Almost everyone knows someone like this or perhaps you find this very recognizable to yourself. You have a short fuse and as a result you sometimes react thoughtlessly and aggressively. You are going out with your friends, hear someone you do not know laughing and before you know it you get a blur because you are convinced you are being laughed at and the person laughing suddenly has a broken nose. Anger out of nowhere and aggression out of nowhere. Chances are you can get into trouble and harm others around you because of these kinds of incidents.
In this article, I discuss how mindfulness can help reduce aggression and faulty beliefs.
The cause of aggression
The cause of aggression is usually in the fight, flight or freeze response when there is danger or stress. In this case, the person usually has a fight reaction. In children, this reaction is still totally underdeveloped, which means that they get the reaction anyway when they face stress, fear or actual danger(1).
As an adult, you have learned in the meantime that not every stressful situation is worth fighting, that danger does not lurk in every dark corner, and that you can weigh your response before you act.
In some cases this development has been disrupted, such as parental neglect, trauma (such as war) or a time when you were thus totally powerless and unprotected by the people who were supposed to care for you.
This allows you as an adult to react impulsively and often excessively toward the situation. The more anger you have, the less able you are to think and the more impulsive the reaction.
The disturbed past allows you to create a false worldview in which you see your environment as a constant source of danger. As a result, adults with this problem may also be quick to blame someone else, such as the partner, children, government, people from a different background, neighbors, etc. As a result, if this anger and impulsive reaction is not helped, the adult may turn into a danger to those around him.
Plasticity of the brain
Fortunately, it's never too late to learn something; you just have to do it. After all, our brains are incredibly plastic. This allows us to adapt. This is incredibly important for our survival.
Not only when you grow up can you learn new things also as an adult this is possible and more importantly, because of this it is also possible to change yourself.
The part that determines how you respond to stress and danger can change even in a period of weeks, if you put in the effort.
Most mindfulness courses last 8 weeks, where you have a weekly course day and have to do exercises at home. You should, of course, continue to use these exercises after the course.
Within those 8 weeks, something very special is already happening. Namely, the part of the brain that deals with the flight, fight, freeze response to danger becomes smaller or at least less active.
The part of the brain important for learning new things and regulating emotions is actually enlarged or at least more active through mindfulness.
Mindfulness against aggression
There is a perception among most people that domestic violence is primarily perpetrated by men. Unfortunately, women are just as likely to become perpetrators of it as men. Even though when a woman does violence to a man it usually has no physical consequences, she can expect to be hit back, and then you often have the dolls dancing. If children are also exposed to this, even if it's just seeing it, they can also become aggressive as adults.
Because violence is bad and can lead to bad things no matter what gender you are, it is important to do something against aggression.
Therefore, research has been conducted on both genders on whether mindfulness can help reduce aggression.
In a study(2) involving 14 women who were required by the judge to do something about alcohol abuse and aggression, 93% of the participants found that after learning mindfulness, they used less alcohol and became less aggressive.
In this case, the women received mindfulness and modification therapy. Unlike mindfulness-based stress reduction, this program lasts 12 to 20 weeks instead of 8.
Key components of this program were:
- Color body scan
- Mindfulness meditation
- SOBER breathing
- Mindfulness meditation during fun things
Color body scan
With the color body scan, there is a slight difference from the normal body scan. While meditating, you can also visualize being bathed in a particular color that does something to you. For example, blue is the color of relaxation, green is the color of healing, purple is the color of releasing emotions and thoughts, orange is the color of happiness, fun and laughter, red is the color of energy and vitality, pink (or violet) is the color of self-respect and dignity, yellow is the color of learning and concentration.
Depending on what you sit with, you can visualize yourself bathing in a particular color and absorbing the energy of that color, such as healing with a green color, with each breath.
Mindfulness meditation
Mindfulness meditation in this case involves becoming aware of your emotions and thoughts. At the beginning of the mindfulness modification therapy, they did this mostly with neutral emotions, but as the subjects progressed in their mindfulness, they also did this with more intense emotions so the participants could experience that there are more ways to respond than with aggression.
What you do in mindfulness meditation is name your thoughts and the emotion you feel with them.
SOBER breathing
The next step was SOBER breathing, this means that when faced with a threatening situation where you would normally become aggressive you stop first so as not to react automatically. This can be very difficult and this was also an exercise that was performed only after the mindfulness meditation was mastered. Next, participants observed what was happening in their bodies and emotions, a kind of mini body scan. Then they had to focus on their breathing (breath) and shift their attention (extend) to their body and the situation around them to lastly react in such a way that is mindful and appropriate to the situation and to taking good care of yourself rather than an impulsive reaction that you regret.
Mindfulness during fun moments
Because not all of life should be about doom and gloom and especially not react aggressively to it, participants also had to perform mindfulness meditation while doing something they enjoyed, such as sports, an outing with the family or something similar. By being completely focused on the experience with your thoughts, you can enjoy it much better and worry less, which also prevents aggression from suddenly developing.
Ruminating and reducing negative thoughts with mindfulness
Another study shows that rumination can lead to aggression(3). During rumination, you are thinking about personal problems and the emotions associated with them for long periods of time and repeatedly. Unfortunately, it does not contribute to a solution which could be a reason why it can lead to aggression. Mindfulness can reduce rumination and thus indirectly reduce aggression.
Smaller studies also show that mindfulness helps reduce aggression. In one study(4) in which people were made mindful before receiving social rejection, those with mindfulness reacted less aggressively than those who had not received mindfulness.
In addition, a study that required participants to self-report on how mindful they were during the day and how aggressive they had been found that the more mindfulness practiced the fewer aggressive moments they had.
Mindfulness thus helps by allowing you as a person to notice earlier when you are getting angry or stressed and therefore to do something earlier to prevent your emotion from escalating into aggressive behavior. Both during a particular moment when the flight, fight, freeze response is normally triggered or precisely because you recognize that you are ruminating and thereby solving nothing.
Want to learn more about how mental changes and recognizing your beliefs can improve your life? Then come to a seminar or check out Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' trainings.
Sources:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ab.20327/abstract
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ab.20258/abstract
