Suppressing Anger Increases Nervous System Dysregulation

Suppressing your anger increases nervous system dysregulation. It can lead to chronic shut-down, freeze and even burnout.

Your nervous system is wired for fight in response to a threat. Mobilising energy is released, and this surge of survival force compels you to take important actions. If you're unable to follow through with that instinct, complete the stress response and return to a baseline functioning, your nervous system remains "tuned" to excess fight energy. The vagus nerve is interrupted from bringing you back to regulation and without recovery you may respond with excess fight response to future stressors.

Shame can then become your coping strategy to dampen down anger. Although it may inhibit this energy, it also shuts off what would be a healthy and appropriate fight response. It's an artificial way to supress mobilisation that doesn't bring true recovery or regulation. Your thinking brain may label anger as wrong or bad, and tell you that you shouldn't feel annoyed, frustrated or irritated. Shame can turn inwards where it becomes chronic and unhealthy keeping you stuck in shut-down. A loud inner critic may tell you there's something wrong with you, when it may be the situation that's wrong.

Anger and the fight response arise from the same system that brings you vitality, motivation and energy. This is why a suppression of anger can lead to apathy and flatness and even burnout: when you close the window on feeling anger, you're also closing off to your inner resources that bring you strength, purpose, agency and mastery. When you cut off from anger and the mobilising energy of your sympathetic system, overtime you can become dysregulated towards depression and burnout.

Dissociating from anger because it feels terrifying can also lead to freeze: you oscillate between shut-down and the anxiety and reactivity of fight-flight for long periods of time. When you become stuck in immobilising shut-down, the energy that up-regulates your system is the mobilising fight energy. If it's too overwhelming to allow that in, your nervous system may collapse back down into hopelessness and hopelessness as a protective adaptation to this threat.

Exercising and training your nervous system to unlearn automatic responses like shut-down, freeze, dissociation and shame, is how you recalibrate it. Over time that repressed stress activation in the body and nervous system can be re-directed to help you set personal boundaries with confidence. To stand up for yourself and keep your cool. To give you the strength to step outside your comfort zone as you work toward your purpose. Repressed anger that's integrated can bring you strength, agency and mastery.

Learning the skills to be present with sensations will lead to a deactivation, and you can learn to see what memories or old triggers are keeping you stuck in dysregulation or unhealthy aggression. You access the agency to gently guide yourself back to regulation, rather than feeling like there's an internal volcano that will erupt and you have no control over it. Tapping into your body's messages early by cultivating autonomic awareness helps you to use these sensations and emotions to guide your decisions. Without this skill, sensations can eventually escalate to reactivity, arguments or unhealthy aggression where you say or do things you later regret.

You can channel large amounts of energy that's mobilised into TODAY, when your body and nervous system stop trying to deal with a threat from your past. Bottom up regulation involves recalibrating your nervous system where you learn to work with the body to discharge old stress activation. The survival brain can learn new ways to respond to stressors. It can stop responding as it did from times of chronic and traumatic stress from your past, and respond to what's happening today.

The problem isn't anger itself, it's not knowing how to cope with or tolerate the sensations, or express them in a helpful, empowering way. Cutting off from fight energy, is cutting off from what it means to be human. It's the biological ability to be robust and energetic. Regulation doesn't mean that you don't feel frustrated or angry. It means you include and hold those powerful feelings and even befriend them. This is how you integrate the stress physiology of earlier years. This is how the residue of past trauma is integrated and you return to wholeness.

Knowledge is power. Are you ready to learn more about about the different responses of the nervous system? They're covered in the 3 hour Vagus Nerve Masterclass. You'll learn a series of trauma-sensitive bottom up regulation exercises that help to recalibrate the nervous system.