THAT'S MEN:The link between heart disease and anger is stronger in men than in women, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
THAT there is a link between anger and heart disease is fairly widely accepted but I was interested to see recently that the link may be stronger in men than in women.
Later I’ll mention a couple of ways to deal with an anger habit but first let’s look at what has been found out about that link.
Both healthy people and patients with existing heart problems increase their risk of coronary disease if they are angry, a review of 25 studies, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology,suggests.
The review found that anger and hostility boosted the risk of a coronary event by 19 per cent among healthy people. Among people who already had heart disease, the increase was 24 per cent. The effect was greater in men than in women.
How does it work? This isn’t clear. One possibility is that people who are stressed are more likely to smoke, drink too much, eat too much and exercise too little. It may be these behaviours which lead to the effect on heart health.
But that may not be the whole story. It is possible that higher levels of cortisol, which is associated with stress, and other physical factors are also involved, the researchers speculate.
Evidence for a physical pathway from anger to heart disease was found in a Yale study of people who were already fitted with implantable defibrillators.
They were asked to think of a recent situation which angered them. The level of anger was assessed by measuring electrical events in the heart. The patients were then followed up for three years on average.
It turned out that the patients who had the highest levels of anger in the mental stress test were the ones most likely to experience arrhythmias (a disruption to the normal heart rhythm). These patients were 10 times more likely than the others to have the defibrillator kick in because of a disrupted heartbeat.
The researchers speculate that adrenaline, produced in response to the stress of anger, is what affects the heart.
All this suggests that reducing your anger levels could save your life.
Now, going around in this world without getting angry is not an option. What we need are ways to prevent the anger from becoming a constant companion.
In the studies mentioned above, the researchers induced anger simply by asking people to remember something that had made them angry in the recent past.
That’s really all it takes to keep anger boiling. So the first thing you have to do is to get out of the habit of recalling the things that aggravate and upset you.
Needless to say, angry memories will come into your mind from time to time. One way to deal with this is to notice the physical effect of the memory, such as a flush of anger, tightness in the chest and so on but to avoid getting into a chain of thoughts about it.
If you do this, the anger will subside in a little while.
If, on the other hand, you insist on getting into that chain of thoughts, rerunning arguments, fantasising about what you might say or do and so on, you’re just getting yourself into an anger fest that could help to kill you.
This takes practice. There is nothing at all easy about it until you get the hang of it.
It’s worth working on though – feel the physical symptoms of the anger but stay out of the thoughts.
For new annoyances that will present themselves daily, use a method I’ve mentioned before and which is advocated by the self-help movement Recovery Inc. Say to yourself, “People do things that annoy me not to annoy me.”
It’s the assumption that people deliberately annoy us that really gets us going. Reminding yourself that people who annoy you – by stalling when the lights turn green, say – hardly ever have that as their purpose can reduce your anger level immediately.
All of which means, I am sorry to say, that anger at the Government, the Budget, the banks, fat cats, developers, the pension levy and all the rest of it is bad for your health.
Hardly seems fair, does it?
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. His book That's Men the best of the That's Men column from The Irish Timesis published by Veritas