self-image.

Uh, how could you cure that?

Well, a good cure for it would be if you distracted yourself from it, like and shunted all of your attention outwards.

And how can you do that by, uh, attributing all of the blame for the situation to the other person?

so training your brain like to focus completely outwards so that you don't pay any attention to the sense of shame or the anxiety that's troubling you anymore.

It's a band.

The anger.

It might seem odd to say this, but now I can legitimately say anger is a distraction technique.

It's an emotional

Yeah.

that often takes the form of distraction.

It's like a bandaid.

You said earlier about this idea in society that anger makes people tough.

This might sound odd as well, but Marcus really explicitly talks about that.

So meditation's a 1118, he talks about the concept of manliness.

Not kidding.

Like he talks about, you know, this exactly, this concept.

And he says that some people in Roman society think that anger is manly, but he thinks the opposite is true, right?

And kindness is more, is more manly than anger.

Actually.

He says anger is a form of weakness, It's the opposite of the way that it's presented to people.

Angry people are weak ass individuals.

Uh, abdicating control of their own behavior.

You wanna put it another way?

Um, people who are prone to anger.

apart from the fact that at high levels of state anger, they might shave up to 10 years off their life expectancy.

So how's that for resilience?

Right.

But they tend to have poorer relationships.

They have poorer mental health outcomes.

Angry people are emotionally fragile, you know, not just 'cause we wanna, we've already labeled them like that.

I mean, in terms of the actual consequences, like, you know, the forecast for them over time is that they have increased emotional fragility.

That's the opposite of emotional resilience.

Right?

Or be, it's the opposite of being tough.

So we're taught that anger makes you tough.

How can that be true?

Like all the evidence suggests that the opposite is true.

Yeah, agreed.

I think, I think for me, one of the things that that helped me to diffuse a lot of that anger was to, like I said, to deal with those root things.

And part of that was also just accepting those things that we might feel insecure about, feel ashamed about, um.

And just owning them.

You know, I, it, it come, I think it really comes down to that self-awareness.

So one exercise that I do with some of my coaching clients and even with some of my friends is I'm like, sit down and write everything you don't like about yourself.

Mm-hmm.

And at first they look at me like terrified.

Like, oh my gosh, I can't do that, that, oh.

And I'm like, no, no, trust me.

It's incredibly powerful.

And then do that.

And then just look at each thing on there and say, can I accept this about myself?

Mm-hmm.

One, because it's either true or two, you believe it's true.

Mm-hmm.

this is just purely just the facts, objective, acceptance of yourself.

And I did this exercise a few years ago.

Uh, it was just an idea that I came up with because the path that I went down is like, why do I get angry?

Because I need other people's approval.

I need to feel safe.

Well, why do I need other people's approval?

Well, because I don't think I'm a good person.

So I need them to think I'm okay.

So why am I not a good person?

That's interesting.

I, I don't know.

What is it that's so bad about me?

And so I sat down, I wrote down a list, and I looked at everything and I'm like, that's it, that's, there's nothing on here that's all that bad.

I mean, if my friend handed me to this list, I'd be like, yeah, I still would accept that.

I'd still love you anyway.

In fact, I do the same thing, you know?

And it was just this, that for me was a huge turning point.

And so I think that we become more resilient by dealing with those core issues.

And you can only get to those core issues of self-awareness by practicing that self-awareness and just accepting all of those things.

Accepting that you feel sad, accepting that you feel grief, accepting that maybe you don't like this other thing about you.

And so it, it kind of reminds me of, uh, one of my favorite lines in, uh, game of Thrones.

Rotarian is talking to John Snow and he says, you know.

He's like, you know, take, you know you're a bastard.

And he is like, yeah, what do you know of that?

He is like, all dwarves are bastard to their fathers.

And he is like, take the fact that you're a bastard and use it as a shield, because if you don't, everybody else will use that against you.

Wear it proudly and own it because it's who you are.

And it was just like, Ooh, I'm, I'm kind of butchering the line.

But it was just such this powerful moment of just saying, this is how they see you, so don't try and hide from it.

Own it.

Yep.

I'm John Snow, the bastard, you know?

And I was just like, wow, if we could just do that with ourselves more often, I'm just saying, yep, this is exactly who I am, and yeah, I suck at this thing and I do this dumb thing and I, you know, but I'm okay with that, and I just accept that that's part of who I am.

Yeah.

there's a lot less to be angry about.

If somebody says, Hey, will you do this?

And you go, yeah.

Then they go, oh, well you do that.

And you go, yes, I do.

Then you don't get upset about it because they're just, there's nothing to be upset about.

what you're describing is what therapists sometimes call conditional self-esteem.

Right.

And I, I agree that it's the, at the root of most stereotypical anger, research shows do pe they, one of the questions, uh, that people have asked about anger is whether people that are angry prone, anger prone, have high self-esteem or low self-esteem, like, and the answer seems to be that they have unstable self-esteem.

'cause it's conditional like on other people's perception of them usually.

So if other people are praising you, your self-esteem will be really sky high and you're desperately trying to cling on.

To high levels of self-esteem.

Like if you're prone to anger, but actually your self-esteem feels very fragile and vulnerable and it's easily undermined by other people's criticism.

You're sensitive to criticism if you're anger prone and you know, and our EBT Rational Emotive Behavior therapy the type of CBT.

It's the earliest, was the first type of modern CBT.

And it's the type that's most explicitly indebted to stoicism, the guy that founded it, Albert Ellis, it's his career.

What went on, he increasingly came to the conclusion that for, to really develop emotional resilience and good mental health, we need to develop unconditional self-acceptance and accept our fallibility and also accept the fallibility and imperfection of other people.

You know, we, um, once we accept ourselves for who we are, works and all, then we, we take away the power that other people have over us.

You know, the strange thing.

When people get angry because somebody else has disrespected them or you know, hasn't treated them in the way that they want to be treated as Epic.

Deus said, if your self-esteem is something as fundamental as your self-esteem is conditional on other people, you're enslaving yourselves to them.

Epic Deus says You would be ashamed to hand over your body to be enslaved by other people, but you hand over your mind, you hand over your self-esteem.

He could have said to other people, which is even crazier, like, why would you do that?

You know, if

Yeah.

I mean it, it's called self-esteem.

Yeah,

Yeah.

like if you can accept yourself in the way that you're describing, you potentially liberate yourself from a lot of that anxiety, shame, and anger.

You know, you're always gonna be enslaved as long as you make yourself esteem con to fundamentally conditional on what other people think of you.

And a lot of the time you, because you can't read their minds, you know you'll be wrong about what they're thinking about you anyway.

So not only are you enslaved to other people's opinions, like half the time you're gonna be wrong about what they're thinking or what their intentions are anyway, like it really is a

Yeah.

from neurosis.

Like basically, and then getting angry compounds it because now you're coping maladaptively with the core problem, making it even worse.

And yet these self-improvement communities that you see online, know, are are full of angry young men, know, who are using, you know, they're supposed to be doing self-improvement, but they're using anger and blaming other people is a way of coping with their problems.

Like, everything about that is clearly back to front.

You know, it's gonna make them worse rather than better basically.

So I was gonna mention a little bit about you.

Some of the things you've said sounded like Marcus, it really is.

There are many cool things that Marcus Elia says about anger.

Um.

One of the other things he says is, if you take away the injury, then the anger will, will go away.

which is exactly what you're talking about.

He, again, it's mind blowing, like they had this idea of anger as a secondary emotion.

Like they, they clearly understood it, you know, way, way ahead of their time in that regard.

And also Chris IPUs, the stoics, I want to say almost that the stoics invented psychotherapy, right?

That would be stretching things a little bit.

Only because other people were writing about therapy.

But in a sense they did.

I think they, the stoics developed the first, you know, fully fledged cognitive model of psychotherapy.

Um, many people may think that Freud invented psychotherapy.

That's wrong in many levels.

Freud actually trained in psychotherapy at the Hospital in Paris under, uh, Chaco and also in a place called Nancy.

In, in France, uh, under Hippolite Bernheim.

It was Hippolite Bernheim that coined the word psychotherapy.

so, you know, modern psychotherapy was around for half a century before Freud.

it was the hypnotists, LIBO, uh, Bernheim, charco, James, Brad, the invented psychotherapy, not Freud, but psychotherapy existed in the ancient world explicitly, you know, um.

It's, it's always been a thing.

The novel didn't exist.

You know, there are many things that we take for granted that didn't exist in the ancient world, but psychotherapy existed in the ancient world.

So Chris Iru wrote, uh, what was at the time, a widely read and well known, highly regarded book called Peri Pathon on the Passions.

Zeno had written a similar book.

Chris Eis, the third head of the store, wrote this highly influential book about psychopathology.

And the four, it was four volumes, and the fourth volume was called to Therapeutic on the Therapeutics.

Uh, it's a book on psychotherapy.

he wrote this four volume thing on a cognitive model of psychopathology and psychotherapy.

uh, Galen, uh, Marcus Aurelius's physician, was influenced by the stoic writings and therapy, although he was also critical of them.

And he wrote a book on the diagnosis and cure of the soul's passions, which again, is clearly a book on psychopathology and psychotherapy.

So we have the psychotherapy, the therapeutic one is lost.

We only have fragments from it.

But we have an entire book by Seneca that survives today called On Anger on Stoic Psychotherapy for Anger.

And I, it's no joke to say that most of the stuff that he says in it is broadly consistent with Modern Anger Management and CBT.

I mean, interestingly, it definitely doesn't sound like psychoanalysis, right?

And it, it doesn't sound much like your therapy like it, that it clearly resembles CBT or kinda, you know, cognitive behavioral approaches to anger management, as we would say.

I mean, that's like, you know, 2000 years ahead of the game.

It's crazy.

Chris ipu, uh, two, 2,300 years like, or more like ahead of the game.

It's remarkable.

But one of the things that you said that reminded me of that is in Chris i's approach.

He said that when people are in the grip of a passion such as anger, they're no longer their normal selves.

So again, this is part of his idea.

Like, it's not just like the rider on the horse trying to control.

I'm just, it's okay guys.

I'm fighting, but I'm just temporarily, temporarily outta control these horses.

I'm just kinda like, I'm fighting here, but I'm just struggling to control my anger right now.

No, the rider is angry.

Uh, the whole of your psyche becomes invested in anger, permeates like your, uh, executive function, like what the STOs call the hegemon, like the master faculty, the, the ruling faculty of the mind.

It gets to the, the very core of consciousness when you're angry.

Um, and so Chris iis said, that's why people say I wasn't my usual self.

you know, I turned into a caricature of myself temporarily.

You know, it's temporary madness.

I became, I became different when I was angry.

I wasn't thinking straight.

Right?

And I mean, we say these things, but really understanding the implications of that.

I mean, the, the simplest strategy, there are many things that you could do for anger.

We've touched on some already, but I'm a big believer in the postponement strategy, so it doesn't solve every problem.

But generally, you know, if you were drunk and you wanted, you were, I'm really, I've just drank a bottle of whiskey, Donald, I think it's a good time to, uh, talk to my wife about an argument that we had earlier.

I would say, Eric, you might wanna wait until you've sobered up.

Right?

Uh, that would be my advice to you, Uh, here's a simple therapeutic strategy.

Uh, it's based on cutting edge, uh, research in the field of psychopathology.

My advice to you would be sober up, like, and then speak to your wife.

Well, anger is like being drunk.

Hey, you're drunker.

Why would you drink a bottle of whiskey?

And then think it's a good idea to talk to my kids right now.

Like, why in the throes of anger would you think this is a good time to sit and have a family meeting?

Right?

You might think, I should probably wait until I've regained my senses, Because the chariot tier is drunk, ER is drunk on anger, right?

So wait until you've recovered your perspective and composure and then when you're using your prefrontal cortex properly again, it's become more dominant.

Like you can think about the bigger picture.

You can act with more self-awareness, you know, communicate more effectively.

Like so wait until you're not angry anymore.

That was the most common strategy in the ancient world that they recommend.

Although there are many other things that people could potentially do as well.

There's something I'm interested in at the moment and it, it is recognized in modern therapy and we increasingly so over the even.

The, the focus has shifted more onto it.

And it's another I, I'll highlight it 'cause it's said an obscure part of stoicism, but it's another area in which I think the stoics were ahead of their time, remarkably sold.

Chris IPUs in that book, in the Therapeutic one, uh, he says, uh, something that's maybe implicit in the other stoic writings, but isn't, it's often the case.

It's not really spelled out very clearly.

Chris Pus probably made this innovation himself.

And he said that in the passions, there are basically two at play.

Now, Seneca repeats this in on anger.

So, you know, centuries later, this seems to still be part of stoicism, right?

It's not.

So it stuck with them and they did employ it in other contexts.

So, Chris, I said there's two judgements that cause the passion.

And the first one has to do with the thing that's happened to you being really bad, or in the case of like a urge or a desire would be that it's really good.

So let's bracket off on that.

But the stoics are actually more interested in, uh, irrational desires than more than psychotherapists are.

But it's either that something's really intrinsically good or intrinsically bad.

So say it's something that's really bad, like somebody just insulted me and that's awful.

I can't, it's catastrophic.

It's like really, really bad.

So to extent, there's something faulty about this.

Obviously, they don't believe that any external event is intrinsically objectively bad.

They think virtue is the only true good advice is the only true evil.

And we're dripping ourselves when we place intrinsic value on any external event like that event.

External events might be helpful or unhelpful, perhaps greatly so like, but they're not intrinsically evil or catastrophic in the way that we typically judge them to be when we get highly emotional about them.

So this is kind of familiar, Epic TTA says, it's not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them.

It's kind of implicit in that, right?

But Chris says there's another judgment that supervenes on that, and it's about what it's appropriate to do.

Right.

And he says it's an excessive judgment.

So I'm not sure about this.

It's hard to, uh, disentangle partly because of problems with translation from Greek, but I think he's implying, um, that it, it's modal necessity that the second judgment is about having to do something like in a passion.

'cause passions are excessive and compulsive in stoicism.

and that's about, uh, the appropriateness of a particular, the word that in Greek is ambiguous.

It can mean that you think something is fitting or appropriate or that you think it's a duty or obligation that you have to fulfill.

And I'm pretty sure, and I know Richard Sorabji and his analysis of stoic, uh, theories of passions, he concludes that they're talking about necessity.

And that's important because it would be very, preemptive of modern cognitive models of, uh, emotion.

It would be very similar to REBT and particular.

So Chris says.

There's a second belief, the first thing that we're responding to, and then there's another belief that has to do with how we should respond.

Um, how long it's appropriate to continue grieving or ruminating about something.

Um, whether it's appropriate to, uh, take revenge or get, uh, payback, uh, against somebody, whether it's appropriate to flee a situation, um, or coping.

basically now this is way ahead of the game because it clearly resembles 1960s was a guy called Richard Lazarus, who's one of the leading researchers on stress, and he proposed something called the transactional model of stress.

And it's based on the idea that stress is caused by two appraisals and an appraisal, a threat, and an appraisal of our coping ability.

Right.

And the, the two things interact with each other.

Right.

And that model is the basis of most CBT models of anxiety, uh, and, you know, issues as well.

So the stoics potentially say something that's remarkably similar to one of the leading modern cognitive models of stress, basically.

but Chris iis says something else that I'm very intrigued by and there's some evidence to substantiate this as well.

So he, first of all, he seems to think that the second appraisal, he implies that I think that it's emotion, it's mainly a matter of emotional coping.

And, you know, how am I gonna deal with this feeling that's emerging, like this initial prop, the initial first movement, uh.

My response, I don't like this very much.

What am I gonna do about that?

Well, I'm gonna take revenge against this guy that'll make me feel better.

Or maybe I'll just sit and ruminate about it.

Or maybe I'll get the hell outta here.

But these are all emotional.

They're all forms of experiential avoidance.

As we put it to date.

They're all attempts to get rid of the initial flash of emotion, basically.

Um, and so Chris IPA says that when somebody is upset, they're outta their minds temporarily.

They're not their normal self.

He said, can challenge our judgments about what's good or bad preemptively in a form of preventative therapy or resilience building.

But when someone's in the throes of an emotion, it's difficult to do that.

He thinks, and he says, of the two judgments, it's more effective to challenge the second one during an episode of anger.

Right?

So that would be the judgment about how it's appropriate to cope.

Um, and that's, that's very interesting.

I I don't know that, that we can be sure that, that's definitely correct, but there's some evidence today that points that would support that.

I think, um, it's well known that those two types of appraisal, we call them primary and secondary appraisal, uh, function differently.

The secondary appraisal uses more like, uh, is slower.

Uh, it tends to happen after a slight delay.

Uh, it's more amenable to a conscious reasoning.

The primary appraisal is often very op, automatic, very rapid.

It's more influenced by subcortical regions of the, the brain.

Um, so it could be harder to, to control.

So there are, there are some interesting psychological reasons, neuropsychological reasons, you know, some clinical research as well that suggests he may have been onto something there like 2,300 years ago, like, you know, which is, is really incredible.

There's something else I'd highlight about what the stoics say about anger.

some of the beliefs that he targets.

The main beliefs he seems to target, have to do, uh, are beliefs, um, about how it's, uh, appropriate to respond to the emotion.

he talks about.

Believe how long it's appropriate to grieve for.

could also apply that to anger and say how long it's appropriate to ruminate about anger.

so we, when we're angry with people, I should perhaps say, um, this, go off at a tangent for a moment.

Uh, I'm not a huge fan of niche sheet, but in the genealogy, our morals, he does say something about anger, which is kind of a, just so story.

It's, I think it's quite problematic as an analysis society, which is how he, he intends it.

It's a bit of a simplification, but he, he's onto something.

I think thinks that in the ancient world, people express anger more directly through physical aggression and violence.

then you get the, the laws, criminal justice system, policing.

And gradually, uh, democracy, uh, society evolves.

We have to suppress our anger.

'cause in the ancient world, if somebody stole your chicken, you just go after them.

Like, you'd maybe get a couple of your brothers or whatever and some clubs and, and go and beat the bejesus out of them for stealing your chickens.

gradually over time, even in the ancient world, um, but increasingly, you know, we're following the industrial revolution, um, the spread of democracy and so on.

You can't just go after somebody with a club like beat up 'cause they're stole your chickens.

You have to go and file a complaint with the police, you know, and wait for the wheels of justice to turn and things like that.

It's a nietzsche's analysis was that people have to suppress and internalize their anger that causes them to be filled with resentment and it leads them to express anger passive aggressively, like, or through fantasies of revenge, you know, and there's definitely some truth in that.

Like I was saying, the internet shows that people have this anger that they're kind of releasing that was always there internalized or suppressed before.

Now they have a, a more of an outlet for it.

Um, but I think it's, it's true that anger statistically, it seldom results in physical violence these days.

Um, or at least as a percentage of incidents when people are angry.

Uh, the, the majority of the time is expressed verbally.

indirectly, or it's internalized.

And particularly women, men and women have different profiles in this regard.

Different cultures, uh, there's different, uh, ways that people express anger.

So women tend to internalize and ruminate about anger a lot more than men do.

Men express it verbally more often.

Directly, you know, in many cases in our society is expressed indirectly, passive aggressively.

Um, so, you know, a lot of times anger really doesn't so much lead to punching people in the face as it, it leads to, as chewing over things, you know, uh, it gets internalized and it turns into kind of toxic rumination, basically.

we know that rumination is maintained by what we call metacognition.

So those are beliefs about your own thinking.

And metacognition is a cognition about a cogniti.

A second order belief about your own emotions or thinking.

Um, and so metacognition would say things like, it, it's helpful to ruminate, to have revenge fantasies.

Uh, maybe it makes me feel better, uh, know, maybe it helps me to figure out what I'm gonna do.

Um, or another metacognition might be that I can't control my anger.

another metacognition might be that anger is so toxic that I have to try and suppress it.

Like, rather than, for example, you know, maybe accepting the initial feeling, but just not acting on it would be a, the alternative, maybe a, a healthier way of responding.

So Cyprus seems to be suggesting that the second judgment is typically, although perhaps not always, but it's typically metacognitive.

Like it's a belief about whether we should cope with a problem by continuing to grieve or ruminate or indulge in the passion for a prolonged period.

And he's highlighting the fact that passions are, at least to some extent, voluntary, like more than people normally assume.

So people are misled, as we said earlier, by the fact that some aspects are involuntary.

The initial kind of flash of emotion, but often whether we continue to experience an emotion is to some extent under voluntary control.

Like we can choose whether we continue to dwell on or ruminate about it, or have an argument or replay conversations in our mind, or have revenge fantasies, for example.

You know, those things might pop into our mind, but we don't have to continue to protect, perpetuate them.

We can choose to let go of them.

Basically, like in meditation, you might be sitting, meditating and a thought pops into your mind.

You can't control the fact that the thoughts popped into your mind.

That's automatic cognition, but you can choose not to respond to it.

That's voluntary cognition, right?

When you're angry, you forget about that and you continue to dwell on things for much longer than is necessary, and that that maintains the anger rather than just allowing it to run its course naturally.

So I, if it's true that stoic psychotherapy was highly metacognitive, to use some jargon that would be way ahead of its time because that's only over recent decades has, uh, psychotherapy started to focus more on metacognition and Chris iis would be right.

That targeting meta metacognition seems to be particularly important.

And it might also be something that people have more voluntary control over when they're in the grip of anger.

So it might be hard for you to challenge the thing that you initially got offended with, although it is still possible, But it might be easier for you to target beliefs about anger itself when you're angry.

Like for example, to come back to the one we touched on earlier when Marcus Aurelia says, anger does you more harm than the things that you're angry about.

That's metacognition.

He's asking himself to evaluate his anger itself.

not, it's not just a belief about the situation, It's a belief about his own response.

It's a belief about his thinking.

a belief about his emotion.

The anger itself he's saying is intrinsically unhelpful.

So he's using, uh, metacognition in that example.

And also when Epictetus says, it's not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them.

That's a belief about our opinions.

It's metacognition again.

Right?

So stoicism like Chris's therapeutic on would be in relation to anger, but also in relation to other emotions as well.

Advocating for a really what's would be considered today to be quite a state of the art approach to psychotherapy.

Interesting.

Um, there was something you said back a little bit in this kind of, even back further that that kind of clicked for me.

Um, and I wanted to bring it up and it was that, you know, you talked about how the idea that this anger has been there all long just when we're online you've kind of taken away some of the consequences.

And so people are just expressing that anger more readily or more openly, I guess.

Um, which also kind of, if we take that, that same model and extrapolate it out on like when you see these videos of these people, you know, walking up to, you know, somebody who's black or Mexican or, or something like that and just completely.

You know, saying the most racist and hateful things that, you know, and even knowing they're on video and they're just losing their shit, you know, out there.

Um, I think that because of our, some of our political leaders who basically have modeled that, that's okay and you can still be successful.

You can still do whatever you want.

You can just basically do whatever you want at this point.

And so I think.

We've seen a more loosening of some of those morays that we had before that that was inappropriate.

You don't just walk up to some stranger on the street and start shouting racist things at them or, you know, it doesn't have to necessarily be racist, it could be misogynistic, but it was just seemed like there was a loosening on a lot of the morays about what was acceptable behavior out in public.

And even as we have more cameras and that, you know, you're probably gonna be filmed or they're saying it right to the camera, these people don't care and they say it and do it anyway.

Yeah.

I wonder if those two are, are kind of that same thing, like they feel like there's not gonna be consequences because people above them in power have done these things and there were no consequences.

It's a disinhibition of aggression or antisocial behavior you're describing basically.

So things, what causes a disinhibition of behavior like that?

Um, drugs, alcohol, famously, uh, the, uh, apparent permission that you get from authority figures in society.

The anonymity and distance of the internet allow people to be disinhibited about antisocial or aggressive behavior.

the other thing would be anger itself.

The very emotion of anger tends to make us feel less inhibited about expressing things.

And then, like I said, 'cause we're blind, we become blind to the consequences of our actions.

We think about it more afterwards.

So it might be that people feel they can get away with doing things like that, but you know, the real, the argument in the ancient world is that, well, we're probably never gonna convince you.

You know that it's a bad idea to do these things because you're harming other people.

Like, but let's start with the fact that you're probably harming yourself by behaving in this way.

That's the argument that the stoics would make.

It's not even in your own self-interests.

Like, so you're disinhibiting an emotion which maybe was suppressed before, it's not healthy to begin with, and that emotion itself is probably masking underlying shame or fear or frustration and preventing you from really dealing with the root cause of the problem.

tell you like, here's a little bit of trivia for you that's maybe related to this.

It's controversial.

Um, so one of the most controversial, uh, theorists in the history of psychology is a guy called Han Zinc.

And Zinc was involved in a very controversial research study.

Um, you know, people have highlighted problems with it.

I still think it's interesting because of one of the things that it allegedly discovered by accident.

So there was a big study done in the 1980s on CBT for anger management, and they were mainly interested in the health effects of it for, uh, heart disease and I think possibly cancer as well.

But Isaac was very interested in political prejudice, so he also gave the participants questionnaires that measured, uh, uh, antisemitism and racism and other political prejudices.

what they found by accident was that when people reduce their anger as a result of having the CBT, their political prejudices seem to reduce.

As a consequence.

Now that's important because it's the opposite way around from the direction that people would typically think that the causal relationship runs.

It's probably circular, right?

So we tend to think if somebody is really anti-Semitic, a really racist, you know, those prejudices are gonna make them more prone to anger, 'cause they're blaming other people and stuff like that and scapegoating people.

But if it's also that people who are generally angry are more susceptible to blaming other people and becoming racist or, uh, prejudice against it's antisemitic, and so on.

You know, might it be the case, you know, that if we look around us and think there's extremism on the rise in our society, for example, and prejudice, it be a consequence?

To some extent of the anger that people are experiencing, and there might be ways that we could deal with it politically, looking at the bad example that politicians are setting, but maybe by dealing with young men's anger at the root, they'd be less prone to that kind of extreme thinking in the first place.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Huh?

Yeah.

Maybe the fact that we're just angry to begin with is the reason for hate towards other people.

Angry people

Hmm.

blaming people and looking for scapegoats, right?

If there's a circular dynamic, but the angrier you

Yeah.

vulnerable you are to being talked into scapegoating other groups and to thinking, you know, when you get angry, you tend to think in black and white terms.

Your brain goes into a kind of an emergency mode, know, in that kind of emergency mode, it, it'll look for other people to blame.

Um, and then, you know, politicians love that.

Like, so you can scapegoat people, like angry people are really easy to manipulate, you know, they're suckers, right?

So they're emotionally fragile.

Like they're also highly gullible, So if you're a politician, you get people angry, like you can control them.

All you have to do is tell 'em, it's all like, it's all these guys like caused all the problems, these dudes over here.

Like I, and then, you know, that gives you a tremendous amount of leverage over people.

so I think we have to be, you know, very careful about the social implications, political implications of, of anger as an emotion.

Look at the internet.

I mean, it's all about rage farming, on social media.

Like it's a huge machine for, in a sense, you know, it's become a huge machine for propaganda and rage farming.

well, like it's enslaving the minds of a whole generation you know, by manipulating and exploiting the emotions.

It's ironic because I think a lot of these people, the things that they're, uh, most upset about and ang about are the very things that they're doing to themselves, right?

You know, like, so they don't want to, they hate the idea of being controlled by other people, but they're handing over control of their own mind behavior and emotions to other people by allowing them to stoke their anger ironically, like they're doing the very thing that they're most, and they're most frightened of.

You know, that takes a bit of self-awareness to be able to step up and actually see that.

And for me, like I said, I didn't, when I stumbled on Stoicism, it was just suddenly like a light had been shown on a whole area of life that I didn't understand.

And you know, I, and I'd read plenty of psychology books and stuff throughout the years and habits and self-help and, you know, was always trying to find this.

And for me, stoicism was just the one thing where.

It clicked.

It was like, that's the clearest answer that I've ever read about understanding what you can control.

You know, the views on anger were just so clear.

It was like, you know, all this other stuff was just, there were great theories, there were practices, there were ideas, but this would just rock solid, clear cut principles and ways of viewing things that I just found were so incredibly helpful.

And I think that's kind of why I stuck with it, was like, okay, this, this actually works and this makes sense to me.

like we talked earlier about how I said anger is made of these different ingredients and the first thing that we'd want to do is to say some bits are automatic or involuntary, and other bits are strategic or voluntary.

So we'd want to be clear about the difference.

'cause the involuntary bits, you're probably gonna have to accept and just kinda like, you know, wait it out and, and stop struggling against and trying to suppress or control those.

Um, but the voluntary parts, you should take more responsibility and ownership over, basically.

And I generally find people are doing the opposite.

They're ignoring, neglecting and disowning responsibility for the voluntary parts of their emotions.

And they're, instead, they're trying to suppress and struggle against the involuntary parts.

So like, people generally have it completely back to front.

Right.

Partly because they've got this confused idea about how emotions work in the first place.

I, I, we kind of touched on something a little bit.

I wanted to emphasize because it, I guess it's a box that we have to tick.

So if you believe in the hydraulic model, that anger is this kinda force that wells up within you.

There are several things we talked about.

You might try and suppress it, that tends not to work like it.

Cause what's called the paradox of thought suppression.

So we know when you ask people to do that, often their, their feelings just kind of rebound more subsequently.

Um, there's another, there a number of other problems with doing that as well.

But basically it's, it's not us.

Usually a good strategy.

might, uh, try and channel your anger by going and using it in the gym, or you might just kinda vent it and try and get it all out your system.

You could say that generally speaking, when people, you could understand most anger is involving some form of venting So generally when you yell at someone and behave aggressively and stuff like that, you're kind of venting your anger.

I would argue that angry people convince themselves that they're.

Using anger as a form of problem solving.

So they think that when they get angry, I had to yell at the kids.

'cause it's the only way I could get'em to tidy the rumor or whatever.

I, you know, I had to slap my wife.

It was the only way I could get her to listen to me or something like that.

Right.

So they treat it as if, I mean, it's a ridiculously simplistic form of problem solving.

Right?

It's acra it's crazy problem solving.

But they treat it as if it's a, a form of problem solving.

But there, there's a deeper error that they're engaged in, is, if you look closely it, it is, they're not actually using aggression, uh, as a form of problem solving.

They're dripping themselves even about that.

Their motivation, I think, on closer inspection is that they're using the angry behavior not to solve the external problem.

Like, 'cause from outside.

You might think that it's puzzling, slapping your wife seems like it would not help, shouting at the kids seem like it might, it might backfire.

Right.

That's 'cause they don't care, right?

That's not really why they're doing it.

real reason that they're doing it is a form of emotional coping.

so their really, their, their real motive is that they're using the expression of anger, uh, and an attempt to cope with the painful feelings that they're experiencing.

And everything about their behavior, I think suggests that they're deceiving themselves about their reason for engaging in that behavior.

So really what they're doing is trying to deal with their pain angry.

It's not an attempt to try and fix something in the relationship, you know, or to deal with an external, it would be an Accra, like completely crazy attempt to do that, right?

It's disguised as that, but really what's driving it is an attempt to relieve anxiety or distract yourself from it temporarily, basically.

And on that front it's not, it's not effective.

I, what I wanted to emphasize is that venting is possibly the least effective emotional coping strategy in the history of psychotherapy research, So there are many studies that show, particularly in relation to anger, that venting anger doesn't really relieve anger permanently, and it often just makes people more susceptible to it in the future.

So this idea that anger kind of builds up within you as a press, like a pressure, and it be like Lansing a boil or getting it out of yourself, you can get your anger out and then it's kind of gone.

Rather, it's more like by expressing anger, you're reinforcing the habit of feeling angry, So,

So you're, you're training your psychology physiology.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's another problem with it, which is if you think anger is just this kind of homogenous energy, again, if we think of it more like a recipe, and like the stoics, the stoics, their big contribution was to say that the passions are cognitive, right?

That they consist of particular beliefs and judgments.

As Albert Albert Ellis used to say, it's not just how you feel, it's also how you think you're thinking angry as well as feeling angry.

So you might think, oh, that's kind of interesting, Donald.

How then could it be beneficial to go and redirect your anger and to working out in the gym?

What's that going to do to modify the underlying attitudes and beliefs that made you prone to anger in the first place?

It's gonna do nothing, right?

So what it'll do is temporarily rid of some of the adrenaline.

Like that you've built up basically, or some of the muscular tension.

But the anger doesn't just consist in those physiological symptoms or sensations.

The anger consists in your sense of entitlement, your desire for revenge, like the attitudes and beliefs like that are underlying those sensations.

And going to the gym and channeling your anger is not gonna get rid of those.

And in fact, it might actually just maintain or reinforce them.

And also like venting your anger isn't gonna do anything like, you know, it will distract you from some of the uncomfortable feelings that you've got inside.

So venting might make you feel better temporarily, but it's not actually gonna do anything to change the beliefs that made you prone to anger in the first place.

So again, it comes back to this fact that having a very simplistic folk psychology of anger leads us to coping strategies that are known to be ineffective.

Unfortunately, the internet, and particularly the manosphere by the way, is full of self-help influencers who give advice that's based on the hydraulic model.

Like, so they're always telling people to vent their emotions or go and channel them into activity in the gym and stuff like that.

That's not gonna do anything to remove your irrational sense of entitlement, right?

If you ask a girl out on a date and she says, no thanks, I'm not interested, like, you know, uh, a wise person might think, okay, fair enough.

You know, you feel irrationally angry and offended by that, going to the gym isn't gonna do anything to remove your fragility.

You've got a bigger problem.

Like you're really just distracting yourself from, or putting a bandaid over by doing that.

But that's the advice like that people get from crappy self-improvement and self-help, you know, channels and podcasts and things like that.

You know, the problem is that if a lot of our psychopathology is caused by maladaptive coping, we'd have to be really careful that people aren't telling us coping strategies that are of the very sort that maintain the problem in the first place.

You know, there's two types of coping.

There's coping that actually helps you and coping, like that's at the core of maintaining the problem, like the crappy, toxic coping like, you know.

You're gonna get like people just reinforcing some of that crappy, toxic coping that's based on the folk psychology.

If you're talking to people that don't know anything about psychology or therapy or coaching or anything like people that are ignorant of the subject, they're gonna give you the same bad advice that you're giving yourself to begin with, but more of it basically, that's what you find in manosphere a lot of the time.

Not always, maybe, but you know for sure.

You know, that's the kind of advice that you're getting from Andrew Tate, and you know, like some of these other dudes online.

So you, you know, increasingly in therapy you'll see people that have got a psychological problem, anger, or it could be some other problem, and they're doing things that they've learned off that actually is just making the problem worse.

Right?

It's just basically, you know, some kind of distraction or avoidance or suppression technique that they're using.

Um, like more of the same, basically, you know, but they think that self-improvement or self-help stuff like bad self-help advice, you cause more problems than it solves.

Here's a clue we drink from a fire hose of self-help stuff today.

Those guys in particular, like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the man, pretty much the whole manosphere revolves around self-improvement advice, right?

people consume it all day long.

They have it on their phone.

They could be sitting on the lavatory watching it or listening to the podcast, whatever, right?

So given that they're consuming far more self-improvement content than people did 20, 30, 40 years ago, how come they're not all improved?

Why, why

Yeah.

be able to look around and think, man, these young guys are on, uh, these manosphere influencers podcasts all the time.

It's amazing how much they've improved.

No one looks at 'em and thinks they all look improved by this.

are they getting more angry or less angry as a result of watching Jordan Peterson videos?

I'll let you decide.

Yeah.

All right.

I don't, I don't think

Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that it, it does create a, a feeding cycle like that, and it's more that, yeah, because they're not dealing with the root causes because the root causes are painful to deal with,

That's

and they take self-reflection and self-awareness and, you know, that's something that I had to do because I'm like, why am I always angry?

Okay, let's, let's dig a bit deeper than just trying to control it.

Let's look at the root causes of it.

And that, that was a, a huge shift for me.

And now I find that my, my overall mood is definitely much more upbeat and much more relaxed.

And I, you know, I don't really get that angry or frustrated at things anymore like I used to.

I mean, occasionally I do, and then it's like, okay, I, I see what I'm being frustrated with.

I can't quite get rid of this emotion.

Lemme go do something else and then come back and then I can think through it and be a little bit better off.

that's because you're becoming wise in your old

I hope so.

That's what happens.

Yeah.

We get wise, and then we die.

Just like

Well, I mean, some people, some people don't.

I know plenty of people who, who get old and don't get wise.

Uh, I was very angry when I was a young guy, and I think actually that ironically, one of the things that sometimes happens with anger, maybe more than other emotions, is that people reach a point where they, they suddenly think this is too much.

It's gone on

Yeah.

and they kind of have a, a, like an awakening.

and it can cause them to question, uh, the most serious, a problem that someone has with anger, the more deeply they'll start to question the, the problem.

So I, I had, uh, quite a lot of anger.

It went on for quite a long time, you know, in my mid twenties or something.

I think I was from my teens.

I was still like, angry about a lot of things.

Um, and I thought, I, I can't go on like this, know, I have to do something about it.

So that forced me to become more questioning.

Than, than normal.

Like, you know, I had to dig into my anger a little bit more and try and understand, you know, what was going on.

Um, but there are many things that we can do, many different therapy techniques and stuff, you know, but you could really, and it sounds too simple, know, often the most important solutions actually are very simple.

But really just, you know, noticing anger, questioning it, looking more deeply into the origin of it, the root of it.

That act alone, that that very decision itself potentially gonna set a lot of things right.

You know, like I say, anger is all about distraction.

It's bad coping.

But the good news is the minute you start to think maybe this is wrong, you know, maybe there's a better way.

Like you start to look.

Hold a mirror up like in those ancient Greek texts like Scaar talk about, you know, the day that you start to actually hold a mirror up.

Just that very act of looking more deeply into yourself is an fundamentally antagonistic to the whole psychology of anger.

My anger doesn't want you to look in the mirror.

Like it needs you to smash the mirror, like trample it under foot, like, and just get caught up in scapegoating.

But the minute you pick the mirror back up again and really start to look at yourself, that's the most important step, to be honest, that you could put, there's a bunch of other therapy stuff that I'd like to recommend.

Obviously, like CBT stuff, you know, we could, I could go through a big list of different techniques, you know, but I think really the root of it often is something, uh, more human, uh, and more fundamental.

Like sometimes we don't see the wood for the trees in therapy, but the, the core of it really is just that ability to pause and take a look in the mirror, like, and that I can't emphasize enough how fundamentally that tends to interfere with the very psychology of anger itself flowing down as well.

Yep.

speeds up our perception.

You know, time flies when you're having fun, right?

The time flies to fly when you're in the grip of anger.

Right.

People lose track of time when they're worrying, ruminating or angry.

So you might think that makes time slow down is potentially gonna give me more control over my anger.

Do you know what research tells us?

Slows down our perception of time is self-awareness.

Like the more you pay attention to proprioceptive sensations, like kinesthetic sensations, the stuff that's going on inside your body, like the more it tends to slow down your perception of time passing.

And the more you shunt your attention outwards, like, and forget about yourself and focus on that guy over there.

'cause he's the problem.

The more time will seem to like fly past, before you know it, you've said, I've done something stupid.

And then the next day you're gonna have all day long to regret it or the, the rest of your life to regret it.

Right.

catching yourself in the moment and noticing how you feel like here, I, I should talk more about some therapy techniques briefly.

You can train yourself to, uh, anchor your attention more in the present moment simply by just using coping statements.

So you could say to yourself right now, I notice that I'm tensing right by saying right now you're forcing yourself to pay attention to the present moment.

I notice like you're focusing yourself to become, forcing yourself to become more self-aware that I'm tensing by turning it into a verb.

Like rather than saying I am tense, you're forcing yourself to take more ownership over what's going on.

Typically, when people are angry, they're screwing up their face, clenching their neck and shoulders fists or whatever.

Sometimes they'll jaw like, so right now I notice that I'm tensing.

As soon as you do that, you might think, why the hell am I doing that?

How is that helpful?

And it's gets you more into consequential thinking.

And you might say, right now I notice that my heart's beating faster.

Now I notice a tingling in my face 'cause my blood pressure's shot through the roof.

Right?

grounding your attention in the present moment.

But the other thing you can do, I won't go into a big digression about cognitive fusion.

I'm kinda like tempted to, it's one of my hobby horses, but I'll just say is it can be very useful as well to gain distance and observe in a detached way, the angry thoughts that you have.

So you might say to yourself right now, I noticed that Donald is having the thought.

This guy's a total a-hole, right?

I should punch him in the face or something.

I need to teach him a lesson.

So right now I notice that Donald's having the thought I should teach this guy a lesson and that allows me to.

a step to one side and observe myself almost like I'm holding the, the mirror up again.

Metaphorically, uh, diffuse, uh, the thoughts rather than me being compelled to act by that thought.

It gives me like some delay.

Like it decouples the thought from my action potentially, if I can get in the habit of doing that.

Um, another thing you might say is, right now I noticed that I'm angering myself and turning into a verb, right?

So rather thinking, I just am angry.

I need to get rid of this anger somehow.

You might think, how am I angering myself right now?

Well, here's a clue.

It's probably through tensing all your muscles up and saying certain things to yourself.

Highly evaluative, kinda rigid pattern of thinking.

It's probably how you get yourself angry.

I'll, I'm going do, maybe this is a bit of an information dump, but I want to give people some, a lot, bit more content.

In REBT, which is actually one of the most effective forms of CBT for treating anger that, that like the evidence shows us.

Um, the idea in REBT is the certain stereotypical types of belief that cause emotional problems.

And so there REBT is very good for anger is it places a lot of emphasis on rigid demands.

Uh, must, should got to have to, uh, kind of in the mode of necessity.

so those kind of beliefs are integral to anger, right?

Even if you don't say that and angry people do say stuff like that a lot, if you're thinking, acting and feeling as if other people damn well have to respect you, then you, that's a recipe for neurosis.

You're probably gonna get angry.

You might as well.

The minute you say other people have to respect me, you might as well put dot, dot, dot.

Otherwise I'm gonna get angry.

You're pretty much just programming your brain with an algorithm.

It's that simple that says, you know, other people have to respect me, otherwise I'm gonna get angry.

Well, you're bound to get angry then.

'cause sooner or later, maybe even on a daily basis, people in some shape or form are gonna disrespect you.

'cause that's life, buddy.

You get used to it and they're not under your control.

So these rigid demands, like other people have to respect me.

And often there's also judgments that say if they don't, or if things don't go my way, it's awful or catastrophic.

So I'm exaggerating how bad the consequences are.

And often I'll say otherwise, it means that they're jerks.

So another typical, some people think, I'm still not a hundred percent sure really what the cognitive kind of essence of anger is, but some people think it's.

Uh, the, what you can call global negative ratings or labels, I think it's pretty integral.

Some people even believe it's essential to other directed anger that we have this kind of reductionist view that we say, this guy's a jerk or an idiot, or incompetent, or she's a bitch, or he's a bastar, right?

those kind of judgments about other people, I'm not, I'm not sure.

Like they, they, maybe they're virtually essential or maybe they are like essential to at least certain common types of anger, they're irrational because, you know, you're labeling somebody in terms of their behavior.

So even if somebody's rude to you, it doesn't mean that they're fundamentally an asshole, right?

Because they probably, maybe for all, you know, they helped an old lady across the street earlier.

Uh, most people have done a combination of nice things, nasty things in their lives, you know, but the minute you label their whole character, you'll have a more extreme emotional reaction to them because this kind of reductionist way of thinking and then usually what's kinda forgotten about as well.

So you've got the rigid demands that you impose on other people.

You can also get angry with yourself.

That's another kind of worms for another day maybe.

But in stereotypical anger, it's usually other directed.

You can also be angry with life or events.

That tends to be take more of the form of frustration.

But again, you know, like that, another thing for another day maybe, but for other directed anger, um, usually, you know, you have to do what I want.

You have to respect me if you don't.

It's awful, If you don't, it means that you're a jerk.

Maybe I'm frightened.

It also makes me feel like I'm worthless or unlovable or incompetent or something like that as well.

If you insult me or criticize me, it's my fragility that you've activated by, uh, disrespecting me or not doing what I want.

there's another belief, um, which is more to come back to, it's related to what Chris IPA said about his second judgment about coping.

So usually there's.

What Albert Ellis calls low frustration tolerance, or, I can't stand at itis, so I can't stand it when people disrespect me.

And that's very closely related, but it's kind of like the flip side of the coin from when other people disrespect me.

It's awful.

So that's how severely bad it is.

But I may also have a belief about feeling overwhelmed or helpless in response to that.

'cause I might think, man, it's really awful when people are rude to me, but I'm a pretty tough guy.

I can handle it.

I know exactly how to deal with this, and then I wouldn't be angry upset.

But if I think horrible when people are rude to me and also it's unbearable, like I can't tolerate it, I, I don't know how to cope, then I'll feel helpless and then I'll probably feel compelled to overcompensate by slapping them or shouting at them or, or whatever.

I'll do ruminating about it internally.

So usually there's a feeling there's this kind of.

This is intolerable.

It's unbearable.

I can't handle it.

It's overwhelming.

It's too much.

When as soon as you start to think like that you, in those extreme terms, your appraisal of your own coping ability is zero, Right?

Yeah.

there's something deeply toxic about that.

it's not surprising.

It leads to extreme behavior.

So I think often, many cases, ironically, the another way of dealing with anger is by improving, uh, people's flexibility and self-confidence and their own repertoire of coping abilities.

Yeah, I can agree with that.

And I think that that's why Stoicism has been, like I said, been such a guidepost for me because it has really helped me to develop that self-awareness to do that and to be able to, yeah, like I said, diving into more of the roots of things rather than just focusing on the behavior itself, because that didn't seem to be working for me.

So I think we're coming up on time here.

I think this is probably a good place to, to, to wrap up.

So, um.

So before we go, go ahead and tell my audience where they can find out more about you online.

um, Substack.

I love my substack.

Now, I guess like I put all my podcasts and my articles and things out there, like that's the best place to find me.

followed Sam Harris's advice and I deleted the Twitter app.

From my phone, actually, I'd already done that.

I followed my wife's advice, like I was being interviewed by Sam Harris.

And he said, you know, apart from studying Tibetan, uh, even though he'd studied Tibetan Buddhism mindfulness, uh, for decades, he said that the single that contributed tangibly to his overall psychological wellbeing was deleting Twitter from his phone.

uh, I, I

Yeah.

I'm.

like.

I still have an account, but I, I'm never on it.

I still have an account on there, which when I do post social media, I post on there hoping that somebody might pay attention, but I don't go on Twitter anymore.

It really, I was watch, I watched 1984 the other night, like Twitter.

I mean, social media in general is pretty bad, but, uh, Twitter seems to me to be the worst in terms of just

Yeah,

being a huge folk quon for political propaganda.

and I don't, it's clearly not a healthy thing to expose yourself to in large quantities.

So I

yeah,

definitely agree with him.

Like, you know, uh, just not having to listen to a load of propaganda all day long is, is, you know, certainly healthy.

I get notifications, but propaganda.

What?

That's insane.

Like, why would I want that?

yeah,

basically

I've noticed that.

I've gotten, I, for some reason it keeps popping up, Hey, you should listen to this person, and it's like.

You know, just some of the most vile, ridiculous stuff.

I'm like, why would you think I would be interested in this?

I post about stoic philosophy and you've got this hardcore right winger who's, you know, just this is, this is ridiculous.

I'm like, okay, I, so I'm never on Twitter.

It's like I still have my account, but I'm never on it.

So

I'm not selective.

I think there's some nut jobs on the left as well, to be honest.

But in

true.

it could be.

I feel like I, I, I'm just suspicious.

I agree with the ancient philosophers who said that politics by its very nature tends to corrupt people.

Like, you know, there's something, there could be the good politicians, but there's definitely something about politics that by its very nature, tends to corrupt.

It's, you know, it's a big challenge.

The ancient Socrates thought you'd have to be a heroic figure to enter into political arena and retain your, your wisdom and virtue.

It's possible, but it'd be like the, almost like the sage, like the Ethiopian Phoenix or something.

You know, maybe once in a blue moon, there's somebody who can actually rise above like all of the corruption and money and stuff that swells around in politics, you know, and, and not be, uh, affected by it.

Um, but I, I think it's extremely difficult.

Like, you wouldn't last very long in politics unless you were willing to take back handles and things like that to, you know, be dishonest about things.

So it's quite, it's like a machine for like, basically manufacturing, uh, people, um, who are, uh.

It's machine for manufacturing surface.

You know, the opposite of Pierre Haddo that the universe is a machine for manufacturing the stoic sage.

You know, I think politics is kinda like the opposite basically.

I'm not on Twitter.

Basically you can find me on Substack, which I think is a slightly better environment for writers and stuff.

uh, you share, I rush out and buy my books like I didn't use to say that, but I think my publisher is kind of like wishes that I would say it more often.

So, but Socrates, how to think like, Socrates was my most recent book, working on a book about anger, but it's gonna be a long time before that comes out.

But all my, how to think like a Roman emperor and how to think.

The Socrates have both got quite a lot of stuff in them about anger actually.

Yeah, I've really been enjoying, I, I, I.

Two thirds of the way through, had to think like Socrates and I need to get back to it.

Like, life got chaotic, I moved back from Amsterdam, had to find an apartment, all of those things.

So, and then I've been working on the courses, speeches, other things.

So it's like I keep looking at that 'cause it's sitting on my shelf right over here and I keep going, ah, I need to finish that.

I've got like one third left and I'm almost there.

But, uh, really enjoy it.

And every time I kind of go back and sometimes I was working on an episode a while back and I needed a story from it.

And so I, I pulled from that and I was like, okay, where was that?

There, there's that story.

So I find it a useful reference book.

So.

I think I should say as well, I think the audio book is much better than the, uh, we put a lot of effort into the audio book and something that's quite odd about it is the kinda reviews for on Audible for the audio book, like on on Audible.

Um, on Amazon, gave how to think like a Roman emperor, slightly better, uh, reviews and not only by kind of small margin, but kinda, it came out slightly on top in terms of reviews on Amazon, but on Audible, how to think like Socrates rates higher.

so I think that's interesting.

Like the, I wrote it, intending it primarily to be an audio book, know, and so I think, uh, hopefully if people are thinking about checking it out, especially if they're listening to podcasts, they might want to check out the audio version

Nice.

All right.

Well thank you so much for your time.

And uh, yeah, so there a lot of, a lot of heavy stuff to talk about that we talked about.

So, but anger I think is something that is.

Coming to the fore in our society today is, and I think it's important for us to talk about it and the le because the more that we can talk about it, the more we can actually discover the roots behind it and hopefully change our behaviors and help others change their behaviors.

So, and that's the end of this week's at Coffee Break.

As always, be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and thanks for listening.

Also, if you haven't bought my book, stoicism 1 0 1, I would really appreciate if you would, you can find more about it on my podcast, on my website at Stoic Coffee.

Also, if you're not following me on social media, I know we just talked about social media.

You can find me on Instagram and threads@stoic.coffee and YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, uh, all the others at Gesto Coffee, all one word.

Thanks again for listening.