Anger Is a Kind of Madness

"They didn’t have the studies to back it up, but they knew. Anger makes you dumber. It makes you a worse leader, a worse decision-maker."Ryan tells us precisely why anger is so irrational on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Anger is a kind of madness. They didn't have the studies to back it up, but they knew. Anger makes you dumber. It makes you a worse leader and a worse decision-maker. This is why Seneca wrote on anger for Nero. He didn't think the emperor could afford to be ruled by his passions. "I tell you that anger is a kind of madness," he wrote, and he was right. A recent research study, conducted and published by the psychologist Michael Greenstein, proves it. According to the study, angry people were not only more susceptible to misinformation, they were more likely to use that misinformation to guide their decision-makings and actions. Information and confidence, traditionally

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  correlated, followed the opposite trajectory in angry people. As angry people got more false information, they became more confident. Angry people unknowingly confused their heightened state of emotion for heightened cognitive capabilities. They think their mind is alert, aware, firing on all cylinders. People after a few cocktails do too, but Greenstein implies that those inhibited by anger are actually more at risk than those inhibited by alcohol. Alcohol impairs the memory. Anger gives you false memories, false beliefs. A constellation of risks. That's how this new research refers to the implications of anger. But the Stoics have known this for 2,000 years. And you know it too. So ignore it at your peril.

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  And like I've said, we don't all have anger problems, but anger is a problem for all of us. It's a constellation of risk. It's a kind of madness, as Seneca said. And that's why we built the tame your temper challenge. It's 10 or so days of awesome Stoic-inspired insights that will help you be less angry, have less rage, be more in control of yourself, carry less resentment and bitterness, all things that I think prevent you from being not just good at what you do, as the study proves, but also prevent you from being happy. So check this out. It's really awesome. DailyStoic.com/anger. And of course, if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, you can join at DailyStoicLife.com. You get this course and all the other ones for free. It's hundreds of dollars worth of courses. So check that out. DailyStoic.com/anger.