You’re Allowed to Be Angry | Understanding Our Emotions

In this episode, I’m talking about something we all experience but don’t always know what to do with: anger.

We’ll unpack what it means to actually process an emotion rather than simply react to it, and how emotional intelligence can change the way we understand ourselves, communicate with others, and respond when things don’t go our way.

✨ This episode is for anyone who gets angry, bottles things up, reacts before they’ve had a chance to think, or simply wants to get better at understanding their own emotions and the people around them.

Transcript

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Hello everyone and welcome to Migrant Munch. My name is Dr. Sharika Sanami Ratna and I'll be your host on this podcast. Let's dive into today's story. Welcome to this week's episode of Migrant Munch. Today I'd like to address the topic of emotions and anger in particular. So earlier this week, I did a emotional intelligence accreditation as part of my work at Deakin. And it was really interesting because we got to look at a report of our own emotional intelligence and then use that to determine where we sat in relation to different parts of the model that they use. And then we also got to see different ways of how we can improve our emotional intelligence. And so the first learning from that was that emotional intelligence is something that we can actually work on and develop, which was quite interesting because you come across so many different people in live, and you sort of start to reflect on how people interact with each other and how they also regulate their own emotions. For me, this was one of the most interesting parts of what I reflected on because I've seen people really work hard to learn how to regulate their emotions. And I've also seen people who default to making excuses for behavior that is less than ideal. So learning about emotional intelligence and how it can actually be harnessed was something quite interesting to me. I finished the workshop yesterday feeling quite reflective and quite curious to explore the different ways that I could use my results to improve how I perceived myself and the way that I regulated my emotions, and also think about how I show up for other people or how I understand and manage other people's behaviors and emotions as well. One of the things that stood out in my report was the fact that I place quite high expectations of people, and as a result, when things don't go to plan, I can get quite irritated with people because they're not conforming to the way that I want them to behave or they haven't lived up to my expectations essentially. And that was quite confronting because it is sort of going against the principle of something I always talk about, which is the fact that we can't control how other people behave, and we can't control other people's emotions or reactions. What we can control is the things that we do, the way we behave and the way we react to situations. So it was quite ironic that I know this thing and I believe in how important it is to look at what we can control. But at the same time, I was looking at a report that literally said the opposite of that. It said that I could be quite emotional and I can also really um be critical about myself and about other people. Upon reflection, it made a lot of sense. There are several instances in my life where I have questioned people's behavior, and I've also got quite angry because I don't feel like somebody's understanding what I want, and I don't feel like I'm able to communicate that well enough to see them perform exactly how I want them to perform. What intrigued me even more was that the day after the workshop, I woke up and I had a couple of emails regarding a couple of different things I needed to work on. And I immediately got quite angry when I saw some of the emails that had come through regarding a few different things that had slowed down a piece of work for myself that was outside of my control. I was so angry because it was a reflection of other people not performing the way I wanted them to perform or not doing uh what I would have expected them to be doing. That's the key here. I was expecting them to do something, and I was getting angry that they weren't living up to that expectation. Now that expectation in itself is within my control, not their control. They get to control the way they react and they respond, but how I react and respond and how I think and feel is within my control. I started to reflect on that anger that I was feeling, and I realized that it was not very justified. There were reasons as to why my anger was reasonable, but it still didn't justify why I had to be angry that someone wasn't doing something that I wanted them to do. In life, we place very high expectations across different groups of people because we want them to behave in a certain way. We have that expectation of them, even if we don't realize it sometimes. It took me a while to process the anger that I felt, and I was quite grateful that I took that time to process how I was feeling. Sadly, not everyone does that. Not everyone takes the time to process their emotions. And an emotion such as anger is one that is communicating to you that something is not right or something is not being done the way you want it to be done. So anger is the way that we then express how we're feeling in terms of the frustration, the distress, or the hardship that has been caused to us as a result of someone else not doing something the way they should have been doing. It could be as simple as driving and then uh a driver cuts across you, or it could be something as simple as someone having to complete a task for you, or it could be someone saying they're going to do something and not doing it properly, or not doing it at all, or literally just not doing it to the extent that you expect. That causes anger because we get frustrated that we're not being heard and we're not being seen, and we're essentially not being listened to because we're communicating how badly we want something and yet the other person hasn't understood it. There are instances where we just expect something to happen, like we expect drivers on the road to drive in their lane and follow all the road rules. We expect that the trains will arrive on time, we expect that people will action their emails as soon as they see them. We expect that people will get to task quite quickly because they work for that job and they work full-time hours. But people also have other things going on. The biggest takeaway for me from all of this is that being more present and mindful actually helps us to regulate our emotions and regulate the way that we're feeling, particularly when we're experiencing some sort of negative emotion, such as anger. If you're someone who reacts quite quickly to things, this might be something that is useful to you as well. Some of the things that I've decided to start doing more of is pausing before I react. For example, when I was angry about those emails, I defaulted to typing up a reply that expressed that anger. And then I actually paused. I walked away and I did some other stuff that I had to do, and then I came back and reread that email and thought about how I would have felt if I had been on the receiving end. I didn't want to hurt anyone, especially not on purpose. And so walking away, distracting myself with other things, and then coming back and reading that email with fresh eyes helped me to see the emotion in that email and to then redraft it so that it sounded more polite and less emotive. So I wasn't just expressing my frustration, but I was actively trying to make it clear what I wanted and not just trying to express my emotions or my anger onto the other person. I would encourage you to try it out as well if you're someone who reacts quite often. One thing is to pause, walk away, distract yourself with something else, and then come back. And the other thing you can do is literally just take a moment to catch a breath and to calm yourself down, even if it's engaging in like one minute of meditation, or even just I would say even 15 seconds to 30 seconds of meditation where you just ground yourself and you stop all those emotions from taking control of how you react. Try it out and see how you go. And reach out and let me know if it was helpful for you. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Migrant Munch. If you really liked what you heard today, uh reach out to us, get in touch. Tell us what really inspired you and would love to connect with you and hear more about your story.