Hello, it's Eve here.
Welcome back to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday.
Did you know that the raw emotion of anger only lasts about 90 seconds in the brain?
That's it.
Just 90 seconds.
What makes it feel like it lasts so much longer is not the anger itself, but our resistance to it.
Instead of fully feeling it and saying, I see you, we fight against it.
We avoid it, or we add fuel to it, which keeps it alive in the mind and body.
We can even go days, even years, following an event or situation that made us angry.
sometimes even forgetting what actually caused us to feel angry in the first place.
So all this week, we're exploring some of the obstacles that can arise in life,
that can become real barriers to feeling a sense of joy and fulfillment in our lives.
Today, we're going to explore anger, or aversion, as it's sometimes known.
I recently got back from a work trip,
and I'd asked my husband to sort out some things in the house whilst he was away.
And when I got back, those things hadn't been sorted.
And before I gave him a chance to explain why he hadn't done them,
I was already so frustrated with him, I didn't even let him explain.
Bearing in mind I was heavily jet-lagged and tired from an 11-hour flight,
all that night I had a narrative playing in my mind that he'd let me down.