The Cost Of Anger

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* 'The Great Day Of His Wrath' - John Martin, wiki.
It Is A Heavy Price To Pay
It used to be not an uncommon sight in the office next door to mine. Employees would stop breathing, at the sight of the signs that clearly foretold that the volcano was about to erupt. And the signs never let anyone down; when the volcano erupted, the lava submerged the entire office. After it subsided, it would be my turn to wait. For the much-relieved-after-the-episode boss would walk into my office for a bite of sandwich washed with a cup of coffee. The eruption would create a void in the stomach which had to be filled urgently, you see.



Anger, and uncontrolled anger at that, has gone down in history as the one of the most damaging of all emotions. It is the 'dispositional' form of anger that one is talking about here, the one that has got nothing to do with self-preservation or reacting to perceived-injustice, but has everything to do with churlishness and instinctive-irritability.



The boss who is not mature enough to handle their anger and explodes when an employee does some mistake - grave or trivial - perhaps does more harm to the company than the mistake itself. For, while the boss may even forget the episode after the bout of anger has subsided - as would be the case with my next-door neighbor -, the episode creates a ball of negative emotions that does not dissipate into thin air. Swallowed by the employee, the ball triggers a counter-reaction in their mind. And they usually do not, cannot exercise the same freedom and privilege to explode back. This implies that the counter-reaction does not find an appropriate outlet for self-expression.



But find an outlet it has to. So the anger is taken out on the kids or the spouse at home - well, wherever there is a victim that is usually in subjugated mode in their relationship. Alternatively, the person slides into a passive-aggressive behavior that stems partly from self-hatred at one's powerlessness to break free from such oppressive condition - alternative jobs are not like fruit that somebody can go pluck from an overladen tree in somebody's orchard -, and partly from a slyness that wants to get even with the perpetrator, someday, somehow.



In the case of my neighboring office, I saw the anger being vented in both these ways. One employee in that office a colleague of mine personally knew would regularly bash his kids in the evening, without justification, whenever he became the butt of anger during the day time in the office. In fact, it became standard practice for this colleague to ring up the employee's wife and forewarn her, so that the wife could hide the kids out of sight well in time.



In another case, a once-top-performing employee of that office began making mistakes that would have been considered unthinkable coming from her. Eventually a time came when she quit, without notice. She was indispensable to the company's operations, so goes without saying that her absence degraded the outfit's business significantly. Later, everyone could pinpoint the exact occasion when the slide started: a sensitive soul, she was insulted in front of her peers and juniors by an insensitive boss who at the very least should have taken lessons in both anger and personnel management, before launching the business.



With time, I relocated my office premises, and after moving out of the city, I gradually got out of touch with my friend, the boss. Yesterday night, an ex-employee who was with me in that same office premises rang up to inform that the boss had died. Cardiac arrest. He was in one of his "volcano-eruption" sessions when it happened. One of his arteries must have most likely busted. The same set of employees who he was spewing the lava on, bundled him into an ambulance and took him to the hospital, in the hope that he recovered so that he could continue with the spewing. Uh, resume from where he had left. But that was not to happen. He was declared dead on arrival.



Otherwise a warm and generous human being and a good friend, one who would often go out of his way to help people in times of need, this man's inability to take control over his temper overshadowed all his good traits. To the extent that, in his lifetime, he inadvertently made more enemies than he consciously made friends.



Anger. You pay a heavy price when you come under its control.

Hypertension? Try These Techniques

These Are Proven Techniques

It sounds strange that, despite this being 2007 - Hypertension or HTN can still only be diagnosed incidentally - somebody does a routine blood pressure check and discovers that you have high blood pressure. But it is true. Yet, this fact is so fundamental to our existence. That the heart is having to exert a lot of effort to do so normal an activity as reaching life-giving blood to all the cells in the remotest corners of the body.



However, all medications to cure hypertension solve only the symptoms, and while attempting to solve one problem, bring in another problem in the form of side-effects. I have always advocated life-style changes and natural techniques that do not require any invasion of chemicals on the body.

One natural technique that I have found particularly useful is: Meditation. The internet has tons of information on the subject of Meditation. Jon Kabat-Zinn's eight-week course called "Meditation-Based Stress Reduction" (MBSR) is a technique that the West has been familiar with, since 1979.



You can practice meditation anywhere, so long as you are passive, and not doing any activity. So you may be traveling (in the passenger seat, not in the driver seat), or waiting outside your doctor's chamber - whenever you get the opportunity to sit still, simply meditate. I have a set of articles post on another blog of mine; here is the URL: http://success-nirvana.blogspot.com/search/label/Meditation.



When you begin practicing meditation, you will slowly discover that you feel rested, refreshed, rejuvenated...

And when you are in that deep meditative state, begin visualizing the entire body, and consciously feel the plaques in the arteries being removed, the salt imbalance being restored to what is just right for your body, the arteries regaining their original, healthy diameter ... in short, whatever it is that the good doctor has told you is the root cause of hypertension in your particular case. This visualization is very powerful: it is the Law of Attraction being put to practice!



At the same time, it is perfectly understandable to not being able to meditate initially. A lifetime of not being "mindful" is a hard habit to crack! So what do you do? This is one great way to begin: use self-Hypnosis. Self-hypnosis is one great way to tell your mind very gently but emphatically, the goal that you desire. It is like an intense, yet calm method to restore the self to a particular state of living.



Here is one URL where you can find a Self-Hypnosis CD for lowering blood pressure: http://www.short10.com/?c=sdb_hypno_lowbp1. Costs USD 12.95 for a download, USD 25.95 for a physical CD.

Another technique that simply relaxes you at the end of the day is this: listening to Relaxation CDs. This is the most-diluted and weakest form of reducing hypertension, but effective, nevertheless.




Here is one URL where you can get a "Tension-Release" CD: http://www.short10.com/?c=sdb_cdrelax_tension. Costs USD 24.95 a pop.

Try any one of them. These techniques are much, much better and more effective than those medications which mess with your body. (With apologies to the medical profession; but I not sure whether the good doctors have completely understood how nature works. Most of the time they work with the symptoms, and not the cure. But I may of course be prejudiced.)