Rage Less, Angry More, and ADHD Better: A How-To

Oct '25 (edited) • 🧠 ADHD

Hi Founders! In this next value-packed article, follow along for a deep dive on all the things I’ve learned in the past weeks as I’ve been moving through processing my repressed rage. Such a privilege to share what I’ve learned about how to alchemize and use this incredible attribute. May it serve you well.

TL;DR Anger isn’t a flaw — it’s a function. This is how life restores integrity when something meaningful gets blocked. To rage less, you have to feel anger more — earlier, more clearly, and without shame.When you hold anger consciously, it stops being reactive and becomes creative.

Index

The Birth of the Self — what anger truly is
Anger Is Energy That Wants to Move — why it exists
The Yin and Yang of Anger — how it cycles
The Confusion Between Anger and Dysregulation — how we mistake signal for instability
Dysregulation and Rage — what happens when it floods
Micro-Frustrations and the ADHD Nervous System — why it builds
Sociological Significance of Anger — how culture shapes expression
Working with Anger — how to regulate it consciously
Channeling Repressed Rage — how to align inner and outer intensity
The Alchemy of Anger — what it becomes
Closing — what it means to rage less and feel more

The Birth of the Self

Anger is the sensation of the self being created.

That tightening in the chest, that heat in the gut — it’s not a malfunction. It’s your nervous system defining its edges.

It’s your body saying, “I exist. I matter.”

This begins around age two, during the “terrible twos,” when a child first learns to say “No.”

That “No” isn’t rebellion — it’s individuation. It’s the moment we realize where we end and the world begins.

As a child, I repressed my anger because I received many subtle cues that to feel and express would risk my safety and survival — cues that neither parent was aware they were sending.Looking back, I can see how my body learned early that silence was safer than self expression. Now, years later, I’ve been given the tools to have what I missed — to feel, express, and integrate the very energy I once had to hide.

Every adult wave of anger echoes that same process. Each flare of irritation or boundary is the self crystallizing again:“This is me. That is not.”

Separation becomes clarity instead of conflict.The subject–object distinction forms — the birth of duality takes place in the mind.From this split, awareness learns to perceive itself.

Anger, in this sense, isn’t just emotional; it’s existential.

It’s the moment consciousness takes shape through contrast, discovering its own boundaries in the act of saying no to the undifferentiated whole.

When anger is met consciously, ego forms without taking over.Duality becomes functional rather than divisive.

To love one’s anger is to love oneself — because anger is the body’s first act of self-recognition.

Anger Is Energy That Wants to Move

Anger is one of the brain’s oldest emotional systems — older than speech or logic.Deep in the periaqueductal gray and hypothalamus, close to the brainstem — the so-called “lizard brain” — anger mobilizes the most primal kind of energy.These structures sit near the autonomic control centers that regulate heartbeat, breathing, and reflexive defense.

It’s the body’s way of saying, “This matters.”

Anger serves three core purposes:

• Protection — defending what’s sacred or safe.

• Frustration — signaling blocked agency or movement.

• Restoration — calling attention to pain that needs care.

When anger moves naturally, it clears space and restores balance.

When it’s suppressed or judged, it builds pressure until it erupts as rage — the body’s emergency release.

“Anger isn’t the opposite of peace. It’s the body insisting on integrity.”

The Yin and Yang of Anger

Anger moves like breath — outward and inward, fire and rest.

Yang – Activating Anger - The fire that wants to move. It rises when agency is blocked or boundaries are crossed. It’s assertive, protective, and full of momentum.

Yin – Restorative Anger - The fire that wants to be held. It emerges after hurt or disconnection. It’s tender, inward, and asks for care.

When Yin and Yang stay connected, anger flows like a cycle — protection feeding into restoration.When the cycle breaks, we either collapse (too much Yin) or explode (too much Yang).

Working with anger means letting both halves complete their motion.

The Confusion Between Anger and Dysregulation

A lot of people confuse anger with dysregulation, but they’re not the same thing.

Anger is a signal. Dysregulation is what happens when the nervous system can’t hold that signal.

Anger itself is coherent — it has direction, information, and purpose.When you feel anger clearly, it points toward truth: something matters here.

Dysregulation is the loss of capacity to stay in contact with that truth, It's the difference between a steady flame and a wildfire.

Most of us never learned to tell them apart. So instead of learning to feel anger skillfully, we learned to fear activation — and in doing so, we cut ourselves off from one of our most powerful sources of clarity.

Anger is not dysregulation. Anger is the body’s attempt to end dysregulation.

Dysregulation and Rage

If anger is motion, rage is what happens when that motion can’t complete.

When the amygdala floods faster than the prefrontal cortex can regulate, the body’s ancient defense system takes over.That’s not a moral failure — it’s timing. The old brain moves faster than the new one.

Rage says: “I can’t hold this anymore.”

Then comes the loop: eruption → guilt → shutdown → buildup.

But not all rage explodes. Sometimes it leaks.

Suppressed rage will find expression through channels we don’t consciously choose — a dynamic known in men’s work as “coming out sideways.” It may surface through constant low-level conflict, unnecessary argument, sarcasm, passive-aggression, or complaint. You might find yourself becoming “pugnacious,” overly oppositional, or drawn toward situations that recreate threat even when life is relatively safe.

This is rage seeking coherence.The system doesn’t know why it’s angry — only that something unresolved still vibrates beneath awareness.

So it keeps testing the world, searching for a match to the internal charge.

The way out isn’t suppression or avoidance; it’s awareness and containment.

Learning to recognize the charge early, to name it, to move it safely, before it chooses where to erupt for you.

When awareness stays online through the wave, the brain reconnects — the limbic system and cortex begin to cooperate again.That’s real regulation: the body and mind re-establishing dialogue.

Micro-Frustrations and the ADHD Nervous System

In ADHD, anger rarely comes from one big thing. It builds through micro-frustrations — hundreds of small breaks in flow that pile up beneath awareness.

Losing a thought mid-sentence.

Searching for misplaced keys.

Getting interrupted during hyperfocus.

Feeling dismissed or unseen.

Each moment leaves behind a trace of “movement withheld” — energy that prepared to act, then froze.Those traces layer until one small trigger ignites them all.

What looks like overreaction is often backlogged activation.

In ADHD, anger often functions like a temporary stimulant.When dopamine dips, anger floods the system with focus, drive, and energy. it's the body trying to regulate through intensity.

The goal isn’t to stop that process, but to meet it earlier — to sense it before it tips into overwhelm.

Awareness turns the surge into power instead of chaos.

The Sociological Significance of Anger

How we relate to anger isn’t just psychological — it’s cultural.

In Western societies, anger is often framed as “negative,” “dangerous,” or “unskillful.”It’s seen as the failure of emotional control rather than the function of emotional intelligence.We grow up equating “calm” with “good” and “angry” with “bad,” so the natural activation that wants to restore integrity gets labeled as threat — and repressed.

But this repression isn’t evenly distributed.

For men, anger is one of the few socially acceptable emotions.But it’s often allowed only in its outer form — visible, loud, and dominant — not in its inner form of truth and clarity. So instead of becoming boundary or advocacy, anger becomes force, violence, or withdrawal. Men are taught that anger equals power, but rarely that anger can also mean care — care for self, for justice, for life.

For women, anger is often forbidden. It’s labeled as hysteria, irrationality, or emotional instability.From a young age, girls learn that expressing anger risks rejection or loss of belonging. So anger goes inward — becoming anxiety, depression, and self-blame.The body holds the fire quietly, sometimes for years.

When women reclaim anger, it often looks like remembering the right to say no.When men reclaim anger, it often looks like remembering the right to feel. Both movements restore wholeness.

“Culturally, we’ve confused anger with harm. But real anger doesn’t destroy — it protects what’s sacred.”

Collectively, we live in a society uncomfortable with anger yet fueled by it — repressed on the individual level, weaponized on the systemic one. When people can’t express anger directly, it leaks through systems: in polarization, burnout, addiction, and violence.

Unfelt anger becomes infrastructure — it gets built into our politics and economies.

Learning to feel anger clearly — personally and relationally — is a kind of cultural repair.

Every time someone learns to feel anger without turning it into harm, a small part of the collective nervous system relearns how to hold conflict without collapse.

Working with Anger

Regulation isn’t about cooling off.

It's about increasing capacity — being able to hold more energy without losing coherence.The body learns safety through experience, not thought.

Simple ways to work with anger consciously:

• Track sensation, not story. Where is the heat, pressure, or movement?

• Contain it. Press your palms together. Feel your feet. Exhale into the resistance.

• Move it. Shake, stretch, walk, or breathe out loud.

• Ask: Does this want to move, or to be held?

• Listen. Every flare protects a value, a truth, or a need.

A somatic note: Very often the experience of anger feels in the body like constriction. I've found that the feeling of constriction is actually the body's way of representing the blockage we are encountering in life - life pushing against us, attempting to hold us back. The anger that comes is actually the sensation of pushing AGAINST the internal constriction - the part of us that wants to create space to exist, to push back against reality.

Each time you stay with anger instead of suppressing it, your nervous system learns that intensity is safe.That’s real regulation — not calming down, but staying present inside the wave.

Channeling Repressed Rage

Sometimes the intensity inside is so overwhelming that it doesn’t make sense to the system. It’s not “too much” — it’s too much without context.Repressed rage isn’t just emotion waiting to be expressed; it’s raw intensity with no story or reason that consciousness can find.

That mismatch — too much energy, no clear source — makes it feel unbearable.Channeling isn’t about venting or discharging. It’s about giving the internal intensity a physical, external reason to exist — something that matches its scale and texture so the inner and outer begin to align.That’s how the body starts to make sense of itself again.

I learned this firsthand not long ago.

Through an organization whose work I’m deeply indebted to, I was able to finally see the subtle, automated patterns that had been creating havoc — in my own life and in the lives of the community I cared about.Until that process, I hadn’t realized how much multi-generational rage I had been carrying — anger that had never been spoken to or even noticed.When it surfaced, it came as a well of intensity that lasted for days: a raw, unfiltered state of rage moving through every cell of my body. I screamed and growled randomly. My body went into spasms. I didn't know what to do with it! It felt unbearable. Like I was about to explode.

It was my body finally telling the truth.

That experience became the impulse to learn everything I could about anger and regulation. And since integrating that rage, I’ve felt more grounded — more at home in myself.Interactions that once felt foggy or reactive now feel clear.I can see people as they are, without unconsciously cutting off a part of my own experience just to stay connected.The anger didn’t make me less relational — it made me more whole.

Now, when I feel anger, I actually like it.

It feels good to know I have that kind of energy — that life still moves strongly through me, that I can use it to make changes in the world.I know I have much to learn about using it more skillfully and about creating the conditions to hold more of it with less reactivity.But that, too, feels right — an endless process of discovery.

Ways to channel safely:

• Run or move hard. Sprint, climb, lift, or push until your body’s rhythm syncs with the charge.

• Hit or press into something solid. A heavy bag, a mat, a padded surface — feel the feedback and impact.

• Use sound and breath. Growl, exhale forcefully, scream into a towel — give voice to the voltage.

• Conscious intensity. Martial arts, ecstatic dance, cold plunges, strong breathwork — containers where big energy is welcomed and witnessed.

You’re not trying to “get rid of” rage. You’re creating resonance — helping the inner and outer experiences match so the nervous system can trust what it feels, is able to contextualize intensity.

When the energy finds coherence, the chaos softens.And once the backlog begins to integrate/ makes sense, subtler work — breath, awareness, Focusing (the modality I practice, feel free to ask about this!) — finally starts to land.

“Channeling rage isn’t about losing control. It’s about giving intensity a world big enough to make sense.”

The Alchemy of Anger

When anger completes its movement, it transforms.

It becomes clarity, creativity, and boundary.

(see graphic 2 for a better image of this chart)

Function — When Blocked — When Integrated

Protection. — Defensiveness. — Healthy boundaries

Frustration — Blame or impatience — Innovation and persistence

Restoration — Withdrawal. — Empathy and repair

For ADHD systems, this shift is massive.The energy that once scattered now fuels focus and creation.The brain and body stop competing — they collaborate.

Integration isn’t control. It's partnership — awareness and instinct working together.