Emotions can be overwhelming. Things can come at you all at once, may it be personal problems that keep you from tackling your pile of schoolwork, or even an overwhelming environment that takes away your level-headedness. Losing control of your emotions, especially anger, is indeed a challenging experience. You can think of anger as a scale ranging from mild irritation to frustration to full-blown rage. In the process you can either hurt yourself or hurt others and oftentimes both.
Uncontrolled anger can lead to destructive and violent behavior. It can lead to physical or verbal fights which can then affect your relationships with others and even your own mental health. Recognizing, managing, and controlling your anger is crucial in dealing with everyday situations.
Recognizing anger
Though everyone expresses their emotions in different ways, you can liken recognizing anger to recognizing symptoms of an illness. These “symptoms” are signs which you can commonly spot in fits of rage. Physical signs may include tightness in your chest, increased heart rate, internal heat, headaches or tension around your head area, sweating, and sometimes even blurry vision.
You may also feel the need to express your anger in ways such as outward aggression wherein a person may yell, scream, slam, or be physically violent. Another is inward aggression where a person directs their anger towards themselves; they may “punish” themselves by denying themselves basic needs, imposing self-isolation, and in most cases doing self-harm. Lastly is passive aggression wherein a person is not necessarily violent to others or themselves but displays attitudes that indicate their dislike for others.
Being able to spot these signs and recognizing them is crucial in knowing what step to take when moving forward with your anger.
Managing your anger
Now that you have learned to recognize anger, let’s tackle managing it. When a person is angry, in the heat of the moment, they may fail to control what comes out of their mouths or what they do with their bodies. Thus learning coping mechanisms and deflating your anger would help you deal with situations better.
First, you should identify where your anger is stemming from. Anger is often described as a secondary emotion that derives from prior emotions such as sadness, frustration, betrayal, and many more. Thus, thinking about where your anger stems from is essential in avoiding future outbursts. Second, think about what situations you have been in that had anger take over as the primary emotion and what might have caused or triggered your anger to occur.
These two steps could help a person identify what primarily triggers their anger. Doing so makes it easier to manage in future situations which warrants an emotion as intense as anger.
Controlling your anger
So let’s say you are placed in a situation where you can’t help but feel angry. Maybe you have already identified the cause for your anger, yet the emotion continues to overwhelm you. What then? There are several actions one can take, but the one common yet simple advice is to step back or step away.
Before possibly committing harmful acts, be sure to step away from the situation and take that time to be alone with yourself to process your anger. By simply stepping your way out of the situation, you allow yourself to have some clarity of mind and the ability to control the situation in your favor.
While you're at it, take a walk wherein you can regulate your breathing and think about the situation from different perspectives. Walking allows you to not only process what happened but to also think about possible solutions. Of course, walking alone won't solve the problem at hand. That is why after giving yourself some time to collect all your thoughts and emotions, go back to the situation to assess it, talk it out in a calm manner with the other party, and listen.
With all that said, recognizing, managing, and controlling your anger or any intense emotions is crucial in dealing with ordinary everyday situations. Each person has a different way of approaching and coping with anger, but allowing them to do so will de-escalate a situation much faster and will help with releasing tension. Always remember that managing your anger is as important as managing your and others’ well-being.
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