7 Ways to Manage Your Anger ...

One of the easiest ways to manage your anger is to focus on your breathing when you feel yourself beginning to get angry. When you are angry your breathing rate increases, your heart rate increases, and the blood flow to your muscles increases. Of these responses, your breath is the only one that you can control. Practicing slow breathing when you are feeling angry will shut off the fight-or-flight system. To calm down, you want to focus on your breathing and take deep, slow breaths. It may not take your anger away, but it will help you respond more reasonably.

Breathing is a great way to quell an angry response, but meditation can help you manage your anger in the long term. Meditation helps you develop awareness of your body. It also helps you focus your mind. As a result, you will feel calmer when you meditate, and over time you will feel calmer throughout the day. Researchers have found that people who meditate are much calmer and much less likely to get angry, which is why meditation can really help people manage their anger. If you are new to meditation, you can listen to guided meditation podcasts, many of which are free.

Often, anger comes with other emotions, and sometimes it is even a response to being hurt. Being rejected, being insulted, being criticized, fear, jealousy, and loss can all manifest as anger. It is surprising how often anger is really masking other emotions. When you feel angry, you should try and see if another emotion is at play. If you recognize what emotion is driving your anger, you can work toward solving the problem. It is much healthier to tell someone you were hurt by something they did than to yell at them for something that is completely unrelated to your true feelings.

Turning to exercise can be a positive outlet for emotional energy. Exercising helps you burn off the excess energy that you can get from the fight-or-flight response that occurs when you are angry. Exercise also releases endorphins, which help you feel much less angry. Exercising when you feel like you are becoming angry is one way to manage anger. Another way is to exercise before a meeting that you know will cause tension. This will allow you to release some energy and get a boost of endorphins. As a result, you are much less likely to respond to something that upsets you with explosive anger.

When you are chronically angry, you are actually training your brain to be angry by activating the same neural pathways over and over again. To manage your anger, you can develop new neural pathways so you won’t always respond with anger. The key to changing thought patterns is to stop yourself when you are angry and focus on something positive about the person you are angry with. This can be really difficult when you are very angry; however, it is one of the best ways to break your brain's habit of activating the anger neural pathway. Additionally, it is much more difficult to stay angry at someone when you are thinking about positive traits.

Laughing when you are angry is similar to retraining your brain. You are activating a different emotional response. Laughing also diffuses an angry situation quite quickly. If you make yourself laugh when you are feeling angry, you will find that it is very difficult to stay angry. Laughing when you are angry can be very helpful; however, you shouldn’t laugh when someone else is angry to try and lessen the tension. Generally, this only makes the person angrier.

Having compassion can help you manage your anger. Practicing compassion everyday will go a long way toward relieving your chronic anger. When you find yourself getting angry at someone, try having compassion for them. Maybe they are behaving badly because they are having a really bad day, you never know. Regardless, practicing having compassion will help you see the world in a different way. You can even volunteer at animal shelters or hospitals. This will help you see people in a whole new way, and it should help your anger die down.

Everyone gets angry on occasion, and usually there are very valid reasons to be angry. Anger is not a bad thing, unless you are chronically angry. Chronic anger can cause many problems and is not healthy for you or your relationships. Using these methods to manage your anger will help you develop much healthier responses when you are angry. What do you do to manage your anger?

Resource
Hart, Joe. “Seeing Red.” Experience Life 16.2 (2014) : 62 -67. Print