Halfway through Larry Weinerman’s 90-minute anger management class, the middle-aged woman in pink jeans suddenly loses it. “That was my Corvette he was letting her ride in,” she yells at her court-ordered counterparts, without much context. She is on her feet, wailing, thrusting her finger at Weinerman and bouncing up and down. “She bent my finger back, and it hurt me! She had my hair! I was winding up. It’s a good thing he put his boot in my face. I bought that Corvette. I paid for it! I gave it to my boyfriend, and he put a fat-ass you-know-what in it! He didn’t even tell me he had another girlfriend!”
For too many Americans, the scene (albeit with different details) may sound familiar. Enrollment in anger management courses—court-ordered or voluntary—is booming. Fatal crashes involving road rage have surged from 103 in 2007 to 255 in 2011, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. A Harvard study published in 2012 in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry found that two thirds of American teenagers admitted to having “anger attacks” that included destroying property, threatening violence or engaging in violence.
Worse, the research and treatment available for those with anger problems remains unsophisticated. There is no entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for anger issues. This means no one can be diagnosed as having a generalized anger disorder, so insurance companies won’t cover therapy. It’s also affecting research. “Because there are no diagnoses, there are no institutes or foundations willing to fund research into it,” says Karina Davidson, the co-director of the Center for Behavioral and Cardiovascular Health at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. As a result, there have been few population-level studies to better understand how anger is affecting us.
Davidson tells Newsweek that the lack of data about anger has driven her out of the field of study. She likens the situation to that of anxiety or attention-deficit disorder a decade ago. “This is clearly a public health problem, but we don’t have recognized ways of deciding who is disordered in it and who is not, and what are considered valid and reliable instruments to measure that.”
This oversight, Davidson contends, owes in part to a societal taboo: It’s not acceptable to be angry. We have a hard time even using that word to describe how we’re feeling—we sub in less threatening terms like irritated or annoyed. That sets off a cycle of denial: We don’t hear enough about people struggling with anger, we can’t be comforted that we’re not alone, we don’t feel safe admitting we too have a problem.
The taboo may be lifting. Janie Selby, who runs anger management classes in Portland, Ore., says she has seen a dramatic shift in even the past year among those seeking out the class. Last year, and for many years before that, most of the participants in her sessions were required to be there by the courts. This year, most are “self-elected.”
Nationwide, demand for anger management counselors is at an all-time high. According to Laura Moss, an anger management specialist and director of communications at the National Anger Management Association, the New York–based nonprofit has seen its member ranks more than double every year since 2008. “Our training is completely full,” Moss says. “People are coming to us in droves, asking for help.”
That surge in demand may finally be leading to more research-based treatment options. A growing body of study suggests that it’s possible to rewire the brain, to carve new grooves in its neurons so that we may react less impulsively to the stressors that trigger us to send an ill-advised email or tailgate that snail-paced driver who won’t get out of the fast lane.
After his class ended, Weinerman told me that the woman pining for her Corvette sometimes gets so angry she blacks out. He’s helping her learn to stop and identify the emotions beneath her anger—research suggests this act alone can shift brain activity from an impulsive primitive region to a more controlled and evolved part. If she takes even a few seconds to ponder that question, it could be enough to avert a meltdown. And if she does that often enough, eventually it’ll just be how she is.
Weinerman’s approach is mostly straightforward anger management therapy: teaching participants to identify the companion emotions to anger, having them fill out weekly “feelings journals” to understand their triggers and urging them to think about whether they could have handled the situation better.
In the past few years, though, exercises have increasingly focused on reorienting the brain. He says that the class now includes reading about neuroplasticity—the idea that the brain can indeed change—and performing tasks designed to affect that change. Instead of just talking about an emotional outburst, the class now learns a nine-point “impulse control” model that helps participants step back from a dangerous place, analyze their feelings and ground themselves before doing something stupid.
This stuff isn’t just self-help babble. It’s rooted in a burgeoning new field of neuroscience focused on two parts of the brain: the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala processes memory, helps us make decisions and governs our emotional reactions. When we are in danger, part of the amygdala floods the body with cortisol to heighten our senses and strength. Researchers believe that those prone to anger have a hyper-reactive amygdala: They see danger when it isn’t really there. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that performs a cost-benefit analysis on potential actions.
When it comes to anger, these two globs of brain matter help each other. ”There may be a situation where a person is justifiably angry, their amygdala is activated, but the wise thing to do is not to act upon it,” explains Nelson Donegan, a psychologist at the Yale School of Medicine. “If the prefrontal cortex kicks in, it puts the brakes on the emotional system. In people with prefrontal deficits, the brakes are broken.”
If we can reframe situations that trigger us, perhaps by stopping for even a moment to think about what just happened, the prefrontal cortex kicks in and slows you down, says Charles Carver, a psychiatry professor at the University of Miami who specializes in anger. “The big problem with anger isn’t the anger. It’s that it leads to action.”
I can relate. Even my closest friends wince when they see an email from me in their inbox, because I have a history of sounding off from the sanctity of my keyboard when something irritates me. We joke that I send “emo-mails.”
And that’s why I wound up in a recliner on the third floor of the midtown Manhattan office of Mary Ann Chafin’s Stellar Brain Technologies, wires protruding from my temporal lobes and earbuds wedged into my ears.
I’d learned of Chafin from Kevin Fleming, the founder of Gray Matters International. Both Fleming and Chafin are practitioners of a strange but interesting new way to treat anger (and other maladies) called “brain wave optimization," (a phrase that Gray Matters has trademarked). The technique was designed by Lee Gerdes, who struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder for nine years after a vicious assault. The technique employs basic EEG technology to gather information about the neuro-oscillatory rhythms in the brain from leads attached lightly to the skull. A computer program then quickly analyzes the readings and uses them to deploy a series of sounds into the earbuds that are constantly changing, based on a feedback loop from the leads.
Fleming adapted the technology and now travels all over the world to treat clients. “What you tend to see in psychiatrists’ offices are people throwing drugs at clients,” he says. “No one is measuring, opening up the hood.”
Chafin attached a lead to my temporal lobes using a sticky paste, accessing my autonomic nervous system. I heard humming voices, alternately a man and a woman. After eight minutes, Chafin repositioned the leads to my temples in an attempt to target my prefrontal cortex. The sounds in my ears changed from voices to the notes of a celesta.
Chafin explained that she was holding a mirror up to the brain, allowing it to “see” itself so it can implement “fixes” for anything amiss. The program works by balancing out various frequencies in my skull. One part of the session targets right-brain dominance, for example. According to Brain State Technologies research, people with higher right temporal lobe EEG amplitudes (versus left temporal lobe) are prone to snap more easily (send an email they regret). Brainwave optimization shows the brain that imbalance and allows it to correct itself.
Chafin says her own use of brain wave optimization allowed her to leave behind 20 years of antidepressants. She took up violin lessons a few years back, and remembers being overwhelmed with anxiety before each session. Now she looks forward to her lessons, and hangs a violin in her office—partly as a reminder of her progress, and partly because she’s frequently inspired to play. “I got so many benefits out of it I hadn’t imagined,” she says. “I could smell better; there were gains in my peripheral vision. I could hear better. Colors were brighter.”
The typical treatment goes for 10 days in a row (at about $200 per session), and I didn’t really expect just a quick demo to revolutionize my life. But two days later, a couple of hours before my flight out of New York, I went back for a second round. This time, Chafin pulled up a graph of my various brain frequencies on her computer screen after the session. I’d made significant progress. During the first round, my right and left brain levels were on average 40 to 60 percent divergent, suggesting my right side was dominating. During the second session, the graphs were dramatically different, my variance down to single digits.
I had to leave for the airport after that. Flying is an experience that tends to instantly put me in a terrible mood, as I mentally prepare for a snark-off with an equally grumpy TSA agent, followed by cramming myself into a box filled with germs and crying babies. But this time, I was cheery and chatty with the flight attendants. The five-and-a-half-hour flight went by in a flash, and when I landed, my girlfriend asked if I’d taken a Xanax.
Maybe my brain can be rewired after all. Maybe yours, too.
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