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Anger is a natural part of life and a normal emotion reaction that everyone experiences at times. When confronted with anger, it’s important to take a moment to calm down and understand the root cause of your emotion. By undertaking this introspective journey, you empower yourself to proactively address and mitigate the anger, fostering emotional well-being.
Managing anger can be a challenge, especially if you don’t have healthy coping skills and if you haven’t addressed the root of the emotion, that at times can be very deeply rooted on past experiences and other times is related to more recent issues or situations. However, addressing your anger can lead to a more fulfilling and content life.
When anger clouds your judgment, it can have negative consequences for both yourself and those in close proximity. It’s presence can lead to errors and misinterpretations that can cause confusion and/or embarrassment. Consequently, it becomes imperative to acquire knowledge about anger and master effective strategies for its management. By doing so, we equip ourselves with the tools needed to navigate this powerful emotion and safeguard our relationships and personal well-being.
What is anger?
Anger is an emotion where you may feel agitated, frustrated, or annoyed. Most of the time, an angry person feels a sense of antagonism towards another person, situation, or object they think wronged them.
Anger is a natural response to challenging or stressful situations. It helps you prepare for battle and motivates you to find answers. But anger can also harm you.
Anger can have detrimental effects on your physical and mental health. It can lead to an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, and overall tension in your body. These physiological responses put you at a higher risk of experiencing a heart attack or stroke.
How to Use Anger
It may seem like anger is a negative emotion that can only cause problems. However, it serves a purpose in our lives. It can be triggered by various situations, such as feeling threatened, frustrated, or when our values are violated. While it is often seen as a negative emotion, it’s important to recognize that anger, when expressed appropriately, can be constructive and lead to positive outcomes.
Suppressing anger, on the other hand, can have detrimental effects on our emotional well-being. When we choose to hide or ignore our anger, it doesn’t simply disappear. Instead, it tends to build up over time, causing inner turmoil and increasing the likelihood of explosive outbursts.
Suppressing anger can also result in feelings of guilt or shame. We might feel guilty for not expressing ourselves honestly or for pretending that everything is okay when it’s not. This internal conflict can add to our overall unhappiness and dissatisfaction.
Instead, use your anger in these ways:
- Use your anger to purge repressed emotions. One way to make your anger work for you — instead of against you — is by using it to let out any suppressed emotions.
● Sometimes anger can be a bundle of suppressed emotions and repressing it only makes it worse. So, anger allows us to address our feelings. Identify healthy ways to express anger and the emotions you were repressing. Some can be writing about them, exercise, talking to others, mindfulness, and tapping.
- Recognize your anger as a piece of information. Another way to use your anger is to view it as a source of information.
● Anger tells us that someone has violated some form of personal boundary. It could be that someone disrespected you in some way, or something you suspected was going to happen eventually finally did happen.
● Seeing anger as a source of information can help you decide if you need to take action in the situation or let it go.
- Use anger to motivate you to act. Anger can be inspiring if it leads us to act. A group of Harvard researchers discovered that anger could encourage people to take hold of their lives.
● For instance, someone told you to give up on your goals because you will never be able to achieve them. The anger that this situation triggered can be used to focus your energy on working towards achieving those goals.
How to manage anger
One way is to practice relaxation techniques. Besides reducing tension, relaxation techniques can help you manage your angry thoughts or words.
For example, you can practice deep breathing while you slowly count to 10, 20, or whatever it takes. The deep breathing relaxes you physically as well as mentally and enables you to think more clearly.
Other great strategies are ways to manage stressors that can lead to anger. For this, exercising regularly, sleeping well, meditation/mindfulness, and setting healthy boundaries are helpful to reduce stress and manage anger.
Often, identifying what other emotions and past situations are behind the anger can allow you to understand where the anger is coming from so that you can take proper steps to process it.
After practicing these strategies a few times, you’ll soon be on your way to a more relaxed and peaceful lifestyle.
