How to Deal with Anger: The Importance of Introspection and Personal Discipline

by

How to deal with anger blog post

We’ve all felt anger, from the tiniest prick of annoyance to full-on rage. It’s one of the most basic human emotions, like sadness or happiness. There’s a lot of negativity connected to this emotion, but anger isn’t bad on its own; the problem emerges when you can’t control it.

Anger is a natural survival response. When you perceive a threat to your wellbeing, anger prepares you to fight. “Fight” doesn’t necessarily mean engaging in physical violence; it also includes the acts of correcting perceived injustices, from standing up for yourself, to changing laws or advocating for new norms.

Basic emotions are the hardest to control; there’s just something primal to them that makes us act without logic. Emotions are so complex, even science finds it hard to define them.

With proper use, anger can help you work through issues, release stress, build better relationships, and achieve goals. But improper use will lead to you isolating yourself from society and incurring psychological and physical damage, which will prevent you from reaching your goals.

Humans experience anger for a wide range of reasons. Anger can largely depend on a person’s personality and personal history. What angers you greatly may only mildly irritate someone else, or perhaps not even at all.

A recent study found that 84% of Americans believe they are angrier compared to a generation ago, with 42% admitting they were angrier more often than they had been in the past. Almost seven out of ten people believe that anger is a negative emotion. Though far from concrete, the study does prove that there’s a growing problem with anger management.

How to Deal with Anger: 5 Psychologist-Approved Methods

Therapy is an effective way of coping with anger, psychologists say. Let’s explore a few tactics for treating anger that you can practice on your own or under the guidance of a therapist.

1. Relaxation

Angry people are often in a constant state of nervousness or sensitivity. Controlling your breathing, or doing image training to exercise your mind, helps you calm down angry feelings before they get out of hand.

Find your own go-to activity that’ll help you relax and release pent-up stress and emotions that can contribute to anger. Physical activities like jogging and exercise are a great start in dealing with anger!

2. Cognitive Restructuring

Change the way you think. When angry, you often do exaggerated and overdramatic things that reflect those angry thoughts. Replacing these thoughts with more rational ones helps set things in perspective.

For example, athletes don’t think of failing a race or match as defeat. Rather, most athletes go over their performance to check on their good and bad points. They then make future training plans based on these. They definitely feel anger, but channel this emotion properly into ways that can help them grow.

3. Better Communication

Frustrations often arise from poor communication, overthinking, assumptions, and jumping to conclusions. What you say and mean may come off differently for other people because people don’t think exactly alike. All of these contribute to miscommunication that brings about conflict, which in turn ignites anger.

Improve your communication by listening, processing the information well, and speaking in turn. Don’t just spout whatever comes to mind immediately. Listen to when someone criticizes you and think about how these critiques can help you grow instead of jumping to an argument.

4. Developing the Right Skills

Sometimes, anger comes from a lack of skill. People can be prideful and hesitant to admit their own shortcomings. Unfortunately, we often project these negative feelings on other people, whom we mistakenly see as the cause of the problem.

There’s a common story of managers blaming those under them for failures, but fail to understand that part of the problem could be their managing style. Improving on what we lack can help us avoid these kinds of feelings and situations.

Learning or improving new skills is a good way of experiencing fulfillment. The more you know and the more you have experienced, the better you’ll avoid the frustrations of failure and setbacks.

5. Using Humor

Utilize the silly aspect of humor to defuse the rage you’re experiencing. It’s a way of balancing your perspective by injecting some “softness” to the “hardness” that you feel when angry. A person who tries to actively move away from negative emotions through a positive attitude is less likely to maintain a negative outlook.

Imagining how absurd your demands and thoughts are when angry is a good way of realizing how unimportant the things you’re angry about really are. If you’re lucky, you might just laugh it off.

4 Stages of Anger

People often think of anger as a one-level emotion, and it’s often perpetuated by the media. In tv and film, you often see people going from quiet serenity to full-on rage. But anger is a complex emotion that differs wildly with each person. There are different stages which are affected by different triggers and factors.

1. Annoyance

Annoyance is the first and most common stage of anger. We mostly get annoyed with the little things, including long lines, traffic, loud sounds, and rude behavior. It’s a mild emotion that tends to go away as quickly as it came. It’s also fairly easy to regulate, but people who are constantly annoyed need to find out whether they can make some changes to lessen their constant annoyance.

2. Frustration

If annoyance isn’t dealt with quickly, it can turn to frustration. It often happens when we deal with consistent negative outcomes which leave us in a constant negative emotional state. An employee who’s late for one time can be forgiven, but consistent tardiness can leave a manager frustrated.

Frustrated people often feel helpless and without control when dealing with the things that frustrate them, leaving it harder for them to keep their composure. It’s an emotion that takes time to subside, especially when constant failures keep piling on.

3. Hostility

Hostility is the result when frustrations keep increasing without being properly processed. Pent up negative emotions start to seep into the way you talk and act. It’s often a defensive mechanism or a way to release some much-needed emotions. But expressing hostility is never pleasant. Shouting, swearing, or physical attacks are the most common ways to display hostility. These signs can quickly turn a bad situation into something worse, leading to the fourth stage of anger.

4. Rage

Rage is the final and most dangerous stage of anger. Someone in a rage has lost control of their emotions and is extremely hard to calm down. When enraged, a person is often verbally and physically abusive and may do things such as throwing objects, making threats, and actively trying to hurt others. People in a rage often make trouble not only for themselves but for the people around them.

Consequences of Poor Anger Management

Anger can’t be compartmentalized; when you’re angry, it bleeds into all aspects of your life, including your personal relationships, health, and work.

When you’re angry, your body undergoes physical changes. Heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure increase. Your body releases stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol.  Body temperature rises and your muscles tense up. If you’re constantly angry, these processes don’t stop and soon wear down on your body, causing insomnia, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and a weakened immune system.

Constant anger is mentally exhausting. It limits your brain activity and making it hard to experience and enjoy life. It makes you focus on the stress and aggression you’re feeling, which can further develop into substance abuse, depression, and other mental disorders.

Anger can severely strain your close relationships, leading to some people avoiding you altogether. It makes mutual trust, honesty, and respect harder to cultivate when others feel fearful and uncomfortable around you. Explosive anger is especially damaging, and can lead to physical violence and altercations with the law.

Discipline Yourself Against Outbursts

Anger is a serious emotion that needs some monitoring on your part. It’s easily stoked to blazing degrees, and hard to put out once it’s raging. It’s also normal for people to experience anger multiple times a week, so it builds up quickly.

Though the emotion is impossible to fully control, efficient anger management gives rewards that are worth the effort. Most of us make the mistake of using band-aid solutions to our anger rather than fixing the root cause. We might be tempted to go on partying and enjoy, rather than sorting out what we feel. Sometimes, we even let it be without coming to terms with why we’re even angry.

Take up a new hobby, go on consistent morning walks, or try out new activities with your friends. Having these appropriate channels to deal with your anger will help you form solid relationships, achieve your goals, and lead a more satisfying life. And the more you practice it, the easier it will get.

Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments below!

 

If you enjoyed this post, then you might also like: