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seems to be one way to get there. Several studies have shown that, from infants as young as seven months to adults of all ages, when faced with frustrating, challenging tasks—such as accessing a withheld toy, opening a locked box with the wrong key, and working both solvable and unsolvable problems—it is those who get angry who persist.
Brain science supports this notion that anger can indeed be productive, particularly when it is coupled with goal-directed, forward-moving behavior. In fact, when channeled into active, healthy striving, anger is the brain’s opposite of fear. Anger first springs from the reactive amygdala, but when we move from feeling emotions to acting purposefully on them, activity shifts to the prefrontal cortex, or the area of the brain where we plan and execute intentional behavior. The right prefrontal cortex manages our more pessimistic responses, and it is activated when we feel angry and powerless, when we sit where we are and stew. However, something different happens in the brain when we feel angry and powerful, when we move from the question of “What has been done to me?” and instead ask ourselves, “What am I going to do about it?”
In the words of William Arthur Ward, “It is wise to direct your anger toward problems, not people; to focus your energies on answers, not excuses.” To benefit from the anger that we feel, we must move from being a victim to being an activist, at least on our own behalf. This redirection of energy from powerlessness toward purposeful activity has long been recognized as therapeutic for trauma and grief—“Work, work, work. This is the single most important goal of traumatized people throughout the world,” wrote Richard Mollica, an expert on survivors of mass violence from around the world—and it is a maneuver that can even override the more emotional, uncontrolled, reckless forms of anger such as rage.
When we perceive there is something we can or should do to overcome the obstacles in our way, anger activates the left prefrontal cortex, or the side of the brain that manages our more empowered responses. The left prefrontal cortex is where we work toward goals, solve problems, and plan for and pursue the things we want. In this way, getting angry and taking action can be good for us as it moves brain activity to the side of the brain where we feel assertive, self-directed, and in control. It is here in the left prefrontal cortex that anger can help us advance our agendas, feel more determined, and even feel more positive about the future.
In fact, although it has long been seen as a negative emotion, in action and in the brain, anger looks a lot like happiness, an emotion that also utilizes the left hemisphere. In a series of studies, research psychologists Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner compared adults who were fearful, angry, or happy. In contrast with fearful adults, those who were angry or happy shared similarly optimistic predictions about their future, even about events that they may or may not be able to control, such as having a heart attack, finding a job, choosing a profession, or marrying well. Further work suggests that, although both happy and angry people tend to be optimistic, the optimism they experience is not quite the same. While happy people tend to believe good things will come their way, those who feel angry are more likely to believe that they will make good things happen for themselves. The optimism that angry people feel may be closer to having faith in oneself rather than having faith in the world, or so said researchers Jennifer Lerner and Larissa Tiedens; it produces “a bias toward seeing the self as powerful and capable.”
There is also evidence that because anger makes our problems feel more manageable, it can actually help us feel less stressed. In another study by Jennifer Lerner and colleagues, ninety-two adults were faced with known stressors such as counting backward from 9,095 by 7s, counting backward from 6,233 by 13s, and mentally solving difficult math problems from the Wechsler Intelligence Test. To add to their frustration, participants were told of their mistakes as they made them, and they were pushed to work harder and faster or else, they were warned, they might fall behind others. While participants who became anxious or fearful as they worked through the problems had higher heart rates, blood pressure, and cortisol levels, those who became angry had lower levels of these same stress measures. There is a grounding self-assurance that can go along with feeling indignant. Sometimes, those who get angry feel stronger and more confident. They feel more equipped to move forward and right the wrongs of the world.
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The military might seem like the last place Paul would choose to be after escaping the relentless hierarchy of his childhood but it was, in fact, the clear structure that appealed to him most. There he lived in a world where relationships felt orderly and fair rather than unpredictable and capricious, and where he was judged on the talents that he had. Looking back, Paul suspects he went into the navy because his strengths still felt somewhat tentative—“Having a lifestyle where I stayed physically active and mentally sharp was important or else I worried I’d relapse and end up like I used to be,” Paul remembers—but far from going back to being a target for his peers, Paul emerged as a leader among them. The running, the coursework, the relentless physical training: Paul had been putting himself through those sorts of paces for years, and he had a lot of experience coping with stress. Now as an officer, Paul says, “I see myself as stronger and more capable than most people around me because of the treatment I lived through. I see myself as an optimist, not because I think bad things don’t or won’t happen but because I believe I can overcome whatever comes my way. I feel independent and confident. I feel tested. I feel brave.”
Poet Dylan Thomas said, “There’s only one thing that’s worse than having an unhappy childhood, and that’s having a too-happy childhood.” I do not know if this is true or not, but I do know that, unlike Paul, too many supernormals feel lesser somehow because of the tough times they have seen, imagining they would certainly be better people if they had had stress-free lives. They look longingly at peers who seem uncomplicated and happy, imagining they are more desirable, more deserving, more attractive, more normal, more fit for life, more . . . everything. This is not necessarily the case.
While unrelenting, overwhelming stress is not good for us, to struggle is not all bad. Learning to cope with stress is a lot like exercise in that we become, as Paul said, stronger and more capable through exertion and practice. This is what child psychiatrist Michael Rutter called the “steeling effect,” or the notion that exposure to some hardships steels us against the impact of future ones, and research psychologist Richard Dienstbier made a complementary argument with the “toughness model.” In Dienstbier’s view, if we experience the feeling of being under pressure, we become less frightened by our own physiological arousal, and we begin to see threats and problems as situations we can manage.
There is ample evidence that exposure to adversity can indeed make us hardier, that grappling with moderate levels of stress is even better for us than experiencing none at all. Experiments with young squirrel monkeys have shown that early exposure to brief stressors resulted in their being more resilient; compared with monkeys who had no previous exposure to stress, those who had been exposed to moderate stressors were more comfortable and less anxious in new situations, and they even had lower levels of cortisol.
Also, in a study of over five hundred Dartmouth students, about half of whom served in the Vietnam War, those who were exposed peripherally to combat showed greater gains in psychological health across adulthood than did veterans with direct exposure or no exposure at all. And in a multi-year study of a nationally representative sample of over two thousand adults, aged 18 to 101, research psychologist Mark Seery and his colleagues found that those who had experienced at least some adversity were both more successful and more satisfied with their lives than those who had experienced extremely high levels of hardship—and compared with those who had experienced very low levels of adversity. These adults also coped better with more recent problems they encountered, leading the study’s authors to conclude, in partial agreement with Nietzsche, that “in moderation, whatever does not kill us may indeed make us stronger.”
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“I guess my life since the bullying started could be considered one long fight,” Paul told me. “I still fight a battle with myself to be the best I can be, and to prove to both myself and others that I can, and will, succeed in whatever way I choose. I have my degree. I have my rank. I have my hobbies. I have my friends. But the battle rages on. There is plenty more to achieve.” That was, after all, why Paul had sought me out. Not because he felt his life was not going well but rather because he was