ANGER MANAGEMENT

Anger is a natural emotion. It’s nature’s way of telling us that something in our lives has gone haywire. Anger is usually “triggered” by an occurrence.

When we go through in any bad situation, we think something like “what did I do to deserve that”.Sometimes emotion takes over your mind and the “pain” of the situation leads you to believe the answer to your question is “Nothing. I didn’t deserve that at all!” Feelings of hurt and betrayal further try to override logic and you’re ready to act on your anger by either suppressing it or expressing it.

 

Suppressing your anger may lead you to believe you have it under control. However, suppressing anger doesn’t solve your problem and is a dangerous type of anger management. Suppressed anger stays with you over time and can lead to mental health problems like depression, and physical problems like “stress” headaches and high blood pressure. Additionally, continually suppressing your anger can curtail your ability to act in the face of a real threat to your well-being.

Anger needs to be expressed. Yet, aggressive displays of anger can result in violent eruptions that further hurt you socially, mentally, and physically. The goal of anger management is to help you find healthy ways to express your anger and resolve the problems that ignite it. The first step in anger management is learning to define the problem and face it head on!

 

Anger Management Tips

• Find a safe spot. Yelling at friends or family members, slamming doors, and breaking crockery doesn’t solve any problem and frequently escalates angry situations between people. Yet, sometimes you just need to vent. Finding a safe spot to act our your anger can relieve the majority of your stress, calming you enough to solve the real problem at hand. Go to a basement room and scream your head off! Take an empty jar to your basement and break it, (remember to sweep up when you’re done). Stomp on a few aluminum cans. Throw a tennis ball at the garage wall. Buy a punching bag.
• Breath Deep. Anger often begins when we feel weaker than we really are. Molehills loom like mountains. Taking a few deep breaths calms you, makes you feel stronger both mentally and physically, and can cut those mountains down to size!
• Count to ten. Sounds simple, but counting to ten is an anger management tip that has worked for centuries! The Roman poet Horace (65 – 8 BCE) said, “When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, one hundred.” Counting to ten (or one hundred) helps you to step back from the situation, buys time for you to examine the problem and decide on an effective, rational way to express your anger.
• Give yourself a break. It’s easier to think when you’re calm than when you’re agitated. Leave the room, take a walk, ‘whistle a happy tune’. Then come back to the problem, examine it, and solve it.
• Look for the sweet spot. Learn to act and not react. Although every cloud doesn’t have a silver lining, when life hands you a lemon, you can make lemonade and when you get angry, you can find a positive way to express it!

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Anger Management has been an interesting topic since time immemorial. I wish to thank Roopshree for raking up this topic. I have conducted a hos of programs and counselling sessions on this topic. My submissions are as given below.

First and Foremost.... .Is anger bad at all? Why is it that we always look at anger from a negative connotation? I guess if we can address this aspect...then we could look at other things.

To me nobody is born with a gene called the anger gene....However there are a lot of factors that determine this anger in a person. It could be the culture, upbringing, environment, role models, a need to win always, a need to prove superiority ...so on and so forth. One needs to get into the root of the problem to understand where it stems from. In other words, when a person displays anger..it need not be based on the situation in hand. It can be based on several past scars that join hands to react to the situation in hand.

Anger has varying degrees....Sometime s anger could be good as a strategy to get things done. We often fake anger with our children to get things done. Sometimes anger could make the situation really messy. Case in point when we ride our cars and an autorickshaw cuts across in such a fashion that neither he can move nor we can move. We often get very angry and react by shouting, screaming and talking law. When we do the same mistake,we find it difficult to accept others anger directed at us. We react once again. What an irony! 

I firmly believe that one needs to first understand whether one needs to become angry all, effectiveness lies in getting things done. If you are smart, then you will use anger as & when required based on situations. In other words, one chooses to become angry or not. That is smart anger management. A smart person will choose his behavior appropriate to a given situation whereas a fool would react and show anger as though it is a convention.

Remember the old grandma saying " When you are angry....count to ten". The logic was to give you time to decide whether you need to react or not. More often you would find that you would have got better results without reacting at all.  

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