The Power of Anger Management: How to Handle Your Rage?
Anyone can become angry — that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way — this is not easy. (ARISTOTLE, The Nicomachean Ethics)
What is Anger?
Let’s say someone in another car cuts dangerously close to you as you are driving on the highway. If your reflexive thought is “That son of a bitch!” matters immensely for the trajectory of anger, whether that thought is followed by more thoughts of outrage and revenge: “He could have hit me! That bastard — I can’t let him get away with that!” Your knuckles whiten as you tighten your hold on the steering wheel. Your body mobilizes to fight — leaving you trembling, beads of sweat on your forehead, your heart pounding, the muscles of your face locked in a scowl. You want to kill the guy. Such is the stuff of hypertension, reckless driving, even highway shootings.
Contrast that sequence of building rage with a more charitable line of thought toward the driver who cut you off: “Maybe he didn’t see me, or maybe he had some good reason for driving so carelessly, such as a medical emergency.” That line of possibility tempers anger with mercy, or at least an open mind, short-circuiting the buildup of rage. The problem, as Aristotle’s challenge to have only appropriate anger reminds us, is that more often than not our anger surges out of control. Benjamin Franklin put it well: “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.”
Diane Tice, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, found anger is the mood people are worst at controlling. Indeed, anger is the most seductive of the negative emotions; the self-righteous inner monologue that propels it along fills the mind with the most convincing arguments for venting rage. Unlike sadness, anger is energizing, even exhilarating. Anger’s seductive, persuasive power may in itself explain why some views about it are so common: that anger is uncontrollable, or that, at any rate, it should not be controlled, and that venting anger in “catharsis” is all to the good. A contrasting view, suggests that anger can be prevented entirely. But a careful reading of research findings suggests that all these common attitudes toward anger are misguided, if not outright.
As Paul Ekman, director of the Human Interaction Laboratory at the University of California at San Francisco, puts it, “Anger is the most dangerous emotion; some of the main problems destroying society these days involve anger run amok. It’s the least adaptive emotion now because it mobilizes us to fight. Our emotions evolved when we didn’t have the technology to act so powerfully on them. In prehistoric times, when you had an instantaneous rage and for a second wanted to kill someone, you couldn’t do it very easily — but now you can.”
Mental and Physical State during Anger
With anger blood flows to the hands, making it easier to grasp a weapon or strike at a foe; heart rate increases and a rush of hormones such as adrenaline generates a pulse of energy strong enough for vigorous action. Anger adds additional stress to the heart by increasing the heart rate and blood pressure. In anger, people can no longer think straight, and too often in the heat of anger, complaints are expressed destructively, as an attack on someone’s character.
Anger builds on anger; the emotional brain heats up. By then rage, unhampered by reason, easily erupts in violence. The train of angry thoughts that stokes anger is also potentially the key — the longer we ruminate about what has made us angry like thoughts, the more “good reasons” and self-justifications for being angry we can invent.
To control our mind, there is a competition between anger-and-rational in the back of our brain; the more intense the feeling of anger, the more dominant the anger mind becomes — and the more ineffectual the rational.
The Technique to Calm an Angry Person
Handling someone at the peak of rage is perhaps the ultimate measure of mastery. The data on self-regulation of anger and emotional contagion suggests that one effective strategy might be to distract the angry person, empathize with his feelings and perspective, and then draw him into an alternative focus, one that attunes him with a more positive range of feeling — a kind of emotional judo.
Angry People Are More Susceptible to Heart Diseases
Both anger and anxiety, when chronic, can make people more susceptible to a range of diseases. Don’t over-express or suppress your anger, but if it is chronic then you must seek psychological assistance.
When Anger Is Suicidal
Take a twenty-year-old who repeatedly gets angry. Each episode of anger adds additional stress to the heart by increasing his heart rate and blood pressure. Research shows, when that is repeated again and again, it can do damage,” especially because the turbulence of blood flowing through the coronary artery with each heartbeat “can cause micro-tears in the vessel, where plaque develops. If your heart rate is faster and blood pressure is higher because you’re habitually angry, then over thirty years that may lead to a faster buildup of plaque, and so lead to coronary artery disease.
For instance, Yale School of Medicine study of 929 men who had survived heart attacks and were tracked for up to ten years. Those who had been rated as easily roused to anger were three times more likely to die of cardiac arrest than those who were more even-tempered. If they also had high cholesterol levels, the added risk from anger was five times higher.
These findings do not mean that people should try to suppress anger. Indeed, there is evidence that trying to completely suppress such feelings in the heat of the moment results in magnifying the body’s agitation and may raise blood pressure. The way out, if possible, is to moderate your anger with mercy, or at least treat it with an open mind, as we have noted in the highway driving example above.
Anger Management Tips: Put Anger to Rest Through Self-awareness and Empathy.
“Once when I was about 10 or 11, in an angry fit, I walked out of the house vowing I would never return. I walked far along lovely mountains, till gradually the stillness and beauty calmed and soothed me, and after some hours I returned repentant and almost melted. Since then when I am angry, I do this if I can, and find it the best cure.”
1- Self-awareness means being aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood. It is not attention that gets carried away by the feeling of anger, overreacting and amplifying what is perceived. Rather, it is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions. It is the ability to understand that all feelings of anger or sadness are okay to have, but some reactions are okay and others not. Aware of what is happening rather than being immersed and lost in it. — It is the difference between, for example, being murderously enraged at someone and having the self-reflexive thought “This is anger I’m feeling” even as you are enraged.
Self-aware people: Aware of their moods as they are having them, these people understandably have some sophistication about their emotional lives. Their clarity about feelings and moods may undergird other personality traits: they are autonomous and sure of their boundaries, are in good psychological health, and tend to have a positive outlook on life. When they get into a bad mood, they don’t ruminate and obsess about it, rather their thoughts bespeaking includes “I shouldn’t feel this way,” “I’m thinking good things to cheer up,” and, for a more restricted self-awareness, the fleeting thought “Don’t think about it” in reaction to something highly upsetting and can get out of it sooner. In short, their mindfulness helps them manage their anger and other offensive emotions.
With the use of self-awareness, one can catch cynical or hostile thoughts as they arise, and write them down. Once angry thoughts are captured this way, they can be challenged and reappraised, though, as Zillmann found, this approach works better before anger has escalated to rage.
2- Empathy: understanding feelings; Understanding others’ feelings and concerns and taking their perspective; appreciating the differences in how people feel about things. Empathy is a term used initially by theoreticians of aesthetics for the ability to perceive the subjective experience of another person. With empathy one is better able to take another person’s perspective and better at listening to others.
Empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in understanding the feelings of anger or sadness in others. Try to learn the ability to see things from the other person’s perspective — empathy is a balm for anger.
Its lack is seen in criminal psychopaths, rapists, and child molesters. Actually, the roots of morality are to be found in empathy The failure to register another’s feelings is a major deficit and a tragic failing in what it means to be human.
While the benefits of being able to read feelings from nonverbal channels: tone of voice, gesture, facial expression, and the like included being better adjusted emotionally, handling and dealing people wisely, more popular, and — perhaps not surprisingly — more sensitive.
Being able to put aside one’s self-centered focus and impulse has social benefits. Empathy, as we have seen, leads to caring, altruism, and compassion. Seeing things from another’s perspective breaks down biased stereotypes, and so breeds tolerance and acceptance of differences. These capacities are ever more called on in our increasingly pluralistic society, allowing people to live together in mutual respect and creating the possibility of productive public discourse.
The ability to hear, think, and speak with clarity dissolves conflicts, by seeing things from another person’s perspective douse those flames. Tice found that reframing a situation more positively was one of the most potent ways to put anger to rest.
Besides Empathy and Self-awareness, There are Other Incredible Ways to Deal with Anger
3- Distraction, University of Alabama psychologist Dolf Zillmann, finds, is a highly powerful mood-altering device, for a simple reason: It’s hard to stay angry when we’re having a pleasant time.
4- One fairly effective strategy is going off to be alone while cooling down. A large proportion of men translate this into going for a drive.
5,6, & 7- Perhaps a safer alternative is going for a long walk; active exercise also helps with anger. So do relaxation methods such as deep breathing and muscle relaxation, perhaps because they change the body’s physiology from the high arousal of anger to a low-arousal state, and perhaps too because they distract from whatever triggered the anger.
However, the cooling-down period will not work if that time is used to pursue the train of anger-inducing thought, since each such thought is in itself a minor trigger for more cascades of anger. In the survey of people’s strategies for handling anger, Tice found that distractions by and large help calm anger: TV, movies, reading, and the like all interfere with the angry thoughts that stoke rage.
Tice found that when people told of times they had taken their rage out on the person who provoked it, the net effect was to prolong the mood rather than end it. Far more effective was when people first cooled down, and then, in a more constructive or assertive manner, confronted the person to settle their dispute. As the saying goes “Don’t suppress it. But don’t act aggressively on it.” She found that ventilating anger is one of the worst ways to cool down: outbursts of rage typically pump up the emotional brain’s arousal, leaving people feeling angrier.
Advantages of Anger Management and Impulse Control
The ideas and analysis discussed above, cover the most important points that govern our attitudes and personality. They should be so thoroughly mastered that their application becomes second nature. It will, of course, serve us better in the following ways.
• Managing feelings • Delaying gratification • Reducing stress • Knowing the difference between feelings and actions • stating your concerns and feelings without anger or passivity — assertiveness • more responsible • more popular and outgoing • more pro-social and helpful • better understanding of others • more considerate, concerned • more pro-social strategies for interpersonal problem solving • more harmonious • more “democratic” • better conflict-resolution skills • More positive attachment to family and friends • Boys will be less aggressive; girls well be less self-destructive • Less drug-use initiation • Improved behavior • Enhanced coping skills — Better coping with anxiety and anger • Better conflict-resolution skills.
References: ( Dolf Zillmann, “Mental Control of Angry Aggression”) (Diane Tice and Roy F. “Controlling Anger: Self-Induced Emotion Change”) (Paul Ekman “An Argument for Basic Emotions”) ( Much of this discussion is based on Danial Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence”)
