The Sunday Times July 16, 2006
Feature
The age of rage
The evidence proves the British are getting angrier every year. We’ve never been healthier, wealthier or wiser. So what’s our problem?
Report by Tim Rayment
Rage, rage, rage. Road rage. Air rage. Trolley rage. What is Britain so angry about?
What makes a disabled grandfather, described in court as a good neighbour with a reputation for acts of kindness, kill a stranger with a single blow after a trivial driving dispute? Why would another motorist chase a pedestrian onto a bus and stab him to death? What makes the driver of a mechanical digger settle a dispute by wrecking two cars and a house?
If these are extreme examples, featuring characters who – whatever the neighbours think – were always nasty pieces of work, there is little doubt something has changed. Here are some facts: we suffer the second-worst road rage in the world after South Africa; 38% of men are unhappy at work; no fewer than 27% of managers in the construction industry have sought medical help for stress, anxiety or depression; the country’s leading anger counsellor says the women he sees are “incredibly angry”, even more so than the men. Something is happening to this inhibited, tolerant island. Is the longest period of economic growth in recent times exacting a price?
In Scotland, a man lies in hospital after fracturing his spine when he was pushed down an escalator by a fellow shopper in a clothes store. In the corridors of the hospital, staff point to a survey by their union, the Royal College of Nursing, in which 27% of nurses say they have been attacked at work – with almost half saying they have been assaulted in the last 12 months. Figures from the Civil Aviation Authority show that UK airlines reported 1,486 significant or serious acts of air rage in a year, a 59% increase over the year before. In another survey, we learn that nearly a third of the population is not on speaking terms with neighbours, and one in 20 of us has had a fight with a person next door. Meanwhile, a new industry to manage our anger is born.
Surveys can mislead and statistics lie, yet there is an underlying truth to the numbers. Britain now has a tetchy temper. To understand how we got here, we have to consider what anger is for – and then go back a generation, to when today’s parents were children.
“All inappropriate anger is a defence mechanism against some sort of pain,” says Mike Fisher, a photographer who has positioned himself as Britain’s expert on rage. A former fuming person himself and the founder, seven years ago, of the British Association of Anger Management, Fisher says that to feel irate is never bad in itself. It drives changes for the good and gives us a voice. Anger is our way of telling the world: “I am here. I exist. Take me seriously.” The problem is that people do not understand their own feelings, and express them in the wrong place.
Pain? What have we got to be pained about? This is the fourth leading economy on Earth. We can downsize, job-share, and leave a failing marriage at will. It takes pocket money to join what used to be “the jet set”; we can buy a BMW for £199 a month, drink and gamble to our heart’s content, and watch football on 70in plasmas. We have legal safeguards against everything, and the infectious diseases that gave Victorian graveyards their youthful corpses have gone. “It is a profound privilege,” says Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and an authority on the effects of stress on our bodies, “to die from stress-related diseases.” But that is not how it feels.
Cultures are complex, and the causes of change are hard to prove. Yet if we go back a generation, to the 1970s, we can sketch a background to our tetchiness. History works like a pendulum: over time, one extreme leads to its opposite. The hypothesis is that the sum of British anger has stayed the same in living memory. How we vent our fury, and who is on the receiving end, has changed utterly.
After the union abuses of the 1970s, Britain transformed itself from a near-bankrupt welfare state into a more dynamic economy. Social-support systems were eroded to encourage people to compete. At the start of this process, anger was either kept behind closed doors or targeted against groups: town against gown in the university cities, miners against Thatcher, the beating up of gay men, and so on. Private frustrations turned inward. We hit our spouses and children, kicked the cat, had the occasional punch-up at the photocopier, and got drunk. Some men were violent and many women were unfulfilled.
Good riddance to that. But advances for humanity can carry an unexpected price, and as early as the 1980s, signs appeared in Britain of what two American cardiologists called “hurry sickness” (also known as type-A behaviour). Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman reported that some heart attacks could be attributed to competitive drive and stresses at work rather than to smoking or high blood pressure. In 1985, this newspaper noted the dangers, and published a league table of occupations, ranked by stress level. Airline pilots were at the top and librarians at the bottom. Since then, hurry sickness has spread to all of us, whether we started our working lives as competitive individuals or not.
“We’re becoming very, very affluent as a society,” says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, and the world’s leading thinker on workplace stress. “But to get there we’ve had to Americanise and globalise. And the pace of change has been phenomenal.”
Britain reacted to its economic breakdown by changing faster, and more deeply, than any country in western Europe except perhaps Ireland. “What I have seen over the past 20 years I can’t believe,” says Cooper, a Californian who came to the UK in the 1960s. “More frenetic, more workaholic, more long hours, constant change. I never thought I would see Britain go in this direction, with most people having 23-minute lunches at their desk.”
We are more American than the United States. Americans seize new technology, but because they have always been capitalists, their society feels relatively stable. Insecure jobs and long working hours are nothing new. For Britain these are novel, especially for the middle class. One generation, now in middle age, has taken the strain of the change.
Every industry, public or private, has its story. When the Chartered Institute of Building studied 1,000 construction professionals, it found that 68% of managers were in the grip of stress, anxiety or depression, and 27% had asked for medical help. Skill shortages were the problem, with more than half the managers blaming their condition on inadequate staffing levels. Research by Bupa, the private health insurer, shows that more than a third of the population is losing sleep because of anxiety, with one in seven adults needing medical treatment for stress. Depression and anxiety have overtaken physical ailments as the chief cause of long-term sickness.
Just as with anger, there is nothing wrong with stress in itself. In fact, it is good for us. A paper presented at an anti-ageing conference in London last year shows that mild to moderate stress helps our defences against Alzheimer’s, arthritis and heart disease by accelerating repair of the body’s cells, including those in the brain. But “good” stress is short-term, varied and stimulating, ending in a sense of achievement. That is not the sort most of us get.
We change jobs more often than before, and the proportion of us living alone has risen, weakening our social support. We have less time to invest in the relationships that reassure us most. We also lead more virtual lives. Our friends include people we have never met except on the internet. The benefits of technology are huge. But if we keep our mobiles and computers turned on, we feel harassed by the desire for a quick response. We irritate others with our devotion to these devices, and feel vulnerable if we switch them off.
At the same time, many men have realised that their real ambition is to be with their families, and the women who run most households know they need careers, creating a new burden of expectation. In the background are national anxieties about terrorism and a general sense of powerlessness. We have known since 1992, when Britain was forced out of the European exchange-rate mechanism, that even governments are smaller than market forces. As individuals, we feel no strength to resist. We have lost faith in politics and most professions. The left and right feel disenfranchised by being out of fashion. Voters in the centre can see that after all the optimism and tax, some genuine achievements in policy are being submerged by incompetence, infighting and the corruptions of power. Meanwhile, large parts of the country, including public servants and small farmers, feel over-directed, misrepresented and ignored; and for older people, broken promises on pensions and the scandalous mis-selling of endowment mortgages have shattered a lifetime’s trust. In short, we live in an age of unlimited choice, but it feels like an illusion. We lose control with strangers partly because we have little control over our lives.
Not everything in this list is new. In the 1960s the background fear was nuclear destruction; the anxiety of the 1980s was Aids. But we have changed at a pace without recent precedent. Turning the screw further, many jobs ask us to hurt others to survive. The staff of every bank has ambitious sales targets to encourage the rest of us further into debt, itself a source of distress. As if the targets were not enough, guilt puts extra stress on the very people who, in the past, were least likely to behave badly: those with moral imagination. Other jobs create similar conflict. To many people, there is no obvious way out.
On top of that, our working lives, and even our leisure time, are less physical – the decline in manual work and rise in car ownership, for example, making us less likely to work off frustration with routine exercise; wider “rights” mean that bosses no longer bully their workers without thinking about the consequences. These are big steps forward, but society is more controlled, and emotion has to go somewhere.
The anger we see in road rage is not the same as the anger we feel for a person who has hurt us. It comes from frustration, with a background of rising anxiety and the repression of traditional outlets. “I don’t think it’s a deep-rooted ‘We hate people’ that is going on in Britain,” says Cooper. “It’s more of a shallow anger. But it is anger.”
Of course, human beings are adaptable, and in Britain we have begun to respond. Workers who are under 35 came into employment with these changes already under way. So they expect insecurity, and are better able to survive. How well you adapt also depends on the work you do. Nurses and teachers have stressful occupations, but research shows that office workers find it harder to cope and are twice as likely to “burn out” and give up their jobs. No doubt it helps that nurses and teachers do not have to fear their jobs being outsourced to India. But it seems to be a lack of meaning, and lack of human contact at work, that turns a job from stressful to intolerable.
A study of over 86,000 people in Britain and elsewhere found that industry and manufacturing workers, council office workers, managers, administrators and supervisors were more likely to burn out than nurses, social workers and teachers. Vivian Collins, professor of psychology at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and co-author of the research, says that “a lack of knowing what is expected of you, having a range of conflicting roles and being made to think your actions will not make a difference” are the conditions that lead to burn-out.
As for our political powerlessness, we have already evolved. Loss of faith in party politics has led to the rise of “protest Britain”, with individuals prepared to fight the perceived injustices of the planning system – which seems unjust when local wishes are ignored – and to register their opposition to government policy in countryside and anti-war marches, or as pro- or anti-vivisectionists. In historical terms, this is more a renewal than something new: in the 1960s our grandparents marched against the arms race, and we have always rioted if given sufficient cause.
According to Mike Fisher of the British Association of Anger Management, rage has five sources: loss of a personal goal; invasion of a personal boundary; anger in self-defence; negative self-belief; and the denial of primary needs. When respectable citizens opposed to the ban on hunting with dogs found themselves fighting with police on Westminster Green, they were driven by the second: the invasion into personal space. They had tried democratic channels and saw nobody was taking them seriously. In general, however, cause and effect in anger are not simple to diagnose.
I was once in love with a woman who was in a passionate affair with someone else. I invited her to a concert. This was a chance to hear one of the world’s top orchestras, and promised to be a great event. She never came, and the concert, by the Berlin Philharmonic, was smug and disjointed. So I wrote a letter expressing outrage to the conductor, Claudio Abbado, who sent back an artist’s hurt reply. Some of the music was poor. But the real emotional driver was the absence of the love object, which was not Abbado’s fault.
So it is with road rage, trolley rage and all the rages. In anger-management language, we are over-socialised. We hide our anger to keep our friends and our jobs. For some of us, that anger will go back to old childhood messages, from a parent or a carer – a poor choice of nanny, even – leading us to believe that we should never have been born. And all anger must go somewhere.
Nothing excuses the cyclist who punched a 69-year-old who reprimanded him for riding the wrong way down a one-way street in London. The victim, the former BBC scriptwriter Ted Rhodes, was found dead from internal bleeding two days later. It is right, too, that a court in Edinburgh should have jailed Carol McMillan, a mother of two, for killing a grandmother who was trying to save a parking space at a car-boot sale. McMillan grabbed Ann Whittle by the hair, pushed her to the floor and kicked her repeatedly in the face, causing her to have a heart attack.
But these are extreme cases, and most people keep their rages to where they feel least inhibited, on the telephone or inside the cocoon of a car. And as we adapt to the changes that have brought us such wealth – and such debt – we should spare a thought for the ill-tempered over-35s, who have suffered most from history’s squeeze. Compared with their parents, they have material riches and poor quality of life. “Maybe it is time for reflection,” says Cooper, who warned in this paper 11 years ago that there would be costs in health and family breakdown if we lost sight of our emotional needs. “Employee surveys show that in most companies, people feel their work is spilling over into their life. That tells us we should slow down. You hear people telling politicians: stop all the legislation, stop the constant change. It’s not any one political party’s fault. I think it’s the way we reacted to the 1970s.”
In a globalised world, change will not wait for one island’s wishes, so perhaps it is time to learn ways of managing anxieties we are perfectly entitled to feel. We are not alone in the challenge. Cooper believes that while France holds out and Germany is about to give way, Britain,- Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden are all getting angrier.
Can anger management work? Some judges think so. Guy Harwood, 43, was lucky to escape jail when he appeared at Mold Crown Court to face his second conviction for dangerous driving. He had been outraged by a poorly judged overtaking manoeuvre by a van driver on the A55. So, with his 14-year-old son in the passenger seat, he travelled alongside the other driver gesticulating and swerving towards the van. Then he got in front and twice slammed on his brakes. When the van driver turned off the A55 in search of safety, Harwood followed. The saga was witnessed by police. He was given a one-year ban, 12 months’ supervision, and told to attend an anger-management programme.
Alas, the judges, prison officials and other professionals who send people for anger counselling are sometimes naive. Fisher has a realistic view of his calling: counselling works, he says, if a client is ready for it. “You can’t teach somebody to have empathy,” he says. “By the time people come to me for anger management, they are usually desperate. Their jobs are probably in ruins and their marriage is in disarray. People are scared to be near them. They are isolated, hurt, depressed, confused and scared. If we asked them to put a hand in the fire or jump out of the window, they would, because they will do whatever they can, at that point, to change their behaviour. But if someone has been sent to us after being persuaded by their wife, children, boss or prison chaplain, we can’t do much for them. We like ’em desperate.”
Fisher teaches principles that might seem obvious. But they accumulate in power. His starting point is that we all see and hear what we want to see and hear. Instead of seeing the world as it is, we distort it so that it fits with what we find comfortable. Therefore, what we assume to be true is often wrong. His strategies for understanding anger, and then expressing it in a healthy way, take up a book (Beating Anger, published by Rider, £7.99). It comes from experience:?he was a quietly raging young man who became scary in his thirties, before bringing himself under control.
As a culture, we have an unsophisticated relationship with anger. Our role models do not help. Last month this magazine chronicled the self-indulgent demands of figures ranging from the pop princesses who insist that their dogs fly first class, to Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, who seems unable to find his own light switch – not to mention Naomi Campbell, who, when she could not find her jeans, allegedly screamed “You f***ing bitch!” before throwing her crystal-encrusted mobile phone at a servant’s head.
Fisher is unhappy with the power of advertising, which fosters the illusion that it is easy to access everything you want, leading almost inevitably to the “loss of a personal goal”, which comes first on his list as a source of anger. There is little we can do about advertising. But we can make the handling of misleading messages easier for the next generation by being better role models ourselves.
Just as the economic collapse of the 1970s gave us the fastest liberalisation an old economy could bear, so the repressions of the war generation, whose mantra was that “children should be seen and not heard”, have given us a generation of parents whose error has been on the side of indulgence. Children who are indulged at home today are disappointed in the real world tomorrow; it’s as simple as that. What is more, they learn how to deal with anger from their carers. Bickering is not a healthy model. “Anger management needs to be taught in every school,” says Fisher, whose vested interest does not make him automatically wrong.
A survey of 20 of the London boroughs shows that, on average, 68 pupils were suspended or expelled for violent behaviour on every day of the academic year in 2004-5, implying as many as 20,000 outbreaks of physical or serious verbal abuse annually when other London boroughs are included. Last year, at the annual conference of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, it emerged that children as young as five are asserting what they see as a “right” to do as they please, as unruly behaviour spreads to some primary schools.
“Tony Blair got it right in a funny sort of way,” says Cary Cooper, our expert on occupational stress. “Everybody laughed at him about the issue of respect, but he hit something important. It’s not old-fashioned respect: ‘Have respect for your elders.’ It’s about having respect for human beings.”
On the website of Fisher’s association, there is a ragbag of statistics showing the state we’re in. Almost every driver in the UK has experienced road rage; 71% of internet users get so frustrated searching the net they suffer net rage; 25% of under-25s admit kicking their computers in PC rage; one in two Britons has reacted to computer problems by abusing colleagues, hitting the computer, screaming, or hurling parts of the PC. One in eight teachers (13%) has been threatened by a parent in the previous year; one in four families has remote rage, defined as frequent rows over who controls the TV; 64% of workers have experienced office rage; and a third of us, as long ago as 2000, were finding it stressful to manage the balance between work and home.
“We have to realise that life is a one-act play,” says Cooper, whose focus is our employment. “There is no evidence that working long hours makes you more productive. The answer is to roll back from the long-hours culture, so we have more disposable time to invest in relationships. We can do that and still be successful.”
Yes, Britain is angry. It’s a shallow fury, with widespread decency and a deepening frustration beneath. But before the pendulum can make its swing, history has a question. Are you seething enough yet to think about being calmer? Or must we wait until the rages get worse? s
THE ANGRY BRIGADE
45% of us regularly lose our temper at work
64% of Britons working in an office have had office rage
38% of men are unhappy at work
27% of nurses have been attacked at work
Up to 60% of all absences from work are caused by stress
33% of Britons are not on speaking terms with their neighbours
1 in 20 of us has had a fight with the person living next door
DO YOU HAVE AN ANGER PROBLEM?
Uncontrolled rage can wreak havoc, losing you jobs and friends. Try this self-diagnostic test to find out how close you are to the edge
1. Do you have a tendency to criticise others?
yes
no
sometimes
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2. Do you keep things in until you finally explode with anger?
yes
no
sometimes
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3. Do you get upset when others disagree with you?
yes
no
sometimes
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4. When you become angry, do you withdraw from people?
yes
no
sometimes
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5. Are you satisfied with the way you settle differences?
yes
no
sometimes
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6. Do you tend to feel guilty or bad after getting angry?
yes
no
sometimes
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7. Do you tend to take your anger out on someone other than the person you’re angry with?
yes
no
sometimes
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8. Do you become depressed easily?
yes
no
sometimes
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9. Do you often act politely even though you’re fuming?
yes
no
sometimes
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10. When a problem arises with you and someone else, do you discuss it without losing control of your emotions?
yes
no
sometimes
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MIKE FISHER, FOUNDER OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION OF ANGER MANAGEMENT, EXPLAINS THE QUESTIONNAIRE
More than five yes answers: you have an anger problem. You need to reflect on how stress influences your moods, and consider taking part in an anger-management programme.
More than five no answers: you are even-tempered, well-balanced and empathic.
More than five “sometimes” answers: much of your anger is expressed in passive-aggressive ways. Instead of screaming at others, you are more likely to talk behind people’s backs or be sarcastic. You may be afraid of being rejected if you express your anger openly. You need to learn to be more open and assertive.
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