All these dudes unable to regulate their emotions “because” they’re in a competitive environment is an embarrassment to manhood.
Dear Kansas brawlers, Myles Garrett and Mason Rudolph being dumb, Tom Brady throwing sideline fits, Draymond Green getting technicals, and batters everywhere storming mounds: quit giving the rest of us real men who can regulate our emotions a bad rap. For whatever reason, sports can somehow give guys unspoken permission to be impulsive, aggressive, and immature when they’re emotionally charged?
Ugh. I hope not.
It is our job as men to improve our insight into our emotionality and intelligence into our emotion regulation abilities. Too often guys get emotionally charged, their brains go into fight-or-flight mode and fear/anger/other-unhelpful-responses take over. Recent sports brawls are one case in point.
In the words of Master Yoda, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” In the non-Star Wars world, feeling threatened leads to fight-or-flight responses, fight-or-flight leads to anger, anger leads to psychological stress, stress leads to the brain shutting down its regulatory system for itself, and that leads to a whole chain reaction of unhelpful, irrational responses.
Functionally, what happens in those moments of aggression for dudes who can’t control it is anger fires up the amygdala and shuts down the prefrontal cortex responsible for rational thinking. Instead of acting rationally, anger creates a loop of stress that cannot shut itself down. Some forms of “letting emotions out” are helpful, but treating anger with aggression actually makes it worse, not better.
Historically, the flight-or-flight response has helped us survive for centuries. From an evolutionary/natural selection perspective, our caveman ancestors made one of two possible mistakes. They may have erred on the side of caution – assuming threats were around every corner – always being ready when one did pop up. The other mistaken assumption was in presuming there were no threats when there actually were. So from an evolutionary perspective, who was more likely to survive and reproduce? Caveman Fred who assumed all bushes could have tigers popping out of them or Caveman Barney who figured there are probably no tigers behind bushes? Yeah – Barney probably met a quicker end.
The only problem is that when fight-or-flight is engaged, like getting emotionally charged in the competitive environment of sports, it shuts down the rational parts of our brain responsible for thinking through decisions. Guys are particularly primed to engage fight-or-flight mode because aggression is linked to testosterone (which kicks into gear especially during competition). But while this system has helped humanity survive saber-toothed tiger attacks, natural disasters, and other threats to our survival for thousands of years, it primes our brains with negativity which, if not well-regulated, can lead to chronic stress.
This is a problem because an overactive threat-response system (i.e., not being able to self-regulate emotionality - like brawls and grown man tantrums, or “mantrums” if you will) makes a guy susceptible to health problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease, poor immune system functioning, and anxiety. In part, the link from fight-or-flight to stress to health problems exists because many of us use the wrong strategies for regulation. Research shows that aggressive thoughts and angry emotions perpetuate more aggression and more anger; as researcher Brad Bushman put it after confirming this with his research: “venting to reduce anger is like using gasoline to put out a fire—it only feeds the flame.”
Dear Male Athletes: Thank you to those of you who have insight and regulation skills for emotionality. For others, get your immaturity and emotional sh*t under control. Too many of us and our sons are looking up to you.