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Manage anger, be happy
Maintaining emotional balance is the key to feeling good. Strong emotions like anger threaten that delicate balance. Understanding your anger is the first step to managing it. |
Understanding anger
Anger is a powerful emotion that can stem from feelings of frustration, hurt, annoyance, or disappointment. It’s a normal human emotion that can range from slight irritation to strong rage.
Anger can be harmful or helpful, depending on how it’s expressed. Knowing how to recognize and express anger in appropriate ways can help people reach goals, handle emergencies, and solve problems. However, problems can occur if people fail to recognize and understand their anger.
Suppressing anger has its own dangers
Suppressed anger can be an underlying cause of anxiety and depression. Anger that is not appropriately expressed or channeled can disrupt relationships, affect thinking and behavior patterns, and create a variety of physical problems. Long-term unmanaged anger has been linked to health issues such as high blood pressure, heart problems, headaches, skin disorders, and digestive problems.
In addition, anger has links to problems such as crime, emotional and physical abuse, and other violent behavior.
Violence causes more injury and death in children, teenagers, and young adults than infectious disease, cancer, or birth defects. Murder, suicide, and violent injury are the leading causes of death in children. Violence with guns is one of the leading causes of death of children and teenagers in the United States. About 5,000 teenagers are murdered every year.
Steps you can take to manage your anger
There’s a variety of ways to help control your anger, including:
- When you start feeling angry, try deep breathing, positive self-talk, or stopping your angry thoughts. Breathe deeply from your diaphragm. Slowly repeat a calm word or phrase such as “relax” or “take it easy.” Repeat it to yourself while breathing deeply until the anger subsides.
- Although expressing anger may be better than keeping it in, anger should be expressed in an appropriate way. Frequent outbursts of anger are often counter-productive and cause problems in relationships with others. Anger outbursts are also stressful to your nervous and cardiovascular systems and can make health problems worse. Learning how to use assertiveness is the healthy way to express your feelings, needs, and preferences. Being assertive can replace the use of anger in these situations. Of course, being a bully is not appropriate.
- Seek out the support of others. Talk through your feelings and try to work on changing your behaviors.
- If you have trouble realizing when you’re having angry thoughts, keep a log of when you feel angry.
- Try to gain a different perspective by putting yourself in another's place.
- Learn how to laugh at yourself and see humor in situations.
- Practice good listening skills. Listening can help improve communication and can facilitate trusting feelings between people. This trust can help you deal with potentially hostile emotions.
- Learn to assert yourself. Express your feelings calmly and directly without becoming defensive, hostile or emotionally charged up. Consult self-help books on assertiveness or seek help from a professional therapist to learn how to use assertiveness and anger management skills.
The bottom line
If happiness is important to you, then strong emotions like anger must be recognized, understood, and kept in-check. Make your emotional well-being a priority and not only will you get more enjoyment out of life, so will everyone who shares your company.
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