12 Tips On How To Deal With Anger

Being angry is intense. Your body tightens up, your mind races. Emotions run wild, and you can’t think straight. This chain reaction can create havoc in your life until you learn how to handle the emotion. And to be clear – anger is a totally normal and healthy emotion. But it’s unhealthy when it flares up all the time or spirals out of control. 

Chronic, explosive anger can have some serious consequences for your relationships, your health, and your state of mind. The good news is that getting this emotion under control is a lot easier than what you might think. 

Here are 12 tips on how to deal with anger:

Recognise The Warning Signs

Becoming aware of your own personal warning signs that your temper is starting to boil allows you to take the needed steps to manage your anger before it gets out of control. If you can recognize when you’re starting to feel angry, you’ll be in a good place to try some of our tips. You can then try a few of the tips listed below. Pay attention to the way anger feels in your body. Some warning signs are:

• Sweating

• Pounding heart

• Gritting your teeth

• Tight chest

• Shaking

• Feelings of anxiousness

• Raising your voice

• Being defensive or snappy

• Temporarily losing your great sense of humor

• Pacing

• Being overly critical of someone

• Feeling argumentative

• Knots in your stomach

Work Out Why You’re Angry 

There are many different reasons why you might be feeling angry. It’s an understandable response in some situations, such as getting stuck in rush hour traffic, for example. If you’re not exactly sure why you’ve just snapped at someone, though, think back through your day and try to pinpoint what specifically set you off. 

Some other reasons why you might be seeing red include:

• You’re under a lot of pressure.

• You’re frustrated with how your personal life is going. 

• You’re experiencing hormonal or bodily changes that cause mood swings.

If you work on first recognizing and then dealing with your anger, it won’t have such a damaging effect on your relationships, mind, body, and emotions. 

Catch Negative Thoughts 

Anger always starts in the mind. Whether it’s a negative assumption or random thought – both happen in seconds. You can’t always control your first thought, but you can control the second one. Catch those negative thoughts and feelings before they get out of control, and you’re halfway there!

As we just touched on, managing this emotion without identifying the cause or the thought that fuels it just simply doesn’t work. Once you identify those thoughts, ask yourself – is this thought even really true? Consider the acronym ‘FEAR’, which stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. What you rarely fear actually happens. So, identifying those random thoughts and assumptions that swirl in your head resulting in anger, creates a much-needed stopping point. Keep in mind that you have a choice to see them for the emotional illusions that they truly are. 

Take A Breather 

Your breathing tends to become shallower and speeds up as you grow angry. Reverse that trend – and your anger – by taking slow, deep breaths from your nose and exhaling out of your mouth. Focusing on your breath will serve as a new focal point, rather than obsessing on who said what. 

When you are trying this breathing exercise, exhale longer than you inhale. Research shows that when you do this, your body automatically begins to calm down. To start, simply inhale to a count of four and exhale to a count of six. This will help you to regain control of your emotions and the situation at hand. 

Count to 100 

Okay, so this one might be pretty basic, but trust us – it works! Just like how breathing helps you to focus on your breath rather than your anger, counting uses the same principle. Thinking about something other than what’s making you angry for 100 seconds can help you to avoid blowing a fuse. 

Start at one and count up or start at one-hundred and count down. In the time it takes you to count, your heart rate will slow, giving you a chance to gather yourself and your thoughts before doing anything else. 

Examine Beliefs That Don’t Work 

As a child, you learn what anger looked like, whether you saw rage, sarcasm, or the good old silent treatment. All of these memories influence how you express anger. Discovering your family’s beliefs will help you to recognize which ones are still causing an impact on your life today. You just might realize that you’re still operating from old beliefs that no longer serve you. 

Some of the most common beliefs surrounding anger include:

• Anger is bad and should be avoided at all costs. 

• Anger hurts people, so I should always be nice.

• I must swallow my feelings for others to like me.

• It doesn’t matter how I feel; nothing will change anyway.

• People don’t care about my feelings.

• Women and children should never be angry. 

• People can’t be trusted with my feelings.

All of these beliefs hold anger back, creating stress and resentment. Be willing to confront these underlying beliefs so you can decide what works best for you now. 

Draw Your Feelings 

When anger doesn’t exactly make logical sense, the common tendency is to just ignore it. You think that you shouldn’t be angry – but you are, and that’s okay! Pick up a marker and draw whatever comes to your mind without judging what it looks like or how you feel. This often provides a safe space to honor your feelings and is a great technique for bypassing the rational mind.  

Don’t Drink, Drive, or Do Drugs 

Avoid activities that don’t allow you to relax and unwind. Driving takes concentration and mental effort that can get impaired when you’re upset. Incidents of road rage happen usually because you’re flooded with stress hormones that cause you to seek revenge rather than think rationally.

Sure, using substances may seem like a good way to take the edge off but using can greatly increase your chances of having escalated arguments that can lead to unintended violence. Emotions are much harder to control when intoxicated. 

Practice Meditation 

Meditation is not about stopping your thoughts. Instead, it welcomes your thoughts without judging them. When most people think about meditation, they think it’s all about sitting quietly in a room, but it’s much more than that! Meditation is a habitual process of training your mind to focus and redirect your thoughts – hence why it’s so great when dealing with anger. 

If sitting still is challenging for you, try a walking meditation, listen to soothing music, or even sit by a warm crackling fire and focus on the flames. Anything can be a focal point. 

Move Your Body 

Exercise is, without a doubt, one of the best ways to let off some steam. It can help calm your nerves and reduce anger. Go for a walk, ride your bike, punch a heavy bag, or hit a few golf balls. Anything that gets your heart pumping and blood flowing is good for your mind and body.  

Look For Support

It’s not easy to admit when you’re angry but denying those feelings can lead you to feeling even worse. Getting support and being heard deflates the anger and will help you to feel more connected. Having a group of close friends to support you makes any crisis easier to handle because you can reason things out before responding. 

If you’d prefer to handle this emotion on your own terms, give an online course a try like the one found at Kabbalah ONE! 

Kabbalah ONE is an incredible master course that distills ancient mystical wisdom into practical and approachable concepts and tools that will transform your understanding of the Universe and your purpose in it. By learning these tools and implementing them into your life, you can get a better handle on your emotions like anger. 

Take Time To Relax 

If you know what helps you to calm down and relax, you’ll find it really useful whenever you start seeing red. Take a little bit of time to do something you love, whether that’s listening to music, walking your dog, or playing in the waves at the beach.  

Wrapping Up

Always remember that nothing good comes out of anger, and it will only make things worse. When dealing with this emotion, it’s best to learn how to deal with it, ultimately learning how to control it. 

Always be assertive and look for possible solutions rather than being aggressive and finding reasons for confrontation. 

But if you’re feeling angry, don’t suppress it forcibly because there might be chances of it erupting later like a volcano causing a major outburst. 

If you are trying to deal with anger, give one of our 12 tips a try, like counting to 100 or enlisting help from an online course like Kabbalah ONE. 

Nothing feels better than getting total control of your anger – and Kabbalah ONE can help!