Seahawks cornerback Tariq Woolen jeopardized Seattle’s 2026 Super Bowl trip with a taunting penalty after a key defensive play during the NFC championship game. On the very next play, the Rams, sensing Woolen’s head was occupied with matters other than the game, threw a touchdown pass to receiver Puka Nacua, whom Woolen was covering. One of the game announcers said he liked to see players “juiced up,” but Woolen, he argued, had gone too far.
Is there such a thing as a good amount of anger? Angry NFL players are common; do they think it gives them a competitive edge?
In On Anger, the Stoic philosopher Seneca dissected false beliefs about anger. Seneca observed then, as in our time, that many believed “it is best to control anger, not do away with it, and to reduce it to a healthy mean by stripping away the excess while retaining the element that prevents action from turning feeble.”
In short, some believe we need anger to avoid being “feeble.” Just because a belief is widely shared, however, doesn’t make it true.
John Wooden is perhaps the greatest college basketball coach of all time. He was renowned for the strict standards he held his players to and for his calm demeanor during games. A Woolen-type player would never have a place on a Wooden roster.
In Wooden On Leadership, written by Wooden with Steve Jamison, he described how he demanded self-control from his players, writing, “Control of self is necessary for consistency in leadership and team performance.” He prohibited profanity driven by “frustration or anger,” because it led to “poor decisions that would almost always hurt the team.”
Wooden saw himself as a teacher, and he taught “Self-Control by having it.” Self-control, Wooden believed, was UCLA’s sixth man, dramatically increasing the team’s effectiveness.
We can ask, does being an angry advocate for liberty make one more or less effective? After all, a flood of events in the world calls to our emotions.
It’s best, Seneca argued, not to let anger in the front door, for it will control you. He observed that once anger takes “up tenancy [it’s] more powerful than the one who would rule [it].” Most of us have experienced the truth of Seneca’s wisdom.
Our perception narrows when we allow anger to take hold; our judgment becomes distorted. We see threats where none exist; we interpret neutral actions as personal affronts. The mind, as Seneca explains, becomes “a slave of the thing that shoves it along.” In Woolen's case, on the football field, anger consumed his attention, degraded his focus, and left him vulnerable to the very opponent he sought to dominate. Seneca described anger as being “like a collapsing building that’s reduced to rubble even as it crushes what it falls upon.”
Seneca uses this analogy to explain why anger will master you rather than you mastering anger:
People who have jumped off a cliff retain no independent judgment and cannot offer resistance or slow the descent of their bodies in freefall: that irrevocable leap strips away all deliberation and regret, and they cannot help but arrive at an outcome they would have been free to reject at the outset.
Seneca's description of anger's mechanism is particularly instructive: “Anger ventures nothing on its own but acts only with the mind's approval.” It requires our assent. Seneca’s sequence is precise: (a) we have the impression that we have been wronged, (b) we desire to take vengeance for it, and then (c) we combine both in the judgment that we ought not to have been harmed and that we ought to be avenged. This occurs with our conscious participation.
Observe this in your own life, for both small and large events. We chew over personal grievances like a dog with a bone. We grind our teeth and harm our bones, yet we’re sure someone or something else is responsible for the damage.
Seneca emphasized that the study of anger is not merely an academic activity. If anger simply emerges against our will, there would be no point in trying to comprehend it. Seneca dismantles this illusion: “Anger is a fault of the mind subject to our will. It's not among the things that happen to us just because of our lot as humans, and happen, accordingly, even to the very wise; and among these things must be included the initial mental jolt that stirs us when we believe we've been wronged.”
I had been conducting a workshop at a large government organization, leading the group to see how our experience of life is generated from the inside out. It only seems that circumstances, events, and other people create our experience of life. It is really our interpretation of these things that creates our experience. A participant speaking urgently said, “I was grocery shopping, and someone banged my foot with their shopping cart. They made me mad!” Seneca would smile, affirming that anything can set us off.
The distinction between the initial jolt and anger itself is crucial. The jolt—that instinctive surge of reactive energy—is a feature of human nature that most of us experience. But anger is something we construct through our interpretations and deliberate choices. “Passion, then, consists not in being stirred in response to impressions presented to us, but in surrendering ourselves to those impressions and following up the mind's first chance movement.”
Seneca’s observations debunk the belief that anger provides a competitive advantage. Anger requires us to surrender to impressions rather than evaluate them. It demands that we follow the mind's first, unconsidered movement rather than pause and choose our response. This is precisely what Wooden recognized and steered his players away from.
But how about in extreme situations? Seneca advises, “Nowhere do we need [anger] less: that's when our aggressive actions must be controlled and obedient to commands, not given free play.” When the stakes are highest, these are precisely the moments when we need clear thinking most and anger least.
The Stoics taught that anger substitutes a personal reactive impulse for the wisdom that comes from the part of our mind connected to our true Nature. Our true Nature is wiser than the knee-jerk response from our ego. Don’t take this to mean Seneca would have us singing “Kumbaya” while mouthing spiritual pieties, however.
Seneca offers a better way. An angry mind, he taught, is a “weak mind.” Instead, when events activate our sense of duty, he advises, “The fine and worthy thing is to come forward in defense of one's parents, children, friends, and fellow citizens with one's sense of obligation actually leading the way, and to do so willingly, deliberately, and prudently, not impulsively and furiously.”
When you are convinced that strength from anger is an illusion, that mindset shift alone does a lot of heavy lifting to help you drop some of your anger. Awareness is a healing balm.
Part 2 of this essay will consider in depth how to let go of anger, but let me leave you with one more pointer from Seneca.
Seneca believed that human life is “held fast in a pact of mutual assistance ... by mutual affection.” To maintain this pact, he offers a simple but profound piece of advice: “agreeing to cut each other some slack.” We are “all inconsiderate and careless; we’re all unreliable, complaining, grasping.” Recognition of our own potential for “wickedness” makes us “gentler with one another.”
Become more gentle and more effective; I call that win-win.