The concept of anger is either hated or loved.

It is both blamed for the worst violence in the world and also praised for the most inspiring protest against such violence.

And like most things that draw out such intense emotions, it is mostly often misunderstood.

To uncover the gift of anger is to see it as an alarm.

Unenjoyable emotions that we experience are signals for that our needs are unmet.

As a basic example, if our need for food goes unmet we feel hungry.

If our need for safety is threatened, we feel fear.

For a little more complexity, if our need for certainty is unmet, and this combines with a fear that what might happened could threaten our safety need, we feel anxiety. This opposes when we think what might happen could meet one of our needs we feel excitement.

The most important concept to understand about anger is that any unenjoyable emotion can become anger if the unmet need behind that emotion continues to go unmet.

Imagine a roommate leaves dishes in the sink. At first, you see the dishes and clean them. Your action meets your needs for cleanliness as well as contribution to the roommate. The positive emotion of the met needs is louder than any unenjoyable emotion in the situation. If the roommate does it again the next day, you may feel irritated because your needs for collaboration and empathy are now unmet and become louder than the joy of contribution.

If this goes on and the need for empathy continues to go unmet, your subconscious realizes that the emotion of “irritated” wasn’t strong enough to motivate your conscious mind to get the need met. It then sounds the alarm and increases the volume of the emotion to an unignorable level.

Enter: Anger

Even if we are simply hungry for too long we risk the emotional bombardment and overwhelming alarm of anger.

Hungry becomes angry, aka “hangry”.

Once we understand that anger is an alarm, we can approach situations that involve anger more appropriately.

If you can notice that you feel angry, you can more likely drop the volume of the anger to discover the more subtle original emotion and its underlying need. This is the information that can accurately guide decisions that more likely get the need met.

Without an awareness of anger being the alarm, a person feeling angry is likely to think, speak, and behave from the primitive brain center that is associated with fight or flight. We don’t tend to make our best decisions from this place and often make situations worse when we try.

Imagine the alarm clock going off in the morning. This is a trigger that woke you up in the face of your unmet need for sleep.

Typically, we hear the alarm, we get up and turn it off, and then we begin making decisions to get our needs met. We do some order of eating, moving, meditating, breathing, and planning.

What if instead of hearing the alarm and turning it off, we just started our day with the alarm blasting in the background. How likely is it that we will make great decisions as we prepare for our day?

I imagine we would hurry through most of it feeling distracted, brow-furrowed, and pissed off. The food probably wouldn’t have much taste due to lowered perception, the meditation would produce a heightened awareness of the piercing sensation in the ears, and movement and breathwork would be altered by the increased tone of our fight-or-flight muscles (upper traps, suboccipitals, corrugator) and decreased tone of our rest-and-digest (and belly breath) muscles.

The volume of the alarm hides the subtleties of what makes life wonderful.

Unless used appropriately to bring us deeper within ourselves, anger also drowns out the subtleties of our life’s experiences.

If we can’t separate the alarm from the noise, we are like a fish unknowingly swimming in our own sea of anger.