What do you do with the mad that you feel?
(the title of a Mr. Rogers song © 1968)
We naturally think of Mr. Rogers, Fred Rogers, as creating songs for children, which he certainly did. Â He wanted to help them to validate and to manage their feelings. But Mr. Rogers knew that grown-ups needed to hear the same messages. Adults need help too to validate and manage their feelings, especially when those feelings are intense.
When feelings are intense they can take over your brain, leaving you without the ability to think about them, control them, express them clearly, or act on them in a safe or productive way. This is all especially true when you’re mad. Feeling angry, whether it’s for a good or a bad reason, causes a whole cascade of things to happen in your body and brain.
Feeling angry can trigger the “fight” part of the fight or flight reflex. Your sympathetic nervous system kicks into action. It’s your activation system. Among other things it floods your body with cortisol, a form of adrenaline. This readies your body for the “fight”. This is an ancient and primitive system, so “fight” means ready to fight a physical threat, like a bear. This system is way too primitive to understand the difference between fighting a bear for your physical survival versus fighting your partner verbally. Your body is revved up for the physical fight for your physical safety.
The most evolved part of your brain, the neocortex, is considered irrelevant at that time to your physical survival, so it goes dim. We can actually observe this on a brain scan. This part of your brain is useful for long term thinking and planning, for paying attention to other people’s feelings, for being able to think in bigger and more complex ways. Fight or flight is about surviving right now and nothing else matters.
This sympathetic activation is very practical for fighting off a bear. It is quite problematic in a relationship. You can survive or dominate in this moment only to be left with the damage that you caused to your partner and your relationship.
Mr. Rogers was always committed to helping children validate their feelings as well as control them. He would not have said that “the mad that you feel” is bad or wrong. His song is about feeling that you can control what you do with “the mad”. He wanted children to feel empowered, confident, and safe. Safe included feeling safe to have and to express feelings.
As adults that same sense of safety still matters. We all have intense feelings. We all need to feel that we can be safe to have them and to express them.
There is a very effective, very immediate way to flip your brain and body FROM your sympathetic nervous system TO your parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is the calm, relaxed, low and slow activation side. It’s the side of your nervous system that permits full access to the neocortex part of your brain. It’s the part of your brain that lets you think in an evolved, reasoning way.
Here’s how to flip that switch. I call it the Slow Deep Exhale (SDE). It’s often called “instant relaxation” in the literature.
Don’t worry about your inhale; you have plenty of air already for this trick.
Breathe out through gently pursed lips. Don’t blow; just breathe. Purse your lips as if you have a straw there. This slows your breathing and deflects you from the events that are inciting you.
Keep breathing out for 4-6 seconds.
That’s the whole thing. It’s a maneuver that instantly tells your brain that there is no physical threat to your survival. That allows your brain to de-activate that survival system that got all fired up to protect you.
For extra persuasion to the primitive parts of your brain, be sure to lower and open your shoulders. They inevitably went up when you went into fight or flight. Lowering and opening them also communicates to the primitive part of your brain that you’re not in physical danger. That frees your brain to exit fight or flight and reconnect with reasoning and control.
Depending on how activated you became, you certainly might need to do more than one Slow Deep Exhale to fully reconnect with reason and control and stay in the best part of your mind. Doing the Slow Deep Exhale might only allow you to walk away from the “fight” rather than pursue it right then and there. Sometimes not doing damage is the best you can hope for at that moment.
The more you practice the Slow Deep Exhale when you’re NOT in fight or flight, the faster and more efficiently you can execute it when you are triggered.
Practice is the smoothest path to control. Here’s to empowerment!
