We tend to think of emotions in fairly simple terms. Positive emotions are good, something to cultivate and hold onto. Negative emotions are bad, something to manage, suppress or push through as quickly as possible. But this framework, as intuitive as it feels, misses something important about how emotions actually function in our lives.
Anger, in particular, gets a rough deal. It is an emotion we are often taught to contain, apologise for, or redirect. And yet, the science tells a more nuanced story. Under the right circumstances, anger is not just tolerable. It can be genuinely useful.
The Function of Anger
Emotions are not random. They evolved to serve specific purposes, and anger is no exception. At its core, anger signals a gap: between where we are and where we want to be, between what is happening and what we believe should be happening. It draws our attention to obstacles and, crucially, it motivates us to do something about them.
Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Lench and colleagues in 2023 found that anger increased effort and persistence in the face of challenging goals across a series of experiments involving over a thousand participants. When people were in a state of anger, they were more likely to keep going when things got difficult, and more likely to reach the goal they were working toward.
What makes this finding particularly interesting is the specificity of the effect. Anger appears to be most effective when the goal requires persistence and determination rather than creative thinking or novel problem solving. Schmitt, Gielnik and Seibel, writing in Motivation and Emotion in 2019, found that anger during goal pursuit was positively linked to persistence, particularly when people had a clear sense of what they needed to do next. When the path forward was obvious, anger fuelled the effort to walk it.
The Arousal Connection
Part of what makes anger such a potent motivator is its relationship with physiological arousal. Anger, like stress, activates the body. Heart rate increases, focus sharpens, energy becomes available. This is the same biological machinery that kicks in under pressure, and it turns out that a certain level of this arousal can actually enhance performance rather than hinder it.
This distinction between helpful and unhelpful stress has been studied extensively in sports psychology. Research published in the Stadium Hungarian Journal of Sport Sciences by Németh and Balogh in 2020 describes what is sometimes called eustress, a form of arousal that increases focus and motivation rather than producing anxiety or shutdown. Athletes who interpret their pre-competition arousal as energising rather than threatening tend to perform better. Anger, in moderate amounts, can produce a similar effect.
The key word is moderate. Extreme anger is a different matter entirely. At high intensities, anger can impair judgment, cloud thinking and produce responses that are counterproductive. The relationship between arousal and performance follows an inverted U: there is a sweet spot, and going beyond it tips the balance in the wrong direction.
What This Means in Practice
None of this means you should go looking for things to make you angry before an important meeting or a difficult conversation. But it does suggest a reframe worth considering.
If you notice anger arising when you are working toward something that matters to you, that emotion is trying to tell you something. It is pointing to a gap between where you are and where you want to be. It is offering you energy. The question is not whether to suppress it, but what to do with it.
In therapy, we often explore how clients relate to their own anger. Many people have learned, usually for good reasons rooted in their history, that anger is dangerous, unacceptable, or shameful. But when anger is met with curiosity rather than alarm, it almost always has something useful to say. It tends to sit right at the edge of what matters most.
Negative emotions are not the enemy of a good life. They are part of what makes us human, and they carry information we need. Learning to work with them, rather than against them, is one of the quieter skills that tends to make the biggest difference.
Shevantika Nanda is a counselling psychologist in private practice in Gurugram, India. Her work draws on cognitive neuroscience, CBT, ACT and positive psychology.
References
Lench, H. C., et al. (2023). Anger has benefits for attaining goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000350
Schmitt, A., Gielnik, M. M., and Seibel, S. (2019). When and how does anger during goal pursuit relate to goal achievement? The roles of persistence and action planning. Motivation and Emotion, 43(2), 205–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9720-4
Németh, K., and Balogh, L. (2020). The relationship between arousal zone, anxiety, stress and sports performance. Stadium: Hungarian Journal of Sport Sciences, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.36439/SHJS/2020/2/8603
