Areas › Anger › Anger, alcohol and the body
Anger has a chemistry of its own. There is nothing to pour down the sink and nobody to stop selling it to you, which is why letting it go feels like losing something rather than putting something down.
The lift is real. Heat, clarity, energy, a body that suddenly knows exactly what to do. Take that away and leave a gap where it was, and within a month the gap gets filled by the same thing again. What tends to work better is finding something that offers a version of the lift, hard physical effort, work that fully absorbs you, prayer, so that the anger becomes less necessary rather than only forbidden.
Qur’an and Sunnah
It is in the remembrance of God that hearts find peace (Quran 13:28). What settles the heart is offered here as something to turn towards, not only as something to stop doing.
ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ وَتَطۡمَئِنُّ قُلُوبُهُم بِذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِۗ أَلَا بِذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِ تَطۡمَئِنُّ ٱلۡقُلُوبُ
those who have faith and whose hearts find peace in the remembrance of God- truly it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find peace
Qur’an 13:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised placebo controlled trial, prazosin, a drug that blocks the effects of noradrenaline in the brain, reduced agitation and aggression in Alzheimer disease. That is a long way from ordinary anger in a healthy adult, but it does show a physiological state feeding behavioural volatility rather than the other way round. It says nothing about what any particular person should take.
Wang LY, Shofer JB, Rohde K, Hart KL, Hoff DJ, McFall YH, Raskind MA, Peskind ER. (2009). Prazosin for the treatment of behavioral symptoms in patients with Alzheimer disease with agitation and aggression.. The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A reward that is merely removed leaves a space, and the old thing is what fits that space best.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
The strongest pull is not the anger by itself. It is anger plus being right, the lift in the body and the certainty of the moral high ground arriving together.
Sleep, food, illness and the run of stress you have been carrying set the height of your fuse before anything has even happened. Sort those out and you are simply a calmer person that week, with no insight required.
Anger sends people back to the thing they had stopped, and the thing they had stopped makes the anger worse. Any plan that treats these as two separate projects tends to come apart.