Jargogled Impressions.

Patience and temper are conjoined twins. An absence of patience is pretty much the core behind temper flares. Even for situations where justice demand anger, patience can bring rewards. Patience is, in a sense, the rein that holds anger at bay. While not part of the primordial soup of human emotions and senses, its place is in the liminal space between when the brain receives a signal and when it reacts to it. It’s also potentially part of the mix when the brain in fact predicts what the senses are going to encounter from the environment. I guess patience mostly becomes a neurological curiosity, versus a psychological one.

Patience can be cultivated. If we are able to zoom-out from the situation at hand, via a variety of devices and tools, we can inculcate patience in our responses. And I bet a large part of our ipso facto regret with anger can be mitigated with this approach. A big-picture, macro thinking such as what Oliver Burkeman terms in his book Four Thousand Weeks as “the cosmic insignificance therapy” which is to say that if we zoom out to view the earth as that famous pale blue dot dangling in this infinite space, nothing human seems to matter. All of our petty squabbles, anxieties, envy, etc. becomes insignificant to cosmic proportions.

But that is a bit extreme and in the heat of the moment it’s almost futile to expect oneself to rely on this mindset to generate the much-needed patience.

A snapshot of what happens when we encounter a stressful (anger-inducing) situation:

• The brain perceives a stimulus as a threat -> activates amygdala. The “perception” is driven by personal beliefs, values, and past experiences.
• The amygdala activation = message to Hypothalamus that triggers the infamous ‘fight or flight’ response, which means stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are released by the brain.
• The sympathetic nervous system is then activated -> increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and heightened alertness. Effectively, body is armoring itself.
• Prefrontal cortex may or may not play a role depending on how overpowering amygdala’s responses turns out to be. PC can control impulse and influence decision making (e.g., deciding to say or withhold that regretfully mean sentence)
• Expression of anger via physical, emotional, and behavioral cues as a result of all the above.

If all our actions and reactions are pre-determined and we are merely puppets in the hands of those millions and millions of cells in our body, then most of the steps above are outside our control. So where does patience come in and why should we seriously be considering developing it?

Well, for one, prevention is better than cure. Much more powerful than building a habit of a subdued expression of anger is the ability to perceive these threats differently.

With toddlers, the book “The Whole Brain Child” has interesting things to say about how to manage toddler tantrums and rage. The key is to first understand that the 4 parts of the brain (left = logic, right = emotion, upstairs = thoughtful, downstairs = reactive) has not been conditioned enough to work in an integrated fashion with these kids. So the “emotional control” we adults take for granted is not so developed for them which is why we get an influx of irrational demands (I want this, but I don’t want this), instant melt-downs, or tantrums that don’t make sense. The kiddos are not able to handle these difficulties because their logic, emotions, thoughtfulness, and instincts aren’t integrated! How easy it is for us to forget that when we are dealing with a fussy toddler!

The book calls out 5 steps to deal with a situation like this with a kid:

• Connect and redirect: empathize with the emotion – no matter how insane – register it, and then aim to redirect it to a constructive task.
• Name it to tame it: when they are angry, it’s helpful to name the emotions ‘anger’, ‘frustration’, ‘fear’, etc. so the child associates with it.
• Engage, don’t enrage: Engage with the emotion. For example, if the anger doesn’t subside; “It’s ok if you want to keep feeling upset, but if you’d rather, we can be problem-solvers and think of another idea.”
• Use it, or lose it: the upstairs brain, which is the thoughtful brain requires practice to build muscle; let the kids think for themselves and exercise some independence where it’s safe! They need chance to weight different options, consider alternatives, and think through outcomes of their choices.
• Move it, or lose it: physical activity can be a big help to kids when they’re struggling to stay mentally balanced.

Idea being to help kids integrate all four parts of their brain so they can work together versus acting in siloes given the brains have not developed yet. It’s like when you set up an organization with different functions and need to define protocols and processes to ensure the functions work well with each other. It’s what the movie ‘Inside Out’ so beautifully highlighted- there are elemental emotions that need to work well together, even including sadness.

It’s funny though as I think a large part of these strategies works equally well for adults too. For example, “Connect and redirect” is essentially cognitive restructuring (see Reframing, Refactoring, Inversion, Redesigning). The only difference is that you need to rely on your own agency to work it through versus an adult guiding you through it. And that requires patience – patience to recognize the triggers of anger and how your brain perceives it. Patience, with glacially influencing the perception that triggers the amygdala – this perception is nothing other than mental models we have built of the world and bakes in our biases, our history, our supposed identity. Reforming the flawed mental models is a pre-requisite for dissociating the real and the imagined triggers, for our brain does imagine reality by predicting it based on pre-conceived notions and ideas. And that requires patience – in the moment when we are in the throes of a perceived emotional threat, as well as longer-term, when we are working on dis-entangling our mental models.