calm Archives | Neel Burton

The Best Cure May Also Be the Simplest

Anger by le Brun — Many people have been able to cure their anger simply by looking into a mirror.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In the first century CE, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a short book called On Anger, which to this day, in my view, remains the best book on anger management.

The first thing we should know about anger is that it is both learnt and highly contagious. Seneca tells the story of a child who was raised in Plato’s house. When the child was returned to his parents, he saw his father shouting, and remarked, ‘I never saw this at Plato’s house.’

If you are surrounded by angry people, it is hard not, in turn, to become angry—and conversely, calm people tend to calm us. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle remarks that even wild animals grow gentle in the company of the calm—although I wouldn’t go to the zoo to test this out.

So our first defence against anger is the company that we keep. Avoid the angry, seek out the calm.

Why We Get Angry

Beyond this, it is important to understand why we get angry. Anger feels powerful because it converts injury or helplessness into reaction and aggression. But it is in fact a sign of weakness, revealing the very injury or helplessness that gave rise to it.

And it is often irrational: we assume the worst about people, exaggerate the harm they have done us, and interpret their incompetence or lack of thought as contempt.

We sometimes rationalise our anger as moral courage, that is, as a spur to virtue. But even in the face of terrible injustice, anger is not required to obtain redress or do the right thing. Indeed, anger may impair our ability to act effectively.

How Anger Defeats Us

If anger arises from an injury, it often inflicts a second injury of its own making. Whereas other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it. Anger, said Horace, is a short-lived madness. It is from anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who saved his life—the conqueror of kings, himself conquered by madness.

We get angry because we seek reparation. But often, we make things much worse than if we hadn’t got angry. If someone has wronged us, we would do much better to calmly explain this to them, rather than lose our temper, and, with it, their ear.

The Surest Cure for Anger

Anger begins with a judgement: someone has wronged me, and I must punish them. But it is easier to revise our judgement than to rage against the world, to rage against how things are.

Before that judgement carries us away, there is a little space. Maybe we can’t prevent the first flash of irritation. But we can refuse to go with it. In that little space that we have, we can ask ourselves three things:

Am I expecting too much of the world?
How is getting angry going to help me?
Who will remember this tomorrow, or in a year’s time, or in a hundred years’ time?

That’s why the surest cure for anger is delay.

When he retired from the imperial court, the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus advised the emperor Augustus: ‘Whenever you become angry, Caesar, say or do nothing until you have repeated the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet.’ At this, Augustus seized his departing teacher by the hand and replied, ‘I still have need of your presence here.’

Perhaps we all do. The surest way to prevent anger from ruling us is to refuse to act while it is on the throne.