A tantrum has a message – often a difficult feeling hides behind it

It was supposed to be a fun night with a friend, but he canceled at the last minute. It makes you angry and you would immediately like to tell your friend: Not if the club is not interested!

Instead of ruining your message with an angry message, it would be good to calm down and think about what your anger actually is.

– When we get angry, we feel a strong feeling of anger. Its purpose is to protect us from a painful, primal feeling, i.e. from being disappointed or rejected, psychologist Jan-Henry Stenberg tells.

If you notice that you get angry easily, stop and think about what kind of difficult emotions the bubbling is actually protecting you from. What are the feelings that are so painful for you that it is difficult to bear them? What threatened you in the situation so that you had to quickly defend yourself?

Emotion takes over

According to researchers, human thinking can be roughly divided into two systems: slow and fast. Whereas slow thinking calculates probabilities and weighs options, fast thinking draws conclusions guided by intuition and feeling, cutting back on information.

Slow thinking is based on higher-level neural systems in the brain, which are mainly located in the frontal lobes and the cerebral cortex. Quick thinking, on the other hand, is based on more elementary emotion regulation systems, the “lizard brain”, which are located deeper in the brain.

– When a person gets angry or nervous, he uses these more elementary nervous systems. The conclusion is made quickly and without thinking.

Breathe a moment

A threatening situation triggers an alarm in our body. The sympathetic or activation nervous system prepares us to fight or flee. The pulse and blood pressure rise, the pupils dilate and blood escapes from the peripheral parts of the body to the muscles. In order for us to think rationally, the body must first calm down.

– Calm breathing activates the body’s parasympathetic or resting nervous system. It slows down the organ systems and restores our ability to see things more broadly, Stenberg describes.

It is also good to remember that our temperament affects our emotional expression. Those with a quick temperament will fizzle and settle just as quickly. People with temperaments who are cautious and demanding of themselves may regulate their emotional expression too much. Then there is a risk that angry feelings will build up and increase stress in the body.

Try this

When you mess up and see red, your body goes into alert mode where rational thinking shuts down. Then try square breathing: breathe in calmly, hold your breath, blow out and hold your breath again, counting to three in each step. You will notice how your body slowly calms down and you can think more clearly.

Expert Jan-Henry Stenberg, psychologist and line manager, HUS Psychiatry

This article has appeared in Hyvä tervey magazine. As a subscriber, you can read all issues free of charge from the digilehdet.fi service.