mbg Spirituality & Relationships Editor
mbg Spirituality & Relationships Editor
Sarah Regan is a Spirituality & Relationships Editor, and a registered yoga instructor. She received her bachelor’s in broadcasting and mass communication from SUNY Oswego, and lives in Buffalo, New York.
Image by Thais Ramos Varela / Stocksy
October 31, 2023
What does it really take to reach a goal? Is it gratitude, excitement, or something else? According to new research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, when it comes to reaching a goal, you might just want to get mad about it. Here’s what to know.
Studying the effects of anger on goals
For this study, researchers wanted to better understand the role of anger in achieving goals. To do so, they conducted a series of experiments with over 1,000 participants, as well as analyzed separate data from over 1,400 other respondents.
The experiments involved having participants feel different emotions, ranging from amusement, to sadness, to anger, to neutral, by showing them different visuals. Then, the participants would be presented with different challenges, such as word puzzles, video games, etc.
As far as the data analyzed, the researchers looked at surveys from recent U.S. presidential elections on voting and the anger participants felt around the election.
In both instances, anger proved to make a difference in people’s behaviors—and how well they reached their goals. Namely, anger improved people’s ability to reach their goals in the game experiments, and was sometimes even linked with shorter response times. These beneficial effects of anger were more significant when the goals were more challenging.
And in the election survey, the participants who said they would be angry if their candidate didn’t win were more likely to vote. “These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort toward attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success,” explains lead author Heather Lench, Ph.D. in a news release.
What to do about it
Anger is typically thought of as a negative emotion that we need to control or repress, but the findings of this study suggest it can actually be a motivating force when we’re trying to reach a goal.
As Lench notes, it’s well and good to strive for happiness, but a mix of emotions, including negative emotions like anger, result in the best outcomes and can be useful.
“People often prefer to use positive emotions as tools more than negative and tend to see negative emotions as undesirable and maladaptive,” she says, adding, “Our research adds to the growing evidence that a mix of positive and negative emotions promotes well-being, and that using negative emotions as tools can be particularly effective in some situations.”
The key, of course, is to use your anger as fuel for inspired action, as opposed to letting it fester inside of you. Our anger can point us to what we value, where our boundaries are, and the things we believe in—and thus, when we feel angry, we can use that anger to make a difference.
The takeaway
If you’ve ever felt like you were too angry and didn’t know what to do with that emotion, it might just be time to embrace it. Healthy anger can be wielded for motivation and inspired action, and doesn’t have to be toxic when it’s pointing you in the direction of what you value and believe in.