Russell Kolts > Quotes

“Anger and other threat-related emotions shape our attention to focus on information that reinforces the feeling of being threatened, so we tend to overlook information that is inconsistent with this state of mind. In this state, your brain is biased toward being angry.”
― Russell Kolts, The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Managing Your Anger: Using Compassion-Focused Therapy to Calm Your Rage and Heal Your Relationships

“When our threat system quickly narrows our attention, our thoughts follow. This is one of the reasons we can feel trapped by our anger, why we may make decisions that don’t seem to make sense when we examine them later. We tend to lose perspective when our threat system takes over. It becomes difficult to think flexibly and to gather information that isn’t directly related to the perceived threat.”
― Russell Kolts, The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Managing Your Anger: Using Compassion-Focused Therapy to Calm Your Rage and Heal Your Relationships

“There are other problems with how we reason when we’re angry. Research has revealed that, compared to other threat emotions like sadness or anxiety, anger is linked with a feeling of certainty.9 When we’re angry, we tend to feel very certain of the thoughts that we’re having, even if those thoughts are unrelated to what we’re angry about, and even if they are dead wrong. In fact, we may even be more likely to be wrong when we’re angry. Research shows that the certainty of anger is linked with processing information more superficially10—we think less carefully when making our judgments”
― Russell Kolts, The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Managing Your Anger: Using Compassion-Focused Therapy to Calm Your Rage and Heal Your Relationships

“the outcome of an activity is very much related to the motivation we have while doing the activity, and that motivation is something that we can choose and develop.”
― Russell Kolts, The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Managing Your Anger: Using Compassion-Focused Therapy to Calm Your Rage and Heal Your Relationships

“with a range of threats to our survival. Anger prepares us to engage—to force a change—and it does this by getting our bodies ready for action. This process can bring on an emotional experience that feels powerful, strong, and energized. This, in turn, can make it hard for us to commit to reducing our anger, because we may often enjoy feeling like that.”
― Russell Kolts, The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Managing Your Anger: Using Compassion-Focused Therapy to Calm Your Rage and Heal Your Relationships