What anger is for

Many people who pick up a book like this one have reached a simple verdict about anger. It's the enemy. It has cost them friendships, maybe a job, some very bad Christmases. The goal, as they see it, is to feel less of it.

That's understandable, and I think it's the wrong goal. It's also one you can't reach, which matters because failing at an impossible goal is a good way to end up hating yourself.

Anger is a signal. It turns up when something you care about seems to be under threat, or blocked, or treated with contempt. Somebody pushes in front of you, breaks an agreement, talks down to your child, takes credit for your work. The feeling says that this isn't right and something should be done. Along with the message comes a body ready to act on it. Your heart speeds up, your muscles tighten, your attention narrows onto the target, and you feel a push to move towards the problem and force it to change.

You can see why people would come equipped with this. A person with no anger at all would be easy to cheat and easy to push around. Plenty of good things in the world began with someone getting angry about how things were and refusing to put up with it. If you've spent your life being told to calm down whenever you objected to anything, you may have good reason to be suspicious of a book on this subject. So I'll be plain about it. Nothing here asks you to drop a fair complaint.

The signal has two weaknesses, though, and they cause most of the trouble.

The first is accuracy. Anger is usually right that something happened and often wrong about what it was. It fires on a fast first reading of events, and that reading tends to assume the worst about the other person's motives. It's also poor at judging size. A lost parking space and a betrayal can produce surprisingly similar feelings for the first thirty seconds. A smoke alarm behaves the same way. It makes the same noise for burnt toast as for a house fire, and the sensible response is to go and look before you do anything else. You wouldn't take the battery out, and you wouldn't call the fire brigade every time you grill a sandwich.

The second weakness is the body. The state anger puts you in is built for physical confrontation. It makes you faster and stronger, and it makes you worse at most of what a modern disagreement requires. In that state you listen badly, you lose nuance, and your memory hands you every previous offence by the same person, neatly filed. It's a good state for pushing a car out of a ditch. It's a bad state for talking to a teenager about their phone.

So I'd like you to start thinking of any episode of anger as having two parts. One is the point, meaning the message about what's wrong and what you'd like to be different. The other is the heat, meaning the bodily surge and the urge to strike. They arrive together and they feel like one thing. They aren't. The point can be true or false, and if it's true today it will be true tomorrow. The heat is temporary. It usually fades within minutes if nothing feeds it.

This is where the title comes from. If your point is a good one, it will still be true in twenty minutes. Nothing about it requires delivery at the peak of the heat. The habit this book is about is the habit of letting the heat deliver the point.

Here's something to check against your own record. Think of the last three times you lost your temper. For each one, ask whether there was a fair point somewhere inside it. My guess is that in at least two there was. Then ask whether the other person took that point on board. I don't mean that they went quiet, or apologised to end the scene. I mean that they understood what you were upset about and changed something. Hold on to your answers. We'll need them in chapter 5.