Why People Exhibit Road Rage
Anger is an everyday occurrence within our normal range of emotion but what is the normal range of anger and at what point does it become unhealthy. Anger is a normal expression experience by everyone. It is exhibited in babies by crying or screaming. Animals express anger through acts of aggression but we as humans and adults have the ability to control our anger and that is where the question of healthy anger becomes an issue.
Webster defines anger as a feeling of displeasure resulting from injury, mistreatment, opposition, etc., and usually showing itself in a desire to fight back at the supposed cause of this feeling.
“Supposed cause of this feeling,” that is an interesting choice of words. In this day and age of road rage people suffering from road rage often react to a supposed cause of anger. Without realizing what the offending driver is experiencing that is causing the offending behavior the offending or victimized driver takes the action personally and reacts with anger. An irrational anger due to a suppose cause. If the offended driver took a second to control their thinking of a personal attack or supposed threat to realize there may have been an outside influence to the offending drivers behavior a healthier driving outlook would occur. Suggest to one’s self after the offense occurs that the other driver may have been lost or unfamiliar with the area thus causing them to be nervous and react poorly to the driving conditions or perhaps they were distracted by a screaming baby in the backseat maybe even sick or in pain. These are all good mental distractions to think of why the offending behavior occurred rather than react with anger and assume the other driver is just being a jerk. Reality is how we perceive it to be.
Albert Berstein, the author of Dinosaur Brains,explains that our brains are constructed like the dinosaurs brains in the way that we conceive more perceived threats in our heads because we view reality the way we want to rather that the way it is. He discusses ways to control our brains thoughts through visual redirection such as imagining what the other driver is going through as mentioned before and stimulating our cortex by meditation and controlled breathing to positively vent anger.
Gaylin tells of anger as rage in a response to a perceived assault that effects the body by tensing skeletal muscles, the autonomic system moves to increase the supply of adrenaline and change the blood flow of the body for fight or flight response. There for proving that if we change our thinking of a perceived assault into a non personal threat due to outside influences rather than and attack on us personally we can avoid the changes that our body under goes due to anger (a perceived threat).
Many Doctors and Scientists have proved that nor epinephrine is secreted during anger increased blood pressure. Anger is directly related to high blood pressure and high blood pressure leads to heart disease. Studies have proved that the risk of suffering a heart attack is doubled after an outburst of anger. Proving that if we change our thinking that other peoples actions are a perceived threat we control our anger response and in doing that controls our health. If we learn to manage our anger and be more assertive in communicating our needs rather than displacing them and exploding during a perceived threat we manage our health. Relative to the subject matter lack of assertion is linked to uncontrolled anger. People tend to be more aggressive in their cars because they feel they are in a force field of safety. And also feel that the car is an extension of themselves leading to a heightened sense of defensiveness towards a possible threat to the car / themselves. Supporting the statement that a lack of appropriate assertion in daily life leads to uncontrolled anger which manifests into uncontrolled road rage. Which in turn is unhealthy for everyone. In the long and short of it if we manage ourselves in assertion an perceived threats(anger) we manage our health.
Anger is healthy when it is used to appropriately assert ourselves. Anyone can get angry and display rage that is easy. The challenge is to become aware of ourselves and anger enough to become angry at the right time, right person in the right degree and appropriate manner that is when anger becomes healthy.
