Bigger Than Your Anger

While anger is one of the most basic human emotions, as rudimentary as happiness, sadness, or anxiety, if too easily or frequently demonstrated can challenge relationships and be toxic to our long-term health. Dr. Cannon, pioneer research in psychosomatic medicine at Harvard University describes the symptoms of anger as deepening of respirations, increased heart rate and arterial pressure as blood shifts from the stomach and intestines to the heart, central nervous system, and muscles as the body prepares to fight. Sugar is freed from the liver; the spleen contracts and discharges its contents of concentrated corpuscles; and adrenalin is secreted. Prolonged release of stress hormones can destroy areas of the brain associated with short-term memory and may weaken the immune system. Anger can cause a heart attack and/or other severe health problems.

Sometimes an angry word can ruin a friendship, cause a war, or be regretted for a lifetime, thus a reminder to be slow to anger…

I spoke a word of anger

To one who was my friend,

Like a knife it cut him deeply

A wound that was hard to mend.

That word, so thoughtlessly uttered,

I would we could both forget.

But its echo lives and memory gives

The recollection yet.

How many hearts are broken,

How many friends are lost?

By some unkind word spoken

Before we count the cost!

A. Lufburrow

Is anger worth the agony it causes? Let it go and realize there are greater things in life than focusing on the wrongs and hurtful things people have done to you. Focus on what is going well, evaluate the plans of today and the dreams of tomorrow. You are bigger than the anger that can reside in you and you are better than the outburst of anger when it flows from you. Be bigger than your anger.