Do you suffer from morning rage?

Morning rage is primarily fuelled by the thought of a day with nothing to look forward to but frustration, exhaustion, and pollution, says G Sampath

Have you ever woken up with the urge to strangle the first thing you can lay your hands on? Do you prise your eyes open with cutting pliers at noon when you should have been at work by 10am? Do you feel infuriated by the sheer impossibility of remaining in bed for as long as you feel like it? Does the very idea of abandoning the horizontal for the vertical position every morning fill you with a mixture of fear, loathing and fury? If your answer is 'yes' to any of these questions, then you will not be unfamiliar with the phenomenon known as morning rage. 

According to a recent study carried out by the deemed University of Chinchpokli, 21.6 per cent of men and 99.3 per cent of women suffer from morning rage. The moment I read about it, I realised I was not alone in the way I felt every morning. 

Morning rage, the study asserts, is a phenomenon seen in all industrial societies that live by the artificial clock of hours and minutes, as opposed to the natural rhythm of sunrise and sunset and the needs of your own body and mind. This means that you are compelled to wake up at 7 or 8 or 9, and be at work by 10 even if the sun is on casual leave.

It means that even if you go to bed at 5am, you have to get up before you have imbibed your quota of eight hours of sleep. This creates a sleep deficit which, in the case of highly evolved, complex individuals like me, gets converted into nervous energy which manifests itself in the form of extreme fury. It is somewhat like the depression over the Arabian Sea creating the monsoons. 

As any anger management expert will tell you, anger is like an automobile. It needs fuel to run. And morning rage is primarily fuelled by the thought of a day with nothing to look forward to but frustration, exhaustion, and pollution. If you are a wage-worker, and report to a boss, the chances of you developing morning rage are about as high as a dog developing a tongue that will hang out. But worry not, there are ways of managing it, and be grateful that I am going to share here my own experiences of coping with it. 

When I wake up early in the morning at 11, my eyes bleeding with five hours of unslept sleep, the first thing I want to do is to nuke the world. But I find I can't do that yet as we've still not signed the nuclear deal with the Americans. This thwarted desire and the resultant frustration ups the temperature of my rage by about 50 degrees. And I leap out of bed like a Dadar variety Hulk - without the greenish tint or muscles, but seething with the same quantum of resentment. I stomp my way to the kitchen, ready to bellow at Wife for no good reason.

But unfortunately, I find her deeply engrossed in a copy of DNA. My contract prohibits me from causing physical harm to any reader of DNA, even if it happens to be my own wife. I have no choice but to gnash my teeth quietly, and slink away into the bathroom to brush. If you have never brushed your teeth while simultaneously gnashing it, I suggest you try it. 

By now growling silently, I get dressed without tearing my clothes, gulp down breakfast without slicing my tongue to bits, and swallow my tea without choking on it. I get into my car, which while waiting for me in the sun for four hours, has become a furnace. This raises my temperature by another 50 degrees, and my acute irritability is like a time bomb ready to explode. I get behind the wheel, and as I am about to take the turn into the main road near the signal, a moron on a motorbike cuts me off from the left, forcing me to brake hard. That does it. The frame freezes, and in super-slow-motion, I
open the car door, step out, and eye the biker calmly through my goggles. 

As the soundtrack of 'Terminator II: Judgment Day' plays in the background, I'm instantly transformed by computer graphics into the ruthless, implacable and unstoppable T-1000, the killing machine. My face is set in a mask of controlled fury. And I move, in strong, even strides, towards the motorbike waiting at the signal. Something makes the biker turn around. He sees me, and immediately starts trembling. When I'm less than a foot away from him, I raise my right hand and point my forefinger at his face. My finger slowly expands into a deadly steel rod, stopping just a millimetre short of his eyes, and having reduced him to a quivering mass of terrified jelly, I casually puncture the tyres of his TVS Apache and calmly walk
back to my car. 

On other days, I don't transform into T-1000. I become Sunny Deol, and merely beat the biker to pulp, which is somehow more satisfying than puncturing tyres. Or I am a member of the Gambolfini family. In which case I can only express myself by fixing an interview with SB, a Page 3 celebrity I find especially annoying, and when I meet her for brunch at JW Marriot, I elegantly chop off her pedicured toes one by one in the decreasing order of their length, beginning with the big toe.

Then, using aluminium string to hold them in place, I arrange the10 pieces in the shape of Shah Rukh Khan's nose, and gift-wrap them in yellow cellophane. Then I despatch them by courier, with a typed covering letter, to KM, her equally annoying celebrity boyfriend. 

But unfortunately, the pre-post-modern ethos of our quasi-feudal society does not offer people suffering from morning rage the right post-Dadaist opportunities to express their anger in creative Jungian ways.

So it usually finds an outlet in rioting, arson, and damage to public property, all of which is really a dumbing down of violence. No wonder the various members of the Thackeray clan and their legions of perpetually offended followers take to it ever so often. Nothing but displaced morning rage. Those who don't know how to deal with it should either never get up in the morning, or be put to sleep, for good.
sampath@dnaindia.net