Controlling Anger

"Anger is a negative experience so closely bound to pain and depression that it can sometimes be hard to know where one of these experiences ends and the others begin. There are a number of actions you can take to keep anger from eroding your life.


- First, of course, is to identify anger and to acknowledge it. Build a lexicon for your internal states. Feelings are fluid. You need to stop and capture them in a word, or else you lose them and don't know you have them.
- View your anger as a signal. It is something to be accepted as a sign that some deeper threat has occurred that needs your attention.
- Make yourself aware of the purpose your anger serves. Things that have a negative purpose are motivated by a sense of deficiency.
- Tune into the inner dialogue you customarily have with yourself. If your anger is deficiency-motivated (driven by a desire to rectify a wrong you believe was done to you), work on acceptance. Give up your obsession about the wrong. Uproot mistaken beliefs that underlie your response. Very often anger is the result of beliefs that lead you to place unreasonable demands on circumstances, such as the belief that life must be fair."


- Psychology Today

Controlling Anger