Qualy #116 - Dealing with anger in spots where you know it's coming

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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I think it was in one of your lessons, but it might have been in a podcast where you talk about, imagine you're playing a video game and it's the same video game every time, and you always get killed by the same monster at the same part of the maze or whatever it is.
And I think about that a lot every time I falter at predictably known, understood things that get under my skin. And it's very discouraging, right? It's sort of like, there are like a dozen things that I just know if they happen. So, I mean, one of them is, there's certain types of questions that if I'm asked really irk me. When people ask questions that are, to which the answer is very complicated, but they ask through the lens of just give me the one word answer, that just irks me. Like, I don't know why, it just bugs the shit out of me.
And I know that. And yet over and over again, I find myself getting upset when that happens. And I feel like the guy that you're describing.

**Sam Harris** (1:40)
Yeah, you're losing the boss fight at the same place every time.

**Peter Attia** (1:43)
Every single time, I know where the boogeyman is, I know what weapon he's going to use to kill me, and I just walk over there and, out comes the machete, and I'm dead. And then I'm back to the starting block again, and I'm one of fewer lives in the game, right?

**Sam Harris** (1:59)
But you can recover faster each time you lose. Getting angry is not the measure of having lost, right? Now, obviously, you can aspire to a time where you never get angry again, or you never get angry in certain circumstances again. But the real practice is to notice as early as possible what's happening and to let go of it. The difference between being angry for 10 minutes and 10 seconds and one second, those factors of 10 are enormous, right?
And I have the same thing going on, where anger is something that I very frequently feel. And I also notice that it totally contaminates the experience of people around me. So I have my wife and my daughters, and my anger for them is clearly toxic. And I have this commitment to letting go of it the moment I can let go of it.
And again, it's not that anger is never warranted. The energy of anger can be useful. Someone's attacking you on the sidewalk, and you're in a self-defense situation. That's not the moment where I would say get rid of all your anger as quickly as possible, right? I mean, there are situations where you want to use that energy. But for the most part, you want to let go of it very, very quickly, and then be in a position to decide what's what, and whether or not it's appropriate to take some kind of confrontational path, whatever it is, by email or say the thing that would convey your displeasure or whatever. But now I have my wife and my daughters as a kind of feedback mechanism for me, because they know I can let go of anger on demand, and they know I want to, and they don't like my anger, right? And they detect it in the subtlest way.
So it's not even anger where a normal person would classically think he was angry.

**Peter Attia** (4:01)
They don't have to wait till you raise your voice. They can see the mannerisms in the way you might move or the way your answers become shorter.

**Sam Harris** (4:10)
Yeah, yeah. Even mild frustration gets scored as a kind of crazy level of anger, right? So if I say, wait a minute, I thought the plumber was coming today. That's like, you know, that's a four alarm fire, right? So one of my daughters will say, ooh, daddy's getting angry, right? And they'll say that so early now.
And it's fantastic because it's, I just let go of it way earlier than I used to.
But if you can't be mindful, you actually have no choice. You just, you will be angry as long as you're angry.