eli5: Why do we destroy/feel the urge to destroy things when angry? How does that relieve anger/stress?
In: Other
Because the world we evolved in was less abstract and complicated than the one we’ve made. Anger and stress are your body’s reaction to something being wrong. Like you’re going to the water hole and this is where the sabertooth cats hang out. Or you shared food with brother-monkey but he isn’t sharing food back. Stress keeps you on edge because your body expects to have to react to something. Anger is your body’s reaction to a threat, whether overt (like a predator) or indirect (being socially victimized), because your body expects to at least threaten violence, if not partake in it.
Socially, primates do a lot of posturing and threatening before doing actual violence. Yelling, stomping, slapping bodies, running around ripping up branches and throwing up dirt. Chimps and gorillas do this, often just as a bluff or a way to reinforce the status quo. Most likely a big “anger display” like that was sufficiently useful that our body tells us we’ve fixed the problem when we’ve done it. So calming hormones like endorphins evolved to de-escalate such violence, which we perceive as feeling good once we’ve exhausted ourselves.
Our bodies didn’t evolve to deal with whether we’re investing enough money in our retirement accounts, or whether our kids are going to have good enough grades to get into college. So our stress and anger responses are now firing off at “threats” that we can’t solve by baring our teeth and ripping branches off of trees.
Latest Answers