Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Is Venting a Good Strategy for Overcoming Anger?

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Everybody gets mad and everybody likes to vent their anger.

It just feels great to yell, say something awful, or even break something. Some people might read that sentence and make fun of the whole thing. But, there is a great deal of music of various genres dedicated to lashing out in anger. Even country songs exist about destroying people’s trucks, etc. Legal literature goes into great detail about the relationship of anger to intent. And a great deal of people approve of angry outbursts as a form of positive expression.

Anger may start as a sudden shock of personal offense and instantly move to the deep desire to be avenged, to return insult for insult, or to visit destruction upon a whole tribe for the injury of one personal friend or confidant. Dallas Willard defines anger as a “response towards those who have interfered with us, it includes a will to harm them, or the beginnings thereof.” 

Of course, not all anger is bad. In fact, anger can be a very good thing. Richard Baxter wrote in his Christian Directory, “It [anger] is given us by God for good, to stir us up to a vigorous resistance of those things, which, within us or without us do oppose his glory or our salvation, or our own or our neighbour’s real good (Baxter, 290).” There are times when it is morally wrong not to be angery because the goods of human existence are being misappropriated for evil ends, people are being abused, the truth is being impugned, or God’s honor is being obscured by idolatry.

The problem with the cluster of coping practices called venting is that there exists a long and apparently clinically honored pedigree in their favor. Freud rather stupidly thought that practicing self-control led to pent up anger. Lorh et al argue in, The Psychology of Anger Venting and Empirically Supported Alternatives that Do No Harm,** that the common practice of giving psychological patients venting practices like punching pillows, yelling, tearing magazines, etc is actually normalizing the negative anger response. Then, “the good feeling that accompanies venting anger is likely to reinforce the venting and violence. People often mistake their enjoyment of these aggressive acts as a beneficial or therapeutic outcome (Lorh 2007, 56).”

This makes sense. Aristotle basically described the human person as a collection of habits. Freud preferred the notion that we’re really bundles of neuroses and that any good habit is you develop is really a repression of some deviant behavior that is actually better for you.

Aristotle’s way of describing human beings makes more sense to me, and it anticipated better research thousands of years in advance. Lorh, again,

“When people are highly aroused, they may not think much about their behavior and its consequences. Instead they revert to what they have learned to do (or what is permissible) in similar situations. If a person has learned to react to frustrating events by venting (e.g., hitting something), it may make little difference whether the object is animate or inanimate.”

(Lohr, 62)

The observable reality was not lost on Richard Baxter (who lived prior to Freud, statistical analysis, or Baumeister) when he wrote:

Direct. V. ‘Command your tongue, and hand, and countenance, if you cannot presently command your passion.’ And so you will avoid the greatest of the sin, and the passion itself will quickly be stifled for want of vent. You cannot say that it is not in your power to hold your tongue or hands if you will. Do not only avoid that swearing and cursing which are the marks of the profane, but avoid many words till you are more fit to use them, and avoid expostulations, and contending, and bitter, opprobrious, cutting speeches, which tend to stir up the wrath of others. And use a mild and gentle speech, which savoureth of love, and tendeth to assuage the heat that is kindled. “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.” And that which mollifieth and appeaseth another, will much conduce to the appeasing of yourselves.

Richard Baxter, William Orme, The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter, vol. 3 (London: James Duncan, 1830), 296.

If you learn to control your tongue and your body when you cannot turn off your feelings, then eventually your passions will follow the habits of your body. This is not necessarily true without the context of a broader system of life with time for contemplation of the Scriptures, prayer, service to the poor, trust in Jesus Christ to forgive those who wrong you, etc. But, it is true and replicable enough that a study of several populations of people who practiced venting or different versions of reflection upon frustrating circumstances (either alone or with a group) has shown that without religious context, a reflective approach to anger is much better than a venting one. If you wish to read the rest of Baxter’s chapter on anger it is available here (its a pdf, so scroll down to page 284).

Conclusion: Anger is a problem-solving reflex and should be treated as such. Venting by punching, yelling, or being morose simply trains us in bad habits, but looking for specific problems to solve turns anger into an energizing force for good.

*I have no idea if this kind of thing is common knowledge. I learned about it helping somebody write a research paper about corporate liability in cases of poorly tested medical equipment. Is there a guilty mind when shortcuts are taken with knowledge of the potential effects of those short cuts (the common sense answer is yes, but the legal answer might not be so clear)? But to determine that I had to read about intent in several other sorts of cases.

**Lohr, Jeffrey M., Bunmi O. Olatunji, Roy F. Baumeister, and Brad J. Bushman. 2007. “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ANGER VENTING AND EMPIRICALLY SUPPORTED ALTERNATIVES THAT DO NO HARM.” Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice 5

My GERD Experiment

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I’ve mentioned before that I have a genetic bone disorder and have utilized my interpretation of scientific publications to self-experiment.

This self-experimentation has had positive health results. Other times I have merely yielded knowledge about what does not help. For instance, I’ve had pretty bad acid reflux for the past few years. I recently discovered from my mother that I also had terrible reflux as a baby. I might even have a weak LES muscle. I don’t know, I haven’t been to the doctor for it for years because they just prescribe proton pump inhibitors or histamine blockers. I can buy those and as far as I can tell, they have long term deleterious effects on the human body. 

  1. Gregory L Austin et al., “A Very Low-Carbohydrate Diet Improves Gastroesophageal Reflux and Its Symptoms,” Digestive Diseases and Sciences 51, no. 8 (August 2006): 1307–12, doi:10.1007/s10620-005-9027-7. In this study, a very low carbohydrate diet (consuming less than 20 grams a day) led to improved symptoms in all eight participants. The metric was a probe utilized to determine acid exposure time in the esophagus. There was no blind in this particular study, but the objective measurement is interesting. The measurements were taken before the diet was initiated and then six days later.
  2. WS Yancy Jr., D Provenzale, and Ec Westman, “Case Reports. Improvement of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease after Initiation of a Low-Carbohydrate Diet: Five Brief Case Reports,” Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine 7, no. 6 (November 2001): 120.

In this article records the case of five individuals who self-initiated a low-carb diet found themselves without frequent symptoms of heart-burn and indigestion. It is published in an alternative therapy journal, but it’s still peer-reviewed.

The Pay Off

So, I started an extremely low carbohydrate diet about two weeks ago. The main purpose was precisely to decrease symptoms of heartburn that had become more frequent that non-heartburn. My existence had become somewhat miserable because if I happened to even eat a small snack, within minutes I would feel very full and bloated. I would have heartburn (even if I took medicine prior to eating) and the full feeling would last for several hours. If I ate lunch at work, I usually was not able to eat dinner or go to the gym at night. The only way to get food in prior to the gym was to eat around 10 am, then just be full and miserable all day at work. This started around March, but the heart burn goes back to my early twenties.

Anyhow, I started the diet, eschewing the conventional wisdom that fatty foods lead to heartburn. For the first two days, I ate less than 20 grams of carbohydrates, continued drinking coffee, and obtained most of my carbohydrates from sauerkraut, spinach, and mushrooms. My protein and fat came from butter and meat. I expected my digestion to remain slow, but to at least experience less heartburn. Within two days, I had my first day with no heartburn and no medication. Upon increasing my carbs to about 50 grams per day, and allowing myself one “cheat day a week,” I have had only one serious experience of heartburn and 7 light flare-ups that went away as soon as I took an antacid or dissipated by the time I walked to the medicine cabinet. My digestion has sped up as well. Just Tuesday I ate a rather large lunch and was able to hit the gym by 3:45 without losing my food after deadlift.

So, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, a high-fat, low-carb diet may assist with the relief of symptoms related to GERD and indigestion.

Update: Carnivorous Diet

I tried the carnivorous diet to contribute data for N Equals Many. During it I had no heartburn at all. This makes sense.

Update: More Research on the Same Topic

  1. The effect of dietary carbohydrate on gastroesophageal reflux disease “More acid reflux symptoms are found after high carbohydrate diet. High carbohydrate diet could induce more acid reflux in low esophagus and more reflux symptoms in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease.”
  2. Dietary carbohydrate intake, insulin resistance and gastro‐oesophageal reflux disease: a pilot study in European‐ and African‐American obese women “GERD symptoms and medication usage was more prevalent in European‐American women, for whom the relationships between dietary carbohydrate intake, insulin resistance and GERD were most significant. Nevertheless, high‐fat/low‐carbohydrate diet benefited all women with regard to reducing GERD symptoms and frequency of medication use.”

Knee Tendinitis and Squatting Every Day

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TLDR

I did an experiment based on some new data I discovered about tendons. My 8-year knee tendinitis is gone as of 2014. It had to do with exercising more frequently. I got a lot stronger in just 3 weeks. After 6 weeks, I hit my then all-time squat max of 365 for an easy single rep.

Training Efficiently

In my own life experience, perhaps the safest and least time-consuming way to pursue total body fitness is to train with somewhere between 6 and 12 exercises and train with perfect form, taking each exercise to a state of complete positive muscular failure, briefly resting and then moving to the next exercise. Your muscles are getting an intense workout, your hardest reps happen when the muscles are producing the least force (because they are tired) and none of the movements are “explosive” thus accelerating the weight to very high velocities and risking injury. During workouts of this nature, your heart feels like it might explode out of your chest, you breath very hard, and your veins pump lava or pieces of broken glass. The problem with training this way, at least for me, is psychological. Every workout must be all out if you wish to make steady progress. Other problems are related to trying to plan for enough rest and when you train this way the metabolic demands are high. Research shows that muscle protein adaptations last for up to 21 days after the most recent bout of training. Energy system adaptations can begin to regress within 4-7 days. I wish I could remember where I found that data, but I remember everything but the name of the study and it’s authors…which means nothing. Nevertheless, training like every workout is a zero-sum game can be psychologically defeating. Also, the training is seldom enough that other types of adaptations apparently cannot happen (more on that later, as it is the point of the article).

Personal Story: Knee and Back Pain

When I was 20 I woke up one morning with very bad knee pain. This came right around the same time I seriously injured my back. I went to a doctor and received an x-ray on both offending pieces of my body. The knee pain was determined to be very serious tendinitis (probably from a knee collision in a jiujitsu match a while before). The back injury, which was missed in the x-ray but was confirmed by another doctor, was a torn ligament between a rib and one of my vertebrae (don’t remember which). Anyhow, I was told to lay off exercise for 6 weeks. If my knee still hurt, it was recommended that I start walking more than just at work and home to facilitate recovery for 6 more weeks. It was especially important that I do no squats or dead lift. If it still hurt, I was told to go back (maybe to get recommended for physical therapy). A weird series of events involving a car accident occurred which lead me to hit the weights again despite the pain about 3 months later. I was weak, fatter than I’d ever been, and my first set of squats did two things: left me gasping for breath and trying my hardest not to puke and when the muscle soreness my knee and back hurt less. TMy knee never stopped hurting, it just hurt less.

Research on Tendon Adaptation

Anyhow, fast forward to now and I started using Ebsco to do research through the public library (out of grad school so I don’t get my own key code anymore). I discovered that there have been several advancements in the knowledge of connective tissue adaptation since my time as an exercise science major. For instance, in 2007 a study was published (though with no control group) observing the effects of leg extension training on subjects doing heavyweight with one leg and light-weight with the other. There were several interesting observations, but what was most pleasing to discover was that the patellar tendon actually experienced hypertrophy as well as increased stiffness (a good thing for joint health) in the leg trained with heavier weight:

In summary, the present study is to the best of our knowledge the first human study to report tendon hypertrophy following heavy resistance training. Further, the data show that tendon hypertrophy to heavy-resistance training in the patellar tendon was related to the proximal and distal region, but not to the mid-region of the tendon.

Kongsgaard, M., S. Reitelseder, T. G. Pedersen, L. Holm, P. Aagaard, M. Kjaer, and S. P. Magnusson. 2007. “Region Specific Patellar Tendon Hypertrophy in Humans Following Resistance Training.” Acta Physiologica 191 (2): 111–21. doi:10.1111/j.1748-1716.2007.01714.x.

In the abstract of a literature review from 2006, I found that

For tendons, metabolic activity (e.g.detected by positron emission tomography scanning), circulatory responses (e.g. as measured by near-infrared spectroscopy and dye dilution) and collagen turnover are markedly increased after exercise. Tendon blood flow is regulated by cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2)-mediated pathways, and glucose uptake is regulated by specific pathways in tendons that differ from those in skeletal muscle. Chronic loading in the form of physical training leads both to increased collagen turnover as well as to some degree of net collagen synthesis. These changes modify the mechanical properties and the viscoelastic characteristics of the tissue, decrease its stress-susceptibility and probably make it more load-resistant.

Kjær, Michael, Peter Magnusson, Michael Krogsgaard, Jens Boysen Møller, Jens Olesen, Katja Heinemeier, Mette Hansen, et al. 2006. “Extracellular Matrix Adaptation of Tendon and Skeletal Muscle to Exercise.” Journal of Anatomy 208 (4): 445–50. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7580.2006.00549.x

Several other studies report the same sort of results. The most interesting things to me are A) The increase in protein synthesis B) The increase in blood flow (which can provide nutrients for recovery) C) That actual hypertrophy can be stimulated in tendons D) that even body weight squats increase tendon stiffness in elderly and untrained populations. But what was most interesting to me on a personal level was that “collagen synthesis in human tendon rises by around 100% with just one bout (60 min) of acute exercise, and the elevated collagen synthesis is still present 3 days after exercise (Fig. 3; Miller et al. 2005). In skeletal muscle, the rate of collagen synthesis also increases with exercise, in a time-dependent manner that follows the increase in myofibrillar protein synthesis with exercise (Miller et al. 2005).” What this means for people who have had chronic tendinopathy, is hard to say. But what inferred that it could mean is that training with more frequency than I’m used to could increase the protein turnover rate in my knee and promote recovery. Given my own hypothesis that overuse injuries often come from explosive exercise and sudden acceleration of a limb which puts tremendous force on connective tissue despite low resistance, I decided that squatting more frequently with heavy enough weight to induce protein synthesis could help my knee.

Method:
I thus decreased my weight on squats, began using a high-bar Olympic depth, squat and hit the gym 3 days in a row during week one. Then week two I did the same thing and the weights that were very heavy using that style of squat went up very easily. I ended up squatting a personal best (345 pounds with no belt, no spotter, and no struggle) even compared to my wider power-lifting stance. This week I did heavy high-bar squats for five days in a row.

Results:
Starting Thursday morning I woke up with no knee pain. Today I still have no knee pain. Now, any number of things could have contributed to my apparent recovery after eight years of tendinitis. I could have just finally eaten enough protein, I could have finally slept enough, maybe I ate a magic vegetable like in a video game, it could be placebo though I imagine that would have fixed it years ago, or perhaps a wizard did it. But, the only variable I changed in my one subject sample group was exercise frequency. Now, my shoulders feel a bit beat up from squatting heavy for 5 days in a row. My lower back is pretty sore too. I certainly read less this week because the trips to the gym eat up evening time after work, but my knee feels better. I did chores around the house all morning and hardly noticed. Normally my knee remains in the fore on my consciousness when I’m picking things up, fixing things, or bumping it into stuff. It was unnoticeable today. I’ll tell you what happens in the future.

Laugh Tracks

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I don’t watch the Big Bang Theory and I intentionally don’t watch shows with laugh tracks. BBT has a laugh track and I just decided to watch a bit of it without the laugh track:

Very little to none of that is funny. But why are there laugh tracks? Well, they work. People laugh out loud more, even when they rate material just as funny as the group that has no laugh track and does not laugh out loud. But I think more work needs to be done on longer exposure to laugh tracks. Even brief interventions can change views, which is upstream from behavior. Also, parody works wonders at promoting negative viewpoints about the target of the parody, which can ultimately change behavior.

In a post on beauty and wisdom, I quoted Dallas Willard’s concern that endless, pointless sitcoms made the cute and mildly funny the standard of truth and beauty. Who and or what is the subject of the parody that constantly comes before us on television?

Replacing the Beautiful and Wise with the Cute and the Clever

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Dallas Willard noticed and described in detail the process by which mass media led to replacing beauty and wisdom with the clever and cute. The process he describes is worth the price of The Divine Conspiracy. The book is about how to connect to Christ in a world where absurdity reigns, even in the Christian churches. But the opening chapters explain the philosophical, theological, sociological, and ecclesiastical trends that made things so weird in the United States. Willard had obviously become very suspicious of mass media. One principle he outlines elsewhere in his book is that the results you get are the precise outcome of the system you use or have designed. So he had to see that a great deal of what he describes below was intentional.

The question to ask, of course, is why would anybody think that smothering the world in platitudes, inanity, nihilism, and sensualism is a good idea?

Cuteness, like cleverness, has certain aesthetic possibilities—as do sex and violence—but they are very limited. Picasso is the most familiar and brilliant illustration of how it can be well used, and of how it goes to seed. But as we now know, masses of people can be cute, and clever as well, who have no ability or sense of art at all. As creators and consumers they fill the field of pop culture today, which is an economic enterprise and only by accident occasionally has something to do with art. Art objects are now commonly referred to as “product” by those who handle them and only make news when they are sold for absurdly large sums or are stolen.

Art is lost in pop “art” as sport is lost in professional “sport”—which is an oxymoron of the strongest kind. Absurdity reigns, and confusion makes it look good. Currently, through pop “art” and the media the presumed absurdity of life that elites previously had to be very brilliant and work very hard to appreciate is mindlessly conveyed to hundreds of millions. It comes to us in Bart and Homer Simpson and endless sitcoms and soap operas involving doctors, lawyers, and policemen, along with the bizarre selections and juxtapositions imposed by what is called news. You have only to “stay tuned,” and you can arrive at a perpetual state of confusion and, ultimately, despair with no effort at all…

In the shambles of fragmented assurances from the past, our longing for goodness and rightness and acceptance— and orientation— makes us cling to bumper slogans, body graffiti, and gift shop nostrums that in our profound upside-down-ness somehow seem deep but in fact make no sense: “Stand up for your rights” sounds so good. How about “All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten”? And “Practice random kindnesses and senseless acts of beauty”? And so forth.

Such sayings contain a tiny element of truth. But if you try to actually plan your life using them you are immediately in deep, deep trouble. They will head you 180 degrees in the wrong direction. You might as well model your life on Bart Simpson or Seinfeld. But try instead “Stand up for your responsibilities” or “I don’t know what I need to know and must now devote my full attention and strength to finding out” (consider Prov. 3:7 or 4:7) or “Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.” Putting these into practice immediately begins to bring truth, goodness, strength, and beauty into our lives. But you will never find them on a greeting card, plaque, or bumper. They aren’t thought to be smart. What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound…

…In fact, the popular sayings attract only because people are haunted by the idea from the intellectual heights that life is, in reality, absurd. Thus the only acceptable relief is to be cute or clever. In homes and on public buildings of the past, words of serious and unselfconscious exhortation, invocation, and blessing were hung or carved in stone and wood. But that world has passed. Now the law is “Be cute or die.” The only sincerity bearable is clever insincerity. That is what the clothing and greeting card graffiti really scream out. The particular “message” doesn’t matter.

Willard, Dallas (2009-02-06). The Divine Conspiracy (pp. 9-10). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Jesus, Musonius Rufus, and Family

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Many scholars suppose that Jesus had a negative view of the nuclear family that was softened by the gospel authors (or that he was inconsistent in his teaching):

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)

And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see you.” But he answered them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” (Luke 8:20-21)

This means something like how Matthew puts it: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
(Matthew 10:37)

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
(Matthew 10:34-35)


And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’” (Luke 18:18-20)

Now, academics are more likely to have this view than normal people, and they do tend to resent those who do not have similar degrees, so it’s not surprising that they want Jesus to be as maladjusted and lonely as they are. But that aside, must Jesus’ view of the family be so inconsistent that the gospel authors made up sayings in which he endorsed the family? I think not. For instance, Musonius Rufus, a philosopher active around the time the gospels were being written, made similar points to Jesus, but in a lengthier and more obviously consistent fashion:

A certain young man who wished to study philosophy, but was forbidden by his father to do so, put this question to him “Tell me, Musonius, must one obey one’s parents in all things, or are there some circumstances under which one need not heed them?”[1] And Musonius replied, “That everyone should obey his mother and father seems a good thing, and I certainly recommend it…

…Because surely all parents have the interests of their children at heart, and because of that interest they wish them to do what is right and advantageous. Consequently one who does what is right and useful is doing what his parents wish and so is obedient to his parents in doing it, even if his parents do not order him in so many words to do these things…

…And so you, my young friend, do not fear that you will disobey your father, if when your father bids you do something which is not right, you refrain from doing it, or when he forbids you to do something which is right you do not refrain from doing it. Do not let your father be an excuse to you for wrong-doing whether he bids you do something which is not right or forbids you to do what is right. For there is no necessity for you to comply with evil injunctions, and you yourself seem not unaware of this…

…If, then, my young friend, with a view to becoming such a man, as you surely will if you truly master the lessons of philosophy, you should not be able to induce your father to permit you to do as you wish, nor succeed in persuading him, reason thus: your father forbids you to study philosophy, but the common father of all men and gods, Zeus, bids you and exhorts you to do so. His command and law is that man be just and honest, beneficent, temperate, high-minded, superior to pain, superior to pleasure, free of all envy and all malice; to put it briefly, the law of Zeus bids man be good….

Now then, it would seem that Rufus explicitly says that the young should not obey their parents, particularly when the study of philosophy is on the line. But, he also says that he recommends obeying parents. He also says that obeying God is superior to obeying men (parents) but that because God wants what is best, so also to disobey parents in the name of what God wants and what is obviously and truly good, is ultimately obedience to both God and your parents who want the best for you. The point I’m making is that people, in Jesus’ era, were able to say that values existed that were greater in comparison to family, but that family was still a good. Jesus didn’t reject family, he simply rejected using your family as an excuse for wrong-doing. Just like Rufus thought philosophy would make you wise, and therefore a good son, even if doing the right thing put you at odds with your parents.