The Good Side of Anger

Anger for too long has been underestimated and misunderstood. 

Professor Jennifer Lerner of the Harvard Kennedy School is leading breakthrough research in emotion and decision-making and shared with me one of the greatest myths her team has discovered: anger is bad and destructive. In reality, rightful anger can act as a stress buffer, automatically triggering a sense of control and certainty, and as a result, anger can be highly empowering.

Lerner explains that anger can be a productive emotion if 1) it is rightful, and 2) it is controlled. In other words, anger is not a helpful emotion if you haven’t really been wronged or if your anger evolves into rage.

When the high school kids of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida experienced the horrendous shooting at their school, their anger drove them to stand up, fight back and demand more from their government. Their passion and commitment to both the classmates they lost and a safer future inspired the nation to band together and confront a terrible issue.

In a matter of days, these high school students had formed a student-led gun control organisation to advocate for tighter regulations (called Never Again MSD), started a Facebook group the day after the shootings that attracted 35,000 members within 3 days and now has over 165,000 followers, organised nation-wide school walk-outs, rallied half a million people to protest on the footsteps of the white house, and lobbied congress.  In the span of weeks, they stood up and took action, spreading their message to the world and igniting a movement.

The kids of Parkland are real life proof of how empowering rightful and controlled anger can be. By declaring “I have the right to feel safe at school,” these students are making it known that they do not have to accept the status quo and deserve to have their voices heard. 

They have WHYPOWER.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen something like this.  Over 10 years ago, the anti-smoking “Truth Campaign” had a similar feeling to what we’re seeing today. Instead of the typical “just say no” approach – the Truth Campaign harnessed the natural rebellious nature of youth to help create something important. As a stunt, teens dumped 1,200 body bags on the street outside of leading tobacco company Phillip Morris to represent the number of lives lost every-single-day to tobacco use. The stunt shocked and awed by showing how these young people were angry at the manipulative tactics used by the tobacco industry.

A recent iteration of the Truth campaign, called the Finishers, is once again tapping into this anger, enrolling youth to be the generation that ends smoking once and for all. It purposefully harnesses rightful anger as well as the desire to change the world and instills an enormous amount of pride. Clearly, in this campaign, anger got people going however their pride will keep them going. That's WHYPOWER. And it’s working! Smoking rates within teens dropped from 23% in 2000 to 6% today- a number that hadn’t budged for years.

As we think about important changes that simply must happen in the world, I’m excited to see how a productive emotion like anger can be leveraged. It has the potential to help drive important behaviour change and inspire an unwavering self-determination within people. 

Fear, guilt, sadness, and even happiness just aren’t cutting it. Knowing that change is needed and being driven to act on that knowledge are two different things. A touch of anger may just be the missing ingredient to some of the most important changes that we need to make as individuals and as a society.