Sunday Times 2
How modern life is making us angry
Modern day life is satisfying our basic needs but in turn is making us angrier, claims a leading psychologist.
Dr Sandi Mann from the University of Central Lancashire said that the aggression we once needed for survival, and which is ‘hard-wired’ into our brains, can ‘misfire’ when it doesn’t have a purpose.
This leads us to lash out and rage about relatively inconsequential and trivial events such as waiting to see a doctor, computers crashing and traffic.
Dr Mann wrote in the July issue of Reader’s Digest that anger which was once key to our everyday survival has become ‘targeted at trivial annoyances.’
She continued that our comfortable lifestyles may have spoiled us and boosted our expectations to the point where anything short of perfect causes us to act like ‘petulant children.’
The absence of genuinely life-threatening events means that trivial events often trigger violent overreactions. This is because our brains are evolutionarily wired to get angry but as we no longer have large-scale events to channel our anger into, our brains misfire and direct it at trivial situations
According to reports in The Telegraph, the energy and drive that originally focused humans on basic survival, such as food and shelter, have become unfocused and secondary in the 21st century.
This is because people are largely provided for, leaving the motivations that fuel basic survival without an appropriate outlet.
Humans evolved to become angry in certain situations because the emotion motivates us to want things.
For example, hunger makes us angry by raising our serotonin levels, prompting us to look for food.
Anger also played an important role in helping early humans live together in social groups, by warning individuals when their behaviour was upsetting others.
‘The red mist of rage helped our ancestors survive,’ Dr Mann claimed.
‘If they’d been too laid-back about others stealing their food or predators trying to kill them, they wouldn’t have taken sufficient preventive action.
‘But nowadays, people rarely experience real body-weakening poverty or genuine life-threatening injustice or mortal danger.’
This could lead to violent overreactions, such as road rage incidents, or make us furious about trivial details such as whether a restaurant meal is warm enough or how much company bosses are paid.
The Telegraph report cited recent surveys which have found that 90 per cent of people become worked up by call centres, while 50 per cent become so cross with their computers that they physically attack them.
Certain circumstances could even fuel our anger by raising unrealistic expectations, such as supermarkets, which claim they will open a new till if people are queuing, only to dash these hopes when they cannot be met, Dr Mann suggested.
‘Now all our basic needs are met and our expectations have risen,’ Dr Mann said.
‘It could be argued that we’re spoilt: like toddlers, we expect everything to be perfect, and when it isn’t we stamp our feet.’
She suggested that anger can be overcome by ‘challenging [its] appropriateness with a simple question: is this incident threatening our survival? If not, we should perhaps rein the anger in.’
© Daily Mail, London
Follow @timesonlinelk
comments powered by Disqus