Archive for the 'Anger Management' Category

Every one becomes victim to anger, but the way they react to it differs obviously.

Anger is not a bad emotion but in extreme cases it can certainly cause harm to your personal relationships and also to your health as well.

How anger affects your health?

Anger is the main cause for you to feel stressed out with simple things in your life.

Do you know too much stress is quite harmful for health? It will eventually raise various health related problems like high blood pressure, tension headaches, migraines, and also heart problems as well.

When you are in extreme anger, the immune system gets suppressed and leads to various other health issues like infections and you don’t believe it can increase your susceptibility to cancer.

What you can do to avoid these problems?

It is not good to suppress your anger because even this can cause serious emotional health problems for you. So, instead of suppressing your anger, try to express anger in much better way. Workout your body when you are in anger, but be careful, don’t hurt self.

Anger is a mood of annoyance or aggression. It’s a regular, healthy emotion, just like any other feeling you have.

You should try to express the anger in a positive attitude so that you will not hurt others.

Try to overcome your anger as far as possible to maintain a healthy environment among the people around you. The most effective ways to express anger include

1. Recognize: Know the reason why you are getting agitated frequently. Displeasure is one of the common feelings among most of you. Try to avoid the situation when you feel that it is not going to work with you.
2. Communicate effectively: Try to face the situation by communicating with the persons so that you can make the point very clear and make others understand the prevailing problem.
3. React slowly: React only when it is really needed. Reacting to small issues will lead into anxiety, irritation and anger.  You can express your anger slowly so that others also understand the situation.
4. Relax: Relaxation can make you feel very calm, healthy and peaceful. If you are at peace, there never comes the question of anger and disapproval. Practicing relaxation techniques like meditation helps you a lot to deal with anger effectively.

Can you recall the last time you were really angry at someone? So much so that you were physically shaken just at the thought of them?

Rarely does this feeling of anger help us in getting what we want. Often, it will work against us, resulting in more pain, unnecessarily.

Even the most gentle of personalities can temporarily turn into a vindictive rascal, if pushed far enough.

For sake of simplicity, we will use anger as the target emotion to overcome. Keep in mind that it can be applied to overcome other non-conducive and intense emotions such as jealousy, guilt, hatred, regret and fear.

Why Do We Feel Like Crap?

Anger doesn’t feel very good. It’s pretty gross, actually. Our stomach tightens-up, we become sweaty, we react - instead of act - in survival mode.

And anger clouds our judgment causing us to respond wildly out of emotion. We’ve all been there. Sometimes, it can get so intense that we tremble passionately while feeling strong hate towards other people.

And when we cool down, we would wonder how we allowed ourselves to get in such a messed up state in the first place.

Managing anger is very essential in order to stay away from all kinds of miseries in your life.

There are certain strategies which can significantly help you to bring your anger under control.

Anger is considered as basic human emotion and feeling.

It is neither a disease nor any adverse health condition. It is quite common for every one to get angry when we feel defenseless or hurt.

Anger can become a problem for you, if you act in a way that causes destruction to others. This anger is not a comfortable emotion and it becomes very difficult for you to live with this disgusting anger.

So, managing anger is very essential for you in order to lead a healthy and happy life. Here are certain simple yet effective strategies for managing anger.

Understand and recognize the triggers of anger!

Managing anger is much similar like controlling a car scrolling down a hill. If you try to stop it as quickly as possible, it becomes relatively easy for you to bring it down under control. If you wait till it goes 80kms speed, it will obviously become much harder for you to stop.

Emotional pain and hurt will show up in many areas of your life.

The suggestions below will help you when faced with pain and hurt.

All take you into your pain and discomfort, and help you develop comfort in your own skin.

The payoff is this: Your emotional pain will no longer be fertile soil for your anger. These suggestions will help you choose to open up to and embrace these painful experiences when they show up and learn to bring compassion and forgiveness to them.

Facing Your Fear

Start by making contact with the dangerous or painful thing you are afraid of. What is the nightmare or worst-case scenario? Notice the bodily sensations that accompany these thoughts.

Be specific. You may fear being exposed as incompetent or being embarrassed, humiliated, criticized, or devalued. Or perhaps you fear the emotion of fear itself. [Fear: Main Cause of Anger]

The problem here is not the emotion, but what you do about it and how that action gets in the way of doing things you value.

Adopt an observer perspective and watch your fear-related thoughts, worries, bodily sensations, and images. Don’t try to resolve or fix them. Simply watch as you’ve been practicing.

Obstacles to healthy communication are a direct outgrowth of the mind’s tendencies to judge, blame, and assume intent - collectively, the compulsion to evaluate.

These tendencies put up walls and turn people who are simply different from us, or who disagree with us, into adversaries.

The mind wants to label them as wrong and/or bad. The mind tells you they are misguided, stupid, and sinful.

You may feel the need to show them their errors.

Whether the issue is sexual behavior or something as trivial as washing the dishes, the outcome is the same: people who are different, who do things differently, or who disagree arouse anger and must be defeated or punished.

The compulsion to evaluate involves wearing emotional blinders. These blinders leave you so consumed with defending yourself that you likely miss what’s really going on.

You don’t see when others are hurt or needing validation or are trying desperately to connect with you. You ignore vital information, including your own deeply felt pains and hurts, because it has nothing to do with winning.

Evaluation also hurts your relationships because it prevents you from seeing life through another person’s eyes. Your sense of perspective is greatly diminished or distorted.

One of the keys to becoming less ruled by what your mind tells you is to learn the skill of watching your mind.

You can do it, but it takes time and practice. Your mind didn’t start throwing evaluations at you overnight. It’s been going on for a long lifetime.

The skill of watching your mind will take practice and commitment, but it’s a powerful tool for changing your experience of anger.

To get started, try completing the exercises as described below.

Each exercise will help you detach from the compulsion to evaluate and believe those evaluations. Do one exercise at a time to see which ones work best for you.

It’s important to give yourself enough time with each exercise. These exercises are not magic bullets. They require practice.

A good starting point is to set aside at least ten to fifteen minutes each day to practice an exercise. Give each of them a few days of practice before moving on to the next.

Exercise: Mind Watching

Mind watching requires you to be a true observer of your consciousness. Here’s how you do it:

Like an observer you know that how anger affects you. It’s time to map how your anger really works - the process of your anger.

Use the techniques of mental DVD to remain a here-and-now observer of your experience.

Either adopt the house perspective or use the mental DVD to recapture an anger event that was too overwhelming to track as it unfolded.

What have you learned? On a separate piece of paper, record as much detail as you can in the following anger map exercise.

Exercise: Your Anger Map

Pre-Anger Feelings:

Describe the emotions and physical sensations you noticed this week preceding your anger episode. Is there typically one feeling, or are there several that may show up at the beginning of your anger process?

How do these feelings affect your sense of self-worth? Do you find yourself wanting to escape or suppress them? Are there physical sensations preceding anger that are painful or uncomfortable? Does anger help to push them out of your awareness?

Trigger Thoughts:

Write down as much as you can remember about any painful images or memories that come up in anger situations. What judgments do you typically make about other people?