The Body Doesn’t Lie: What Your Anger Is Really Doing
He came to see me about his stomach.
He was a restaurant manager. Long hours, late finishes, eating at midnight because that was when the shift ended. His IBS had been getting worse for months. Bloating, pain, unpredictable symptoms. He’d tried cutting foods out. He’d Googled. He’d worried. Nothing shifted.
I didn’t prescribe anything. I asked him about his hours, his sleep, when he was eating and why. We made a plan. Earlier eating where possible. Enough rest. Slowing down just slightly at the edges of his day.
A week later, the symptoms had largely gone.
His body wasn’t broken. It was responding to a life that had become unsustainable. It had been trying to tell him something for months. He just hadn’t had anyone ask the right questions.
The Body Speaks. Most Men Stop Listening.
I see this pattern consistently in my clinical work with men. The body carries emotional and physiological load long before we’re willing to acknowledge what’s driving it.
Another patient spent over a year going backwards and forwards to A&E with chronic migraines. Multiple GP visits. Several CT scans. A long list of medications that didn’t quite work. I’d estimate the NHS spent upwards of £10,000 investigating and treating him in that twelve months.
When I looked at his life, not just his symptoms, I suggested daily deep breathing exercises, vitamin D, and magnesium. I asked him to come back in a week.
The migraines had largely cleared.
I want to be careful here. I’m not suggesting that all physical symptoms have a simple fix, or that investigations are wrong. Sometimes they’re essential. But what the body is often doing, particularly under chronic stress, is speaking in the only language it has left. Pain. Exhaustion. Gut symptoms. Headaches.
The frustrating part? It’s easy to see in other people. Much harder to see in yourself.
I Didn’t See It in Myself
When I left my GP partnership, I still needed to maintain my licence to practise. So I worked a small number of locum shifts each week.
I would come home from those shifts exhausted. Head pounding. Needing to lie down before I could do anything else. It didn’t occur to me that this was a problem. It felt like a normal consequence of a long day.
It was only when I stopped working within the NHS altogether that the symptoms disappeared.
Last week I wrote about finding ten boxes of paracetamol in my old work bag. I had completely forgotten that I used to live with chronic headaches. They had become so ordinary that I stopped registering them as a signal. The body keeps the score. It just doesn’t always present the invoice in a format we recognise.
The Productivity Trap
There’s another layer worth naming.
Part of what was driving me to keep working those locum shifts was money. And behind the money was fear. A rule I had absorbed, without realising it, from watching my father work in a certain way. More work equals more security. More security equals safety.
The logic had a flaw. What’s the point of earning more money if you have no energy to enjoy it? If you’re too depleted to be present with the people who matter most? It took stepping away from everything to see how skewed that thinking had become.
Many of the men I work with carry a version of this same rule. Busyness as safety. Output as proof of worth. The body becomes the collateral damage of a logic that was never really questioned.
If this is landing somewhere, you might want to read more about why high performers are struggling, because the pattern usually starts well before burnout becomes visible.
The Exercise Myth Nobody Wants to Hear
Here’s something that might surprise you.
When you’re already angry, going for a run might be making things worse.
That’s the conclusion of a landmark review by Kjærvik and Bushman, published in Clinical Psychology Review in 2024. They analysed 154 studies involving over 10,000 participants, specifically looking at which activities actually reduce anger.
The activities that worked were the ones that calm the body down. Deep breathing. Mindfulness. Meditation. Yoga. Progressive muscle relaxation. Activities that decrease physiological arousal.
The activities that didn’t reliably work, and sometimes made things worse, were the arousal-increasing ones. Running. Hitting a punchbag. Venting out loud. The catharsis idea, the idea that you can burn anger off by going harder, has no scientific backing.
I Know This Because I Lived It
I remember cycling home from a late shift near the point of burnout. Steep hill. Long day. By the time I got through the door I was overenergised, on edge, full of stress hormones with nowhere to go. I would storm out of the house. Couldn’t be near my wife or my young children. My head was clanging and I just had to lie down.
I thought the cycling was helping me decompress. It wasn’t. I was adding physiological fuel to a fire that was already burning.
I see the same thing in some of my testosterone patients. Men who are very committed to the gym, training six times a week, no real rest days. They come in not feeling right. Sometimes the answer is simple: the nervous system has never been given permission to recover. The stress hormones never drop. The body never gets the signal that it’s safe to rest.
You can read more about the relationship between testosterone, stress, and emotional regulation if you want to go deeper on that connection.
What the Science Says Actually Works
The Kjærvik and Bushman findings point toward something important: calming the body down is not a soft option. It is the evidence-based one.
Deep breathing. A slow walk without headphones. Sitting still for five minutes before you react. Yoga. Mindfulness. These are interventions backed by a review of over 10,000 people.
Running harder when you’re already flooded with cortisol is not strength. It is, according to the research, often counterproductive.
The body doesn’t lie. It just needs you to slow down long enough to hear it.
If you’re unsure where your anger pattern actually sits, the Anger Audit is a good place to start. It’s a short diagnostic quiz that gives you a clear profile in about four minutes: the-anger-audit.scoreapp.com
I’m making three Controlled Fire Study Calls available this week, free of charge, worth £625 each. We’ll work to solve your biggest anger issue in the next seven days. All I ask in return is honest feedback. If you’re not happy with what we cover, I’ll give you a copy of my Purpose Project course, worth £80, at no cost.
To book one of the three spots, email me at ed@mensmindgp.com with the subject line “Controlled Fire”.
Change One Thing
Before your next difficult moment, try this.
Before you react. Before you send the message. Before you walk back in through the door.
Take sixty seconds. Run a quiet check through your body. Jaw. Shoulders. Chest. Stomach. Name what you find. You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to say it out loud. Just name it.
The body has been speaking. This is how you start to listen.
References
Kjærvik, S.L. & Bushman, B.J., Clinical Psychology Review, 2024. Meta-analysis of anger reduction strategies, 154 studies, 10,189 participants.
Levant, R.F. & Richmond, K., Journal of Men’s Studies, 2016. Normative male alexithymia and emotional suppression in men.
Mauss, I.B. & Robinson, M.D., Cognition & Emotion, 2009. Measures of emotion regulation and physiological consequences of suppression.
WFSBP/ASLM Lifestyle Medicine Guidelines for Major Depressive Disorder, 2022. Lifestyle interventions as foundational treatment across 8 domains.