Anger, Anxiety, Resentment, Stress, and Basic Humanity

To reduce negative feelings, exercise your sense of basic humanity.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer

Key points

• We become better people by staying in touch with basic humanity — innate interest in the well-being of others.
• Basic humanity motivates respectful, helpful, valuing, nurturing, protective, and altruistic behaviors.
• Basic humanity allows us to grow beyond the limitations of personal experience and prejudice.
• Blame, denial, and avoidance cut us off from basic humanity.

After 40 years of work on problems of anger, resentment, anxiety, and stress, and half a dozen books on the subject, I still get sarcastic emails:

“I want to manage anger, anxiety, and stress, but I’m not interested in becoming a 'better person'.”

Let me be clear. Your chances of consistently managing anger, anxiety, resentment, and stress, without becoming a better person, are practically zero. The only significant and lasting improvement in life and relationships results from becoming “a better person.”

We become better people by staying in touch with basic humanity, the survival-based capacity for interest in the well-being of others.

Basic Humanity and Survival of the Species

Early humans could not have survived competition with more plentiful and powerful predators without banding together in emotionally bonded social units to defend and hunt collectively. Small, emotionally bonded, cooperative communities became the natural order of human social organization. In modern times, we remain dependent on the consideration and cooperation of others, so much so that we condemn even minor deviations from them. The “out-group” phenomenon, instrumental in racism, rises from the fear that “they” won’t be compassionate or cooperative.

Basic Humanity as Motivation

The sense of basic humanity motivates respectful, helpful, valuing, nurturing, protective, and altruistic behaviors. In adversity, it motivates sacrifice. In an emergency, it motivates rescue.

A Requisite of Personal Growth

Basic humanity allows us to grow beyond the limitations of personal experience and prejudice. If out of touch with basic humanity for too long, we become locked in a prison of self. The sense of self grows fragile, in constant need of validation by others, intolerant of differences, resentful, anxious, or angry. We feel less humane.

In touch with basic humanity, we become smarter about the world around us and our relationship to it. There’s an intrinsic reward for this increase in vision; the more in touch with basic humanity, the more humane we feel.

The Prominent Emotions of Basic Humanity

Compassion – motivation to help relieve pain, suffering, discomfort, or hardship.

Kindness – motivation to help others be well.

Guilt – motivation to be true to personal values and community standards.

Shame – motivation to succeed and connect.

Anxiety – motivation to avoid exposure to fear, sorrow, guilt, or shame.

Violations of basic humanity automatically stimulate guilt, shame, and/or anxiety to motivate humane behavior. But that natural motivation is subverted by the toddler's coping mechanisms of blame, denial, and avoidance.

Yes, these ways of coping begin in toddlerhood. Ask a two-year-old how the toy came to be broken, you’ll likely hear:

“He/she did it.” Or “I don’t know.”

Or the kid acts preoccupied, ignoring you, or hiding.

Blame, denial, and avoidance cut us off from basic humanity, which is why, to consistently manage anger, resentment, anxiety, and stress, we must become better people.

The Modern Paradox of Basic Humanity

Why is it so hard to stay in touch with basic humanity?

The answer is simple: There are so many of us, and we’re all different. Basic humanity is easier for individuals to maintain in smaller communities of people who seem to be alike. The mammalian brain, a better-safe-than-sorry organism, distrusts differences. The human bias is to distrust people who look different, believe different things, have different values. Yet our lives are clearly enriched by differences; sameness is boring, while appreciation of differences yields intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth.

How to Maintain Basic Humanity in Diverse Cultures

• Accept the complexity of human beings. When you’re sure you understand someone, you’re most likely oversimplifying, based on superficial observations through inherently biased lenses.
• Appreciate as many differences as you can; tolerate the ones you can’t appreciate.
• Focus on categories of values rather than specific values.

We tend to make invidious, largely error-prone judgments about people whose values are different. To obviate this unfortunate tendency, we must appreciate what we share with most others: value categories. Our specific values vary, but the broader categories seem universal. Anthropological evidence suggests that the following have been important to humans since our earliest time on the planet:

• The ability to form and maintain emotional bonds
• A sense of spirituality (desire for connection with something larger than the self)
• A sense of community (identification with or connection to a group of people)
• Appreciation of natural and creative beauty.

What Makes Me Like Myself Better?

In general, feelings are not a good guide for becoming a better person, as they are always derived from past experience, and acting on them runs the risk of repeating the same mistakes over and over. An exception lies in which behaviors or attitudes produce more positive feelings about the self. Ask yourself:

Will I like myself better when I'm focused on:

How my values differ from someone else’s?
How the categories of our values are similar?

Do I like myself better:

When I’m devaluing other people?
When I’m in touch with basic humanity?