The wrong person

Consider two versions of the same moment. In both, you walk into the kitchen at half past six and your partner says, "Did you remember to ring the plumber?" You didn't.

In the first version you slept well, the day went fine, and you had a proper lunch. You say, "No, sorry, I'll do it first thing tomorrow." In the second version you were awake from four, a meeting went badly, you skipped lunch, and somebody nearly took your wing mirror off on the way home. The same question now sounds like an accusation, and you hear yourself say, "I do have a job, you know," much louder than you meant to.

The question was identical. What changed was the state it landed in. We talk about anger as though it were always about whatever just happened, and often the thing that just happened is only the last small addition to a load that was there already.

Several kinds of load are well studied.

One is leftover arousal. In the early 1970s the psychologist Dolf Zillmann showed that the bodily stir from one event hangs around after the event is over, and that people don't keep track of where it came from. When something irritating happens next, the old arousal gets added to the new and the whole amount is blamed on the latest cause. That's the near miss on the drive home turning up in your voice in the kitchen.

Sleep is another. Zlatan Krizan and Garrett Hisler took 142 people and had half of them cut their sleep for two nights. They then had everyone do a rating task with irritating noise in the background. The short sleepers got angrier, and they also failed to get used to the noise the way rested people did. Hunger seems to work in a similar direction. A study led by Viren Swami had 64 adults report their hunger and mood five times a day for three weeks, and the hungrier they were, the more irritable and angry they reported feeling. Pain and illness shorten the fuse too, as does a long run of days with no time to yourself.

Alcohol needs its own mention. A review of thirty experiments by Bushman and Harris Cooper concluded that alcohol does cause more aggressive behaviour, which won't surprise anyone who has been in a town centre at closing time. If many of your worst rows happen after the second or third drink, you've found something practical, and it'll do more for you than any breathing technique. I'll add one caution. If you drink heavily every day, speak to a doctor before cutting down sharply, because stopping suddenly can be dangerous for a dependent drinker.

None of this excuses anything. The person you snapped at is just as hurt whether you were tired or not. The point is practical. Look at when your outbursts happen. For many people it's the first half hour after getting home, or late at night, or on the school run. If yours cluster like that, the conditions are part of the cause, and you can change conditions more easily than character. Eat something at four o'clock. Sit in the car for five minutes before you go inside. Agree that no difficult subject gets opened after ten at night. These are dull measures, and I'd expect them to do more good than many clever ones.

There's a second pattern here. Ask yourself who gets your anger. Often it isn't the person who caused it. The boss who humiliated you gets a tight smile. The customer who was rude gets politeness. Your partner, your children or your mother get the rest, hours later, over something minor.

This has been studied too, under the name displaced aggression. A review of several decades of experiments found it to be a sturdy effect. People provoked by someone they can't safely hit back at will take it out on someone else. Two experiments from the same research group added a detail you may recognise. A trivial annoyance from the second person made no difference on its own. After an earlier provocation, the same trivial annoyance drew more aggression than the provocation alone did. The rule your anger follows is a bleak one. It lands on whoever is safest to be angry at, and they're usually the people who love you and won't leave.

I'd ask you to look at your own last five outbursts with that in mind. If the targets were mostly the people closest to you, and the true sources were mostly elsewhere, two things follow. One is that the people at home have been paying for debts they didn't run up. The other matters more for where this book goes next. You held it together all day in front of the boss and the customer. You did that without any technique or book to help. We'll look at what that means in the next chapter.