Managing anger and frustration with music
All during my adolescence I was told that to get rid of frustration or anger, I needed to “let it out”. Yell, scream, punch a pillow, anything. It never worked for me, and just made me feel angrier, more helpless, and a little scared. I’ve run into a few people in my life that seemed to subscribe to the idea of venting their anger, to varying levels of success; I even had a boss at a previous company who was famous for his angry outbursts, and it seemed to work fine for him – though it left the rest of us worse for the wear.
Of course, it turns out that the idea of venting anger has been proven to be counter-productive.
So, what should we do? The article I just linked to suggest breathing exercises. That’s nice, I guess. Breathing certainly can calm you down, and there are times where it’s smart to take a few moments to breathe and dial the anger back to something more manageable. But what next?
I’m lucky in that I don’t get angry often, so it’s not something that I’ve had to really concern myself with managing. But even with my relatively even-keeled manner, there are times when things get to me. Today I discovered something though: for me, a useful part of managing and redirecting anger can be found in music.
I created a playlist with all of the “angry” music that I like. Music like Synchronicity II by the Police, and Killing in the Name Of by Rage Against the Machine. Once it was complete, I had a look at it, and reordered it so that the songs that were pure energy were at the start, and the ones that had a sense of hopefulness came in at the end. It’s a pretty obvious psychological manipulation, but you know what? It doesn’t matter that I know I’m manipulating myself. It still works.
The beautiful thing is that music of any kind makes people feel good. Yes, it can make us feel other things too, but overall it is reasonable to say in general terms that music makes people feel good. So just starting to listen to music is the first step in getting over the anger. I find that music also energizes me, so listening to music when I’m angry helps me to harness that angry energy for more productive purposes.
Today I did exactly what I’ve described here, and I ended up accomplishing more work than I normally would in the same period of time, and came out the other side in a fantastic mood. How’s that for effective anger management?
Now I’m going to go kick my cat. Just kidding; I don’t have a cat.
