The anger loop creeps in when my mind isn’t otherwise occupied.

It starts when I wake in the morning, especially if I haven’t slept well. My upper teeth and my lower teeth are engaged in battle. I stumble into the bathroom and obsess about the size of my nose. On the drive to the station, I revise old pains and fluff up my annoyance when the car in front of me stops or someone is too slow making a turn. There are just so many people out there who offend my sensitivities and don’t do things the way I would do them.

By the time I reach the station, I’m ready to be annoyed at people who hold everyone up parking. Particularly the ones who make two or three attempts to back their car into a space, presumably so it will be easier for them to drive out when they get home at night. Don’t these people realise that we all have trains to catch and jobs to get to? I drive my car straight into the space, probably more forcefully than is necessary. It’s much easier to reverse out when I’m not stressed about catching the train. Although there’ll probably be something else to be stressed about when I arrive back.

On the train people make me nervous. Obviously the ones who sit next to me harbour ill will or will otherwise complain about something I’m doing. I prepare scathing replies in my head for when I will need them. I make myself comfortable, daring them to complain. Then I try to read something, just to relax.

By the time I get to work I’m grateful for something to occupy my mind. Email or a morning meeting are best, I’m disappointed if I have something which requires focus first thing in the morning. Focus can be slippery, it opens the door to other thoughts. Other thoughts slither in during the day anyway and if something goes wrong I’m primed and ready to jump down someone’s throat.

Whenever my mind has nothing to occupy it, the anger loop is there. It keeps me company when I go for a walk or empty the garbage. It complains about my lack of a successful career and blames sexism and ‘jobs for the boys’ (which may even be true but doesn’t help much for the future). It tells me no one likes me and I don’t have any friends. It brings on hypertension and the urge to protect myself by getting fatter and fatter. I dwell on all the bad things and so good things never come to me.

I suppose you could call it ‘self talk’. It’s what positive thinkers and self development trainers tell you to watch carefully. When you catch yourself telling yourself negative things you’ve got to turn it around and tell yourself what a wonderful, deserving person you are. They don’t know how insidious the anger loop is, how my mind runs from angry thought to angry thought just below the level of consciousness. How can bland affirmations about happiness and drawing good things to me compete with that kind of fire?

Psychologists are more circumspect. Just breathe when you feel it coming on, they say, or focus on the things you can see and hear and smell around you. I can see someone staggering along the walking path and hear the sound of a lawnmower and the cawing of a tone deaf bird who obviously failed nightingale school. I can also see the lake and feel the sunshine on my skin. There’s an old man occupying the other half of the bench I am sitting on. I was sure he objected to my presence. He walks over to the bin to put something in, then pauses to say good bye in a friendly manner and walks off.

What would it be like to have a friendly loop running around my head all the time? What if I woke with a smile on my lips and expected everyone around me to be polite and well meaning? I rarely smile at others because I’m afraid they won’t smile back but what if I didn’t care and smiled anyway? The Dalai Lama says we should look at others with compassion and understanding. Maybe people who reverse their cars into the parking spot at the station every morning are concerned about being able to drive out quickly at night time so they can pick up their kids on time. Those people who drive slowly, maybe they aren’t as confident as I am. Not every woman had a former rally driver mother who forced her to get her licence at 17. If I focus on positive thoughts about others, will more positive things come for me?

What about the ‘I’m the best’ loop the positive thinkers talk about? What if I imagined that I was successful and everyone loved me? I keep thinking this one has the potential to pump hot air into my brain and make me unbearable in company. I’m not sure it’s realistic either, if everybody loved me how could I be mad at anyone? Sometimes you just need to be angry and negative. Or maybe that’s just me.

What about the karma loop? I could accept everything life brings me and wonder which past life was the cause. This may be a little difficult, given that I know zero about any of my past lives. In fact, the only proof I have that I even had a past life is a woman who looked at my palm at a party once and told me I was an old soul. Maybe I was a real bastard and I’m still angry at myself for all the evil things I did. I might have been Hitler, what a supreme irony for Hitler to be reincarnated as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor! My mind shies away from that, I would truly deserve a much worse life than I have had if I were Hitler in a past life. The things his anger made him do were truly frightening. I might have just been a supercilious and narrow-minded fool who set my own standards as a way of judging others. Hmm…guess I haven’t learned a thing since then.

I could try a problem solving loop. It might be a bit much first thing in the morning but by the time I got to the station I could be revising possible solutions to the refugee problem or working out how to stop myself spending so much money and eating so much food. I could have a go at putting together the theory of everything physicists talk about, though that would involve understanding what all those subatomic particles are supposed to be doing and why the Higgs boson gives particles mass. Although I think I got that one, something about a Higgs field that stops us all zipping around at the speed of light. Hmm…maybe I should start smaller.

I have a friend with what she calls a fantasy loop, she spends mental downtime thinking about how she could make good things happen for her friends. I like that thinking but I guess I always expect my friends to find good things for themselves. And for me if they have any spare time.

Then there’s the contemplative loop. I could stare out train windows, watching mist on the water and seeing it as a metaphor for growing clarity as my mind slowly wakes. I would probably generate a lot of really bad poetry but as long as I kept it to myself, I’m guessing no one would hit me. Or maybe the anger loop would just slither in amongst those thoughts and I’d start worrying that the people next to me would stare in absolute horror at the things I am thinking. The rattling of the train would become a metaphor for all the things with which I can beat myself about the head.

Maybe the only way to kill the anger loop stone dead is to start laughing.