Anger tends to have more bad press than good. Whereas emotions like love and gratitude invariably draw praise for their health benefits, anger has a spotty reputation at best. Health experts link it to a host of ills: heart disease, high blood pressure, trouble sleeping, digestion problems, headaches, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, according to an article by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration.
Naturally, these anger-related health problems frequently inspire advice for how to cope with anger or address anger issues. For example, people with depression often have symptoms of anger. More often, the therapeutic project is about working through these repressed feelings of anger, as opposed to also asking what positive purpose the anger might serve. Yet anger can serve more than one positive purpose….
Some Positive Dimensions of Anger
From a survey of research into the benefits of anger, here are just several positive functions of anger.
Anger can motivate you to achieve challenging goals. In a study in October 2023, researchers showed participants visual expressions of various emotions before asking the participants to undertake a particular challenge, such as solving word puzzles or playing video games. When participants were shown an expression of anger beforehand, they performed better. The researchers concluded that anger improved the participants’ ability to reach their goals.
Anger and its expression can help you set boundaries and resolve problems in a relationship. Researchers made this discovery after exploring the negative, long-term relationship costs of purely expressing “positive thoughts and emotions” (optimism, forgiveness, happiness, etc.). The study ultimately concluded that “expressing anger might be necessary to resolve a problem—with the short-term discomfort of an angry but honest conversation benefiting the health of the relationship in the long-term.”
Anger can alert you to when you’ve been mistreated and empower you to exert more control in the situation. As a healthy, self-preservative signal, anger can tell you when someone has hurt or taken advantage of you and can motivate you to make sense of the pain, find closure, and move on with more self-understanding. When allowed to surface and be felt, anger can be a cue to embrace the lesson waiting to be learned.
Anger is necessary to survival. Like other emotions, anger has an evolutionary basis: survival. Anger evolved as the “fight” response that helped primitive people stand their ground against predators when threatened. It fulfills that same biological function today in more extreme circumstances.
How to Tap into the Positive Power of Anger
Tapping into the positive power of anger can look different, depending on the situation. A good starting point is to accept and acknowledge feelings of anger when they bubble up, rather than deny or repress them. The next step may be expressing those feelings in an appropriate way and/or through writing or other forms of expressive art. Sometimes, depending on the situation, talking to a therapist may help. Most importantly, allow yourself to consider how these feelings of anger may be serving a positive purpose in your life.
