Anger may be bad for us – but on the other hand it has its uses | David Webster

News that anger makes you five time more likely to have a heart attack may be a worry, but without it we lose our political instinctIn the misanthropic fug of early morning, I woke to the radio reporting news that getting angry makes people five times more likely to have a heart attack in the following two hours.Great. Just what I needed to hear. Not only am I subject to endless media provocation to be angry about immigration, corruption, dredging, etc, but that this very anger is putting my life at risk.Of course, this dovetails with a persistent contemporary narrative in which one fears to open a Sunday newspaper magazine without someone banging on about mindfulness and its panacea status. In a country beset by road rage, idiots drunk on their own bile on Twitter, a tabloid media addicted to an outrage-cycle news agenda, and where many of us can't bear to watch Question Time for fear of our own anger (it can't just be me) – surely we need all the calm we can get.Not only the contemporary advocates of mindfulness, but also the meditative traditions of Buddhism are right in that anger is not as involuntary as it can feel: we can take steps that over time chip away at the mental conditions that lead to the arising of anger within our consciousness.If you've got so much rage that it's killing you, and it's futile, impotent fury where you just scream at the television/cat/wall, then some mindfulness might not be that bad an idea. It seems that today's evidence adds to the noti...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Comment Psychology theguardian.com Medical research Meditation Politics UK news Life and style Science Comment is free Source Type: news