Road Rage - A New Disorder or a Symptom of Today’s Chaotic Lifestyle?

Writen by Lisa Rickwood

You’re a law-abiding, tax paying member of society. People respect you, you’re generally happy with life (aside from minor annoyances), and you practice fairly good self control at work and home. But when you get behind the wheel of your car, you change. You become a horn-blasting tailgater with no patience and a lot of anger.

In your mind, you’re running late and everyone is in your way. You’re convinced that other drivers are rude, oblivious and ‘out to make you miserable.’ You tell yourself this is irrational and that people are simply trying to get to their destinations but you can’t control your impulses and end up feeling your blood pressure rise, tension increase and aggression build. Before you know it, you’re cutting off drivers and giving them the ‘international signal.’

Recently, doctors of psychiatry at the University of Chicago’s medical school discovered yet another new disorder to describe the aggressive, angry tailgaters on the highway. The new disorder is called ‘intermittent explosive disorder’ and it involves multiple outbursts which can include threats or aggressive actions and property destruction. The outbursts are generally out of proportion to the event.

According to doctors, the disorder is fairly common and affects up to 16 million Americans, and the disorder first appears during adolescence around the age of 14. The disorder involves inadequate production of serotonin, a mood-altering relating brain chemical (often referred to as a natural happy drug).

Is this disorder really as common as discovered or is it just the tip of the societal iceberg - an indicator of the stress people feel? More research needs to be done into the affects of stress on the brain chemical, serotonin. Perhaps long periods of stress depress the system and cause intermittent explosive disorder, or perhaps not as many people have the disorder - they’re just taking their life frustrations out on the road because the highway is more anonymous and no one will know it’s them.

Whether this disorder is common or not, we can make our travels on the road less dangerous. If we stop and think about how dangerous it is to operate a motor vehicle and how one small error can end our lives or the lives of others, we might think about our intolerable actions on the road.

Ask yourself when you’re running late if it’s really important to beat the car in front of you to the next set of lights. Is it worth cutting off other drivers and making them angry? Is speeding worth it? Do you feel calm, cool and collected when someone cuts you off or you feel like ramming your vehicle into their back bumper? It’s not worth it.

What can you do to make your commute more pleasant, then? Think of your car as a refuge - a traveling oasis, not simply a machine to get you from point A to point B. Next time you plan a trip, equip your car with the following things to make your adventure more interesting and relaxing: calming music CDs or books or seminars on tape, easy finger snacks, bottled water and any other things that would make the trip less taxing.

If you find that your emotions are out of control while driving or elsewhere, you should seek the services of a medical professional as you may suffer from intermittent explosive disorder.

For most of us, we simply need to practice more self-control. Nothing is worth risking your life, not even being late for your own wedding.

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Anger on the Move

Writen by Charles Bonasera

Maybe it’s my age or my distorted perception but anger seems to be much more rampant these days. Its effects have infiltrated families, communities, government and even our educational systems. More than anger, the proportions appear to have taken the forms of rage, hate, hostility, “getting even” and violence. As a former psychotherapist, I decided to obtain training as a mediator as well. I learned that the most difficult feat to engineer is to get people on opposite sides of an issue to sit across the table from one another in order to find a “win-win” solution to their differences so that resolution and not revolution might become the final outcome. The key factor, of course, is to be able to introduce the art of communication as a basic tool enabling this achievement.

As much as the differences between people may be cited as being the root cause of the anger being experiencedand the most evidentthere are also commonalities that bind the conflicting parties which are much more difficult to identify yet do exist nonetheless. Once those common elements can be identified through various steps provided for by the professional mediator, the process of resolution can become much more fluid and easier to achieve. Of course, the whole process is predicated on the fact that people can get past their angeralbeit justified in most casesin order to have their sense of rationality surface and become the “common denominator” allowing the process to become successful.

As a relatively new resident of Florida, my wife and I have been very impressed with the outgoing friendliness that’s been displayed by people. Their willingness to help us become acclimated to “Florida Living” has been welcomed to say the least. However, recently we have also witnessed some intensive conflict as evidenced in some of the meetings held in the Community around importantly common issues. Personally, I am alarmed at what form these differences are taking and, more importantly, where and how they will culminate. My only hope is that reasonability and resolution will be the mainstay methods that will ultimately be employed instead of ANGER ON THE MOVE.

As a Community, we have demonstrated the “good will” of our people in many different ways. The most obvious is the manner in which we have “stepped up to the plate” in helping those much less fortunate than ourselves who were victimized by Hurricane Charley. The outpouring of help and support was truly remarkable and took many different forms for many of us. Just as there was no question about whether we should or shouldn’t help, there should be no question about resolving the concerns and differences that we are experiencing as well. It is in that sense that our Community will grow and prosper and our reputation will follow us because of the “early settlers” ability to “make it work” instead of “utilizing the methods of “search and destroy”.

Refer to previous bio

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Anger- What It Does To The Body

Writen by Pradeep Chadha

A middle aged man was attending me for his anger problems. He was on medication to reduce his stomach acid for last many years. He had been suffering with dyspepsia. He was also allergic to many foods like wheat, and poultry products. With meditation and anger burning exercises, he was becoming more and more relaxed in his mind and body. He noticed that he did not need the stomach medication every day of the week. One day he decided to take the risk of eating some wheat products. Nothing happened. He waited for his abdomen to bloat and for the abdominal pain to appear. But he was pleasantly surprised that nothing happened this time. His body had started to accept the foods that he had previously developed allergies to.

This is one of the examples of food allergies that were reversed by burning out the locked up anger. This anger was about all the issues that he had been thinking about, that he had not been able to address to his satisfaction in his younger days. There were regrets and resentments that he did not know he still had, that had been ‘locked up’ in his body for many years of his life.

Anger affects the body in many ways. There is little literature on how anger can be locked up in the body and affect body’s physiology. Unbeknown to the sufferer, other than raising the blood pressure, the suppressed emotion affects the body in many ways.

Itching in the whole body for an unknown reason, is the first sign that the body is rejecting something inside it. When a person becomes angry, then there is a sense of rejection to whatever the person feels angry with. This sense of rejection, is probably picked up and transmitted at the cellular level and the body starts to reject foods. These are foods that the body was totally comfortable with before. Itching is the first sign of rejection. Itching occurs when hitamines are produced in the body. Histamines are chemicals that the body produces when it has to deal with something it is not used to. During any inflammatory process in the body, histamines are the first chemicals to be produced. So when the body has to express ‘displeasure’ about anything, histamines are produced first.

Allergies develop to many substances subsequently, as the anger increases and is not released from the body. Allergies happen when the body is rejecting a particular substance. This sense of rejection is more powerful, as the person holds on to the anger strongly. No doubt then , that the immune system starts to become angry and rebellious. The body can reach a stage that it starts rejecting its own tissues. Almost all immune disorders are due to this sense of rejection by the body of its own parts. It is as if the body is angry with itself.

In my clinical experience, I have come across some extremely angry individuals suffering with cancer. I have not done any research on this subject, but my observation has been that all of these people carried intense suppressed anger that they could not get rid of. They knew they had anger. They did not know or had the ability to burn the anger out. Cancer is a condition in which a part of the body becomes rebellious. The body starts to produce cells that eat up all the energy resources of the body, just like an army of angry rebellious soldiers on a warpath. There are hypnotic techniques that have been used to pacify the body part that has cancer. They work on the principle of pacifying the diseased part taking the anger and rebellion elements into consideration.

Anger affects the body in more ways than the emotion that we know of. It has to be dealt with, addressed and dissipated on a regular basis to maintain good physical health. Meditation is one of the options that is available to address anger on a regular basis.

Pradeep K Chadha is a psychiatrist who specialises in helping patients with meditation and imagery using little or no medication. He is the author of The Stress Barrier-Nature’s Way To Overcoming Stress published by Blackhall Publishing, Dublin. He is based in Dublin, Ireland.His website address is :http://www.drpkchadha.com

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