Your Thursday Three Things for March 26, 2026
What if Anger is The Answer: What the ancient Greeks understood about the fire inside you... and why we’ve been taught to put it out instead of aim it.
I want to start with something that might make you uncomfortable. Think about the last time you got angry. Really angry. And then think about what you did with it. Did you take a breath and let it go? Did you stuff it down and pretend everything was fine? Did you tell yourself that getting upset wasn’t worth it, that it doesn’t matter, that you’re above all that?
Now here’s the question: did any of that actually work?
Because I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’ve started to wonder if the way most of us handle anger is actually making everything worse. Not better. Worse. And we had a conversation this week on Men Talking Mindfulness with Mike LeBlanc... Marine veteran, Harvard MBA, founder of a billion-dollar robotics company... that cracked this wide open for me. Mike has a book coming out called What If Anger Is the Answer? and man, even the title made me think differently.
The Word We Lost
The ancient Greeks had a word: thumos. It’s translated a few different ways, but the closest we can get in English is something like “the spirited force of the soul.” It was the inner fire that drives you to stand up for what’s right, to protect what you love, to push through when things get hard. The Greeks saw it as one of the central elements of a well-lived life. If you didn’t cultivate your thumos properly, you weren’t fully alive. You were a shell going through the motions.
And then somewhere along the way, in our modern world with our modern understanding of mental health and emotional regulation, we started treating anger like a malfunction. Like a check engine light that we should tape over instead of actually checking the engine. We’ve been taught to breathe through it, release it, reframe it, diffuse it. We’ve been taught that the goal is to not feel it at all.
Aristotle would have said that’s cowardice of the emotional kind. He actually called anger a virtue, with a catch. He said you need to be angry at the right thing, at the right time, for the right amount of time, in the right way. And yeah, that’s a lot of qualifiers. But the point is that it can be good, and that suppressing it entirely has a cost.
What Anger Is Actually Telling You
Here’s the frame that has been most useful for me: anger is a warning light, not a malfunction. When you’re driving and the oil light comes on, you don’t tape over it and keep going. You pull over and check what’s actually happening. Anger is the same thing. It’s telling you something about what you value, what you need, and where something is out of alignment. Suppressing it just turns the light off while the engine quietly destroys itself.
I’ve done some journaling on my own anger over the years... and I mean real journaling, not just venting, but actually trying to trace the thing back to its source. And what I’ve found is that almost all of my anger comes down to a handful of roots. I’m tired, I mean really depleted, and my fuse is short. Or my expectations aren’t being met, whether that’s traffic, my kids getting their shoes on, myself. Or I’m in a hurry, which is usually tied to expectations anyway. Or I feel disrespected, or I feel like someone I love is being disrespected. That’s maybe the fastest way to make me angry. Every situation where I’ve blown up, if I trace it back far enough, I can find one of those roots.
What I didn’t understand for a long time is that the anger was never really about the thing that triggered it. The guy who cut me off in traffic wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I was already fried before I got in the car. The anger was information. I just didn’t know how to read it.
The Real Cost of Suppression
Mike put this as well as I’ve ever heard it: suppressing anger is like shaking a can of Coke. The pressure doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere. And usually where it goes is the people who had nothing to do with the original problem, your kids, your spouse, your employees, the guy who asks you a perfectly innocent question at the wrong moment.
There’s something even more insidious than the blowup, though. And that’s what happens when you suppress long enough that you stop having acute anger at all. You don’t blow up. You just become... cold. Distant. Quietly resentful. And I’d argue that chronic resentment, the low-grade, never-addressed kind, does far more damage to a relationship than a sharp conversation ever would. I’ve seen it in marriages. I’ve seen it in teams. The leader who never raises his voice but also never addresses anything, and everybody walks on eggshells because they can feel the weight of everything unsaid. That’s a pressure cooker with the lid welded shut.
Mike also made a point about parenting. He said if you can never show your kids acute anger, you’re almost certainly showing them chronic resentment instead. And kids feel that. They might not be able to name it, but they feel it. A dad who says “I’m fine” with a tight voice for the fifteenth time is modeling avoidance not healthy emotional regulation. And kids learn by watching, not by listening.
Anger that’s acknowledged and properly directed is a conversation. Anger that’s suppressed becomes an atmosphere. And you can’t escape an atmosphere.
The So What
So if the answer isn’t to suppress anger, what is it? Here’s what I’ve taken from this conversation and from my own work on this:
1. Start by asking what’s actually going on.
When you feel angry, before you do anything with it, get curious. Where is this actually coming from? Not the surface trigger... what is underneath it? Most of the time, you’ll find one of a small number of real roots: you’re depleted, your needs aren’t being met, something you value is being threatened, you don’t feel seen or heard. Naming the real source takes some of the urgency out of the emotion. You’re no longer just flooded. You’re investigating.
2. Write it out before you talk it out.
Mike told us he knows he’s in a bad mood when Microsoft Word is open on his desktop. That’s not a joke. When he’s feeling off, when his workouts are off and his sleep is off and the world feels tilted, he sits down and starts writing. Not to vent, but to think. He starts with what he’s actually feeling, then traces it to the relationships or situations that are unresolved. He finds that nine times out of ten, what’s dragging on him is a conversation he’s been avoiding. And every time he has that conversation, everything gets lighter. His sleep improves. He’s more patient with his kids. He’s more available at work. The suppressed anger was the weight, not a protection against it.
3. Get the facts before you get loud.
This one has saved me more times than I can count. When you’re angry at someone, sit down and try to write out the indisputable facts of the situation. What actually happened? What can you say that the other person would agree is accurate? Not your interpretation, not your judgment about what it means... the actual facts. You’d be surprised how often this process reveals that your anger is partially or entirely misplaced. Mike shared a story about an employee he was sure was always late. He sat down to prepare a conversation, went back through the badge records to gather his facts, and found the guy wasn’t late at all. He crumpled up the paper and moved on. And it saved a relationship and probably that guy’s job.
4. Ask yourself what advice you’d give a friend in your exact situation.
I love this one. When you’re too inside the anger to see clearly, pretend it’s someone else’s problem. Pretend a good friend came to you and described exactly what you’re dealing with, and asked for your honest take. What would you tell them to do? We almost always know the answer. We know when we need to have the hard conversation. We know when we need to let something go. We know when we’re making things worse with our own behavior. The problem is that we can’t access that knowledge when we’re in the middle of it. Creating some imaginary distance... even just asking “what would I tell someone else to do here?”, gives you a little space to hear what you already know.
5. Pick a battle. But actually fight it.
Choose your battles, but choose one. There will always be things in your world that aren’t the way you want them to be. Most of them are not yours to address. But some of them are. And the ones that are? You have to actually show up for them. Not in a way that burns the house down. But you have to speak up, set the boundary, have the conversation, take the action. The failure to engage when engagement is called for... that’s where resentment is born. And you don’t do anyone any favors by pretending you’re fine with something you’re not fine with.
This Week on Men Talking Mindfulness
Will and I sat down with Mike LeBlanc, a Marine veteran, Harvard MBA, and founder of Foundation, a robotics company valued at over a billion dollars. Mike and I actually deployed together back in the day... he was a Marine captain at the time, and I will say he’s grown considerably since then, in the best possible way. His book, What If Anger Is the Answer?, comes out August 25th. This conversation got real really fast. We talked about thumos, about Aristotle’s case for anger as a virtue, about how shame can be a tool rather than a weapon, about Mike’s five-part framework for having the hard conversations you’ve been avoiding. I think you’ll get a lot out of it.
Watch the Episode on Valor Media Network Later Today (YouTube)
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Three Resources for Learning to Work With Your Anger Instead of Against It
These go deep. Don’t try to absorb all three in one sitting. Come back to one each week and actually do the work inside it.
