Everybody knows what is anger? It’s a pretty strong emotion; all of us have felt it. You must have felt hostile towards someone or something, who, you feel has deliberately done you wrong. Though anger is a completely normal human emotion but uncontrolled anger can negatively affect a person’s psychological and social wellbeing.
Anger affects the way we feel, think and behave, so basically what we think, affect our feelings, and consequently, we react as for how we feel.
In order to learn anger management, we have to work on all the components of it which we may have never learned to do. Let’s try to learn how we can possibly do it.
First of all we have to challenge our angry thoughts. These thoughts just flash into one’s mind and make him feel worse. To fight with these negative hot thoughts different strategies can be implied like
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- Remember! When you are angry, your thinking become exaggerated and dramatic. Try to replace these angry thoīughts with more rational ones for example instead of telling yourself “I just can’t stand this,” or “it’s extremely awful” etc replace these with phrases like “yeah it’s frustrating, and I am disgusted but getting angry about it can’t help me to fix it.
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- Try not to use absolute words for yourself and for others like “always “and “never. “ Such statements not only give some sort of rationale of your anger but also hurt people around you who, otherwise, might want to help you to resolve your problems.
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- Try to be more rational — as logic defeats anger.
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- Tell yourself that world is not intended to harm you in particular. You might be just going through a bad patch of your life. That’s it!
Angry thoughts make you irritable, short tempered and frustrated and it leads to physical changes in your body like trembling in limbs, headache, heart pounding, clenching of your fist etc.
To help yourself relieve from such physical changes you can use different breathing and imagery exercises to relax your mind and body for example
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- Breath in slowly, imagine that it is coming from your “gut”, to the count of four or you can use a calm word like “relax”. Hold it for a while, then breath out slowly. Repeat this process until you begin to feel calm.
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- Imagine a pleasant scene from your memory or create one to make yourself relax.
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- Different yoga exercises can also help in controlling anger.
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- Regular physical exercise like walking has been proved to be helpful in altering mood.
Hostile reactions like anger outburst, hit out or abusive language can also be altered with more appropriate reactions.
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- Try to improve communication, by replacing anger with assertiveness.
- Try to express your actual feelings, rather going into angry words.
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- Slow down and listen to the other person, avoid mind reading and never jump to the conclusion and don’t immediately start fighting back.
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- Changing your immediate surroundings, for the time being, can also be helpful; to feel better prepared to handle stressful demands of our environment, which give us cause for irritation and fury.
If you think that you are not able to control your anger, if it’s having marked negative impact on your relationships and on crucial part of your life. Then it’s better to consult a psychologist and consider counseling to learn effective ways to handle it better.
