How to Curb Your Anger
Everyone in the world has experienced anger in their lives. Whether it’s a chronic problem in your own life, or someone in your family that’s dealing with it, it can completely take over and make you feel out of control.
It’s important to learn how to deal with anger — both manifested in yourself and in others — so that you can take back control of your life. A little bit of controlled anger can be a useful motivator, but as soon as you let it dominate your thoughts and feelings, it can ruin your life. Here is some information about how anger manifests, and what to do when you encounter uncontrollable anger in yourself, or in others.
What is anger?
Anger is an emotion that helps us notice when we feel something is wrong or unjust. Anger in and of itself isn’t a bad thing since it can help trigger your fight or flight response, which is a part of our brain that we rely on to get us out of life-threatening situations.
In prehistoric times, our fight or flight response kept us alive in physically dangerous situations. Now, our fight or flight response may be triggered by stress or anger, and it takes a lot of convincing before our bodies are able to calm down and start thinking rationally. This is why it’s important for us to be able to calm our anger before it triggers our fight or flight response.
What causes anger?
If you consider yourself an angry person, chances are there are a lot of things that can cause you to become angry.
In general, people become angry because they feel powerless, or because they wish to intimidate others in order to influence a situation in their favor. People can also experience righteous anger, where they become angry as a result of an indignity committed against themselves or person that they love.
Anger can be caused by external factors or by internal factors. For example, depressed people often become angry because they’re frustrated with their own lack of power or agency.
Is anger always a negative force?
Anger isn’t necessarily a negative emotion. For some people, simply the ability to have and express an emotion (any emotion) is a positive thing.
Anger can be used as a motivator to accomplish tasks, and can also be shared among a large group if they are looking to bond together. Following a tragedy or a catastrophic event, people gather to mourn and to experience their righteous anger together. The only problem comes when people let it take over their life. Anger can cause all sorts of health problems if it’s left unchecked too long.