My Search for Equanimity
My favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle growing up was Raphael. This was mostly because he was the red one. But also because he flew off the handle like a lunatic. I did that too. I still do sometimes but not as often as growing up. When I would get mad, I’d get so mad and rant and rave and yell. My parents have a lot of my temper tantrums on video. They got less cute the older I got.
But as anyone who has struggled or currently struggles with anger management knows, when the madness passes, the next feeling is deep regret and shame. I wouldn’t just be upset with my behavior, but at my seeming inability to control it. It was as if the feelings and the actions came together in a package without any time in between, and then before I knew it, it was over, and I was thinking about how to apologize.
I became drawn to people who seemed in complete control of their emotions. Leonardo (the blue one) is kind of a nerd, but he isn’t rash. I could be reading about Albus Dumbledore or watching Michael Corleone and, even though one is a hero and one is a villain, I’d be thinking the same thing — how do these people do this? Your response might be, “Well, Joe, they are fictional characters, that’s how.” Sure, but it was the idea of the thing. There are real life examples. I admired the way many of the best professional athletes or coaches remained calm and collected. It’s a cliche in sports: “Don’t get too high, don’t get too low.” But it’s especially impressive in the realm of civil and human rights. 1 and Nelson Mandela come to mind most forcefully. How did they maintain their sense of humanity and optimism in the face of crushing oppression?
I didn’t know this word growing up, but what I was becoming obsessed with was equanimity. I had a lot of missteps before realizing this or how this works in practice. Did people just suppress their emotions? Learn to disregard them? Did they simply not get mad or sad? It can be easy to conflate someone with a tranquil mind with someone who is simply Machiavellian or even a sociopath (like Michael Corleone). I think I spent a while looking in the wrong places.
So, I don’t think I made a ton of progress on this question until I was about 30. When I began studying mindfulness, I realized that I had previously viewed “anger” as
one thing or one process when it is in fact two things. There is the immediate, uncontrollable physical sensation, and then there is the cognitive approval that comes shortly after. When we talk about anger as an emotion, we’re talking about both of these things as if they were one with no separation. Empirical research supports this claim even if it can be very difficult to separate one from the other. With training, people can learn to identify when they are feeling angry and sit with that a moment before deciding how to act. The idea is not to pretend I don’t get angry or to suppress the anger, but to acknowledge it, and then allow it to pass.
As I said, for me, studying mindfulness unlocked this realization. But this is an ancient idea that appears in philosophies from the Buddhists to the Stoics2, who each recognized that anger was a negative emotion that overpowered our rational capacities leading often to undesired outcomes, which often made situations worse.
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The teaching of the Buddha is that anger can never remove anger. Anger can only promote more anger. Only understanding and compassion can put down the flame of anger in us and in the other person. Understanding and compassion is the only antidote for anger. And using that, you heal yourself and you help heal the people who are victims of anger.”
In other words, acting from a place of anger isn’t helpful. The stoic philosopher Seneca came to similar conclusions, which he compiled in the appropriately titled, “On Anger”:
“Reason gives each side time to plead; moreover, she herself demands adjournment, that she may have sufficient scope for the discovery of truth; whereas anger is in a hurry: reason wishes to give a just decision; anger wishes its decision to be thought just: reason looks no further than the matter in hand; anger is excited by empty matters hovering on the outskirts of the case: it is irritated by anything approaching to a confident demeanor, a loud voice, an unrestrained speech, dainty apparel, high-flown pleading, or popularity with the public.”
I spent some time talking about anger specifically because it’s an emotion that was particularly hard for me. But this idea of cultivating a gap between sensory experience or initial feeling and action is not limited to anger. For example, another bad habit is to catastrophize things. I’ve written before about how when I was a kid, my anxiety would go through the roof as school approached. I feared I was simply not smart enough for the next grade. I’d get worked up in a tizzy over this and no matter what my mom or dad said, I’d have a reply “but what if…” In other words, I would just create these hypothetical what-ifs, and then worry about these imaginary scenarios that may or may not ever happen. All the while, whatever was happening, right in that moment, just passed me by. I did the same thing with sports, with work — you name it. People do this all the time, and it’s really not our fault. We’re wired to anticipate bad things and try to avoid them. It’s good evolution but not good for a happy life. But again, through training we can learn to be aware that we are spiraling a bit, and rein it in.
The Stoics called the immediate physical sensations we feel “impressions” and then whether or not we act on those impressions is up to us do we assent to them. Thousands of years later, this thinking was the basis for Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy which paved the way for other sorts of therapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. They all differ slightly but share the idea that we can acknowledge and accept our feelings before acting on them. The thing I have been calling “the gap” is, in academic literature, called “cognitive defusion”
Cognitive defusion techniques derive from mindfulness practices designed to detach from the content of the mind. Rather than seeing the world through distorted or unhelpful thinking, defusion is about seeing the thoughts themselves. Watching the thoughts, not watching the world through the thoughts.
Have you ever read the news and thought, “Well, we’re fucked.” If not, bless you, but the rest of us at least momentarily contend with this. Self-talk and cognitive defusion can help avoid dwelling on thoughts that don’t serve us. Like with anger, the objective is to acknowledge the thoughts are there, contemplate them, but let them pass. This helps us to see clearly and respond effectively, which is somewhere between difficult to impossible when we are angry or filled with anxiety.
When I was a little kid, I didn’t know any of this, because I was a little kid. I tried to figure it out on my own by watching people I admired. Studying the theory of mindfulness and beginning regular practice has helped me gain more equanimity than I’ve ever had previously. And it’s not just an abstraction — it’s helped me to deal with both real-life trauma and the more mundane ups and downs of daily life. Equanimity is a universal goal, but your path may be very different from mine. Perhaps it’s stoic philosophy or the teachings of the Buddha. Perhaps you try cognitive behavior therapy. Or perhaps there’s some other thing out there that I haven’t mentioned here. I found help in my own way, and I sincerely hope that if you’ve ever wondered about or struggled with the things I have, that this helps you on your way.
This anecdote in a 1946 edition of the NYT is pretty funny. He said he lost his “equanimity” and was no longer sure he’d live to be 125. He made it to 78.
This beyond the scope of the essay, but I just want to be clear I’m talking about the philosophical school of stoicism throughout this essay, which is different than the common usage of the word “stoic” today, which has come to mean something like never complaining or having no feelings whatsoever. This is not really what the philosophy is teaches or is about. But again, I just mean to point out this difference, not get into a whole lecture on the common misperceptions.
Excellent reflection, Joe. Anger is destructive, to the self as well as to others.