Anger is sparked when people and events in our…

Anger is sparked when people and events in our lives fail to meet our expectations

— from The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations)

In the book

That is its genius and its trap, because almost all our suffering at the hands of other people is the gap between what we expected and what occurred. Anger, specifically, is sparked when people and events fail to meet our expectations. Satisfaction with life is nothing more than a verdict — does what is happening measure up to what I expected? […] Anxiety itself is not a response to danger but to the perception of a threat — adjust the reading and the feeling follows. Anger, we said, is just an expectation collision. And the cruelest trick of the forecasting instrument is that we adapt: attain the thing we were sure would make us happy, and within months the expectation simply resets higher, and we are hungry again. — The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations)

The moment anything feels like a threat — especially a threat to how you see yourself — you stop thinking and you start reacting. Anger flares the instant the world fails to match what you expected of it; fear's whole impulse is to run, to hide, to freeze. These are not decisions. — The Heart in the Cockpit (Emotion/Awe/Anxiety/Regret/Empathy)

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