Picture this. You’ve reached the end of a long, hard day at work. Your boss spent the entire day lecturing you because you missed a deadline, then you had to leave early to collect your daughter from ballet, and your son from football straight afterwards. Both of them were arguing the whole way home, and you haven’t even prepared dinner for when you all get back.

You can feel a very familiar, but very uncomfortable feeling rising within you. And all of a sudden, you let out a rather uncontrolled, high-pitched shriek at your two children:

“WILL YOU JUST BE QUIET! I’VE HAD JUST ABOUT ENOUGH FOR TODAY!”.

The car immediately grows silent, and you curl up inside with shame. You’ve let the anger get the better of you again.

Parents, we’ve all been there. Sometimes letting out your anger feels like the only way to cope, but it’s normal to become frustrated with yourself when you do.

The fact is that anger is a normal part of life. And a pretty difficult part to control. However, although we can’t change our basic brain structure and chemistry, understanding more about why our brain and nervous system works the way it does will certainly help us gain better control.

So, to understand what happens in our brains when we get angry, we need to learn a bit more about how the different parts of the brain work.

How do the different parts of the brain work?

You have a prefrontal cortex (PFC). Your prefrontal cortex can be found behind your forehead, and helps you to think logically, make decisions, plan ahead, be creative, manage feelings, and calm down in times of stress. When your PFC has been working hard for a long period, it will become tired, worn out and irritable. However, taking care of yourself properly will help the PFC become much more efficient.

Your kids won’t have a prefrontal cortex yet. Science tells us that we don’t develop a prefrontal cortex until our late twenties, so technically, your child doesn’t have a PFC yet.

But they do have a limbic system. Your kids may not have a prefrontal cortex, but they do have a limbic system, and so do you! The limbic system consists of the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus, and is located in the middle of your brain. It’s mainly responsible for handling ‘big’ feelings, and triggers your fight or flight response. In general, the limbic system tends to take over when the prefrontal cortex is resting.

Brain development is influenced by different factors. Our brains all tend to develop slightly differently, depending on a variety of factors such as genetics, gender, life experience, illness, traumatic incidents, education, etc.

Our brains continue to grow and develop as the years go on. The human brain will naturally grow and develop as time goes on, and it is exposed to new experiences. So, if your child hasn’t gained as many experiences or skills as you had hoped in their first few years, remember that they have many lessons yet to learn, and their brain is constantly soaking in new information.

Our brains are designed to keep us alive, but sometimes they won’t work in our favour. Like a computer, our brains have been designed in a very specific way. They were originally formed to be able to keep us alive, to think, anticipate, and react. Understandably, all this brain activity can be rather exhausting and counterproductive, as our thoughts, reactions and ideas will often lead us down the wrong path or into unnecessary worry.

Our brains aren’t muscles, but it’s useful to think of them in that way. This is because like the other muscles in our bodies, the more the brain is used, the stronger it will get. On the other hand, the less frequently you use different parts of your brain, the weaker they will get.

What happens in our brains when we get angry?

Raised cortisol levels and more. Unii explains it all.