Transforming Anger: The HeartMath Solution for Letting Go of Rage, Frustration and Irritation.
by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman, Ph.D.
Sample Chapter
Chapter 1
Why This Book Is Different
The car in the next lane suddenly speeds up and pulls in front of you, and you have to jam on the brakes to keep from hitting it; your heart pounds and a few well-chosen swear words escape your lips. A few hours later a coworker keeps making the same mistake in file after file, and your patience nears the breaking point. That evening your spouse, for the umpteenth time, won't hear the plea you're making for more time together, and your frustration and resentment build.
Every day, all of us face situations like these, and when we do, we often flare up and get angry. Feeling anger isn't wrong. Anger is a natural human emotion that can stimulate us to take action. Anger is one of nature's ways of enabling people to ward off a threat or attack. It can also be a normal response when we lose basic trust in others, because that too threatens our security and survival.
While anger can motivate us to cope with life's adversities, unmanaged anger leads to feeling out of control. Anger is a powerful energy that can take over your body and brain and make you feel like exploding, but instead you may stuff that energy inside. Then someone can say something unrelated or look at you the wrong way, and you believe they're out to get you. All that stored anger comes bursting out like a volcano. Anger and its fierceness can be frightening to other people and even to you.
The problem is not anger; the problem is that we don't understand what to do with the feeling of anger or understand what is underlying that feeling. Anger can be a place to hide from deeper feelings of insecurity, guilt, hurt, disappointment, embarrassment, jealousy, or resentment. These deeper feelings often determine whether the action we take when we feel angry is effective or something we later regret.
If you are dealing with anger you can't quite seem to manage, this book will give you new hope. It will provide you with new tools to achieve the transformation of anger that you've always wanted but couldn't accomplish.
Managing Anger
Hundreds of self-help books and therapies are on the market to help people manage stress and control anger. There are many good programs. You may have tried relaxation or breathing techniques, time-outs, cognitive reframing, prayer, counseling, group therapy, and other anger coping methods. But if you're like millions of people, no matter what you've tried, you haven't been able to pull off anger control that lasts. There are important reasons for this, and you don't have to feel bad about it. People are natured differently. Perhaps you find it hard to remember cognitive techniques in the heat of the moment; you get blocked and your mind goes blank. Or you may feel that there are so many different anger-management tools you could use that you jam up inside and finally wear out trying. We know how hard you may have worked to control your anger.
We know you probably have felt terrible about your anger at times. It may have hurt your relationships or your job or your health and cost you dearly in terms of your own happiness. Whatever you've tried before, you'll find the methods in this book effective and easy to use. They are effective because they come straight from the heart--your heart. You can use these methods by themselves or to enhance the power of other techniques you have found helpful. You can even use them to unlock creative potentials in other areas of your life.
This book will give you some of the missing ingredients to understand anger in yourself and others. It will show you how to connect with an inner reservoir of untapped power to accomplish what you couldn't before, and do it more quickly than you may have thought possible. Transforming Anger is based on solid new science with a lot of evidence and studies to support its effectiveness. You will find stories of people just like you who used the simple, scientific methods in this book not just to control rage, frustration, or irritation, but to get rid of it. You'll see why many have said, "Finally, something to really help with anger."
Technology of the Heart
Transforming Anger is based on inner technology that takes you deep inside your heart. It gets your heart, mind, emotions, and nervous system in sync. This inner technology, called the HeartMath System, was developed over the course of thirty years and validated with twelve years of scientific research at the Institute of HeartMath, a recognized leader in stress and performance research and interventions.
Scientists used to think that emotions were purely mental expressions generated by the brain alone. We now know that this is not true; emotions have as much to do with the body as they do with the brain. Furthermore, of all the bodily systems, the heart has been found to play a particularly important role in emotional experience.
In this book, we provide a model of emotion that includes the heart--together with the brain, nervous system, and hormonal system--as a fundamental component of a dynamic, interactive network from which emotional experience emerges.
We show you how to access this network to change your emotional experience.
Over the past twenty years, neurocardiologists have firmly established that the heart is a sensory organ and a sophisticatedinformation encoding and processing center. The heart has its own internal nervous system, called the "heart brain" (Armour and Ardell 1994). It enables the heart to sense, learn, remember, and make functional decisions independent of the "head brain."
In the early 1990s, breakthrough studies at the Institute of HeartMath revealed a critical link between emotions and the rhythms of the heart. This research provided evidence that the physical heart is part of the emotional system and that the heart plays a large role in how we feel and think (McCraty, Atkinson, and Tomasino 2001). Most of us intuitively understand this. Poets, philosophers, and religions have said this for ages. But it's only since the advent of modern technology that we've had the ability to see on a computer screen, in real time, how the rhythmic pattern of our heart changes as our feelings change. This gives us a window into our heart.
The next breakthrough at the Institute of HeartMath was discovering how ordinary people can easily learn to shift their heart rhythms and bring their emotions quickly into balance. As they do so, a remarkable thing happens. Their feelings and perceptions change. They break free of old emotional patterns.
The brain operates as a complex pattern-matching system. It builds a set of patterns in our neural architecture based on previous experiences, then looks for a match or mismatch to that experience (Pribram and Melges 1969). In 1996, Tiller, McCraty, and Atkinson found that emotions are reflected in the patterns of heart rhythms. Disturbing emotions (such as irritation, frustration, and anger) lead to a more disordered and incoherent pattern. On the other hand, positive emotions (like appreciation, care, compassion, and love) lead to a more ordered and coherent heart rhythm pattern. The brain monitors and interprets the heart rhythm patterns. It compares an incoming pattern from the heart to patterns it has already stored, and often triggers an emotion based on a pattern match. For example, if you are used to getting angry, an incoherent heart rhythm pattern will tend to trigger anger as a familiar response to incoherence.
Researchers have found that tools and techniques that allow you to shift your heart rhythm into a more coherent pattern enable the brain to find a match to a more positive feeling. Love and related positive emotions not only increase coherent heart rhythms, they also increase synchronization between the heart and brain, resulting in improved mental clarity and cognitive performance (McCraty 2002b).
The heart provides a unique access point from which anyone can regulate many of their reaction patterns. Learning to control your own heart rhythms gets to the heart of anger control. It is self-empowering and self-transforming. It gives you access to an internal source of power and intelligence which you probably have tapped into only unconsciously or intermittently. The heart is so powerful--generating sixty times the electrical amplitude of the brain--that it can draw your brain, nervous system, and emotions into its coherent rhythms and unlock more of your own innate intelligence.
The HeartMath techniques in this book will show you how to bring the rhythms of your heart into more coherence on demand. As you practice these techniques, you will have more " aha!" experiences of understanding and mental clarity. The HeartMath methods work for anyone who uses them sincerely. Adults with a long history of anger, children who are easily frustrated, teenagers with shifting emotional moods and raging hormones--all have used the power of the heart to change their feelings and their perceptions right in the middle of an angry reaction. Many are surprised at how quickly the HeartMath tools and techniques work.
As you practice the HeartMath solutions, you learn to love and care in an intelligent and new way. You don't get walked on. You don't become naive or cave in to others' demands. You become clear and centered, and see what's best for you and others. Deep in the heart, everyone has this type of centered love, but it takes practice to connect to it. You start to see life not in an overly idealistic way but in a realistic and hopeful way.
Intelligent Love
The quickest way you can shift your heart rhythms into coherence is to feel more love and care. So how do you do this? You add love. Not the mushy kind of love you might be thinking of, but a different kind of love. An intelligent love that has a businesslike or commonsense quality at the same time. You do this by shifting to an attitude of appreciation, care, or compassion. Or by just making a sincere effort to center yourself in the heart and hold the attitude of love.
Transforming Anger asks you to become an intelligent lover. It asks you to add the intention to love right in the middle of irritation, frustration, or rage, because that's what gets your system back in sync. You have that capacity to love inside you waiting to be accessed. It's your inner attitude that makes the difference. So learning how to shift attitude right in the moment--when you feel that mechanical dart of anger, that surge of adrenaline, or even while tempers are flaring--is where Transforming Anger begins. The HeartMath tools will show you how to access your heart, shift your attitude and perception, and then see a bigger picture. You will come to understand your anger in new ways and have the power to transform it.
The goals of Transforming Anger are:
- to better understand how and why anger occurs in your daily life
- to understand how your body triggers anger and responds to anger
- to learn and use fast-acting tools and techniques to get into coherence and release anger
- to find and act on new solutions for situations involving anger
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