Archive for the 'Anger Management' Category

The prefrontal cortex, that part of our brain that uses language to evaluate experience, can literally manufacture anger by using the sense of judgment, attribution, and assumed intent.

Here’s how these functions work to generate angry feelings and behavior.

Judgment:

Judgment is the natural spillover of the mind’s tendency to categorize experience in black-or-white terms.

With judgment, your mind is using the same strategies it has used to evaluate experiences as pleasurable or painful, safe or dangerous.

Now, though, it’s judging other people and their behavior as right or wrong. This is a critically important shift.

With judgment, your mind is declaring something or someone to be absolutely and objectively good or bad. When the mind makes judgments, experience is no longer about subjective feelings of pleasure and pain.

It is about the intrinsic moral worth of your experiences and the people around you. You compare them to a standard of what should be. And if they don’t measure up to your standard, you may begin to get angry.

A second form of judgment is called toxic labeling. Here your mind transforms the very normal process of recognizing and labeling experience into a series of global judgments: people are stupid, incompetent, crazy, lazy, and so on.

It is important to understand that you are not your anger. Anger is something you experience periodically.

Anger explodes into your awareness and, after a while, it lets up. You are not the anger.

You the person who experiences and observes your life are separate from your feelings of anger.

Do not take your anger so seriously. It’s just a moment in time, a wave on the sea of existence.

You don’t have to fight it and you don’t have to join it either. Your task is to disentangle yourself from your anger, not to become your anger. Just let the wave of angry feeling come and go.

Think of it as this: All your feelings and thoughts are projections. You are the movie screen on which they play. While the screen never changes, the images change constantly, and the movie itself changes all the time, too.

When an angry thought or feeling shows up on the screen, wait. It will change soon. The screen doesn’t fight or resist the projections. It merely provides the space for the movie to play out and waits for it to end.

Face it; you want to change your anger. Perhaps your wish to change follows some incident where you lost control.

Or maybe you’ve struggled for a long time, looking desperately for a way to stop the damage anger does to your relationships and your life.

What are the Costs of Anger?

The battle with anger has cost you-in energy, of deep and painful regret, and of damage to your closest bonds. You feel that your efforts at anger control and all the ways those efforts have failed, have left a deep impact on you.

You probably already have a good idea how much responding with anger has cost you in the various areas of your life.

Have you experienced broken and strained relationships? Sickness and poor health? Excessive stress? Difficulties at school or work? Problems with alcohol and other substances? There may also be other costs that are less obvious, or that you choose not to think about.

The following exercise on calculating the costs of anger can help you to see exactly what anger has cost you in your life. This will also give you a better idea of what you have missed out on by responding to anger feelings with anger behavior.

Conscious, deliberate, purposeful control works well in the external world outside your skin wherever the following rule applies: “If you don’t like what you are doing, figure out a way to change it or get rid of it using your hands and feet. Then go ahead and do it.”

Unfortunately, this rule does not apply to internal events that occur inside your skin, such as angry feelings, painful thoughts, and other emotions.

Rather than trying to change these, you are far better off refocusing your attention and expending your energy on the three areas where you do have control: your choices, your actions, and your destiny.

You are the Only One Who Has Control Over the Choices You Make

You alone have full responsibility for the choices you make. Understanding this can feel both sobering and liberating. For example, you cannot choose whether you feel hurt or angry. However, you can decide what you do with that hurt and anger.

You can choose to dwell on your hurt and anger, run from it, or bury and hide it. You also have the option of doing noting about the feelings and thoughts. You can decide to let them be or actively meet them with compassion and patience.

Recognizing that you hold your own strings in life will put you face-to-face with your own pain, hurt, and other emotions, both positive and negative.

You may think, “Well, if I can’t control other people, then maybe I can control the negative energy and thoughts that arise in my mind and body when I hurt and feel angry.”

This sensible-sounding solution is unfortunately another dead end.

Control over your emotional reactions is just as misleading as your desire to control other people.

The results that come out when people act to get rid of emotional and psychological pain:

• Numerous studies have shown that when people act to get rid of emotional and psychological pain, they end up instead with more emotional and psychological pain.
• You can’t keep your unpleasant thoughts and emotions from burning you in the same way you can pull your hand away from a hot stove.
• Trying to control unpleasant emotions, internal bodily sensations, and even disturbing thoughts will mostly backfire.
• You’ll get more of the very thing you don’t want to think and feel. This happens because your body is a system with a built-in system of feedback loops-your brain and nervous system.

You’ve know the struggle that lies within your anger and the costs of your anger.

You’ve made attempts to manage and control anger thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Then you’ve realized the difficult truth that nothing has really worked.

No matter how hard you tried, no strategy to manage anger has ever helped long term.

The costs are still there.

The healthiest response is to give up the struggle with anger, to surrender. By surrendering you will experience - perhaps for the first time - what your struggle with anger has really been about.

It seems like you’ve been fighting a tug-of-war, with the anger monster pulling at one end of the rope and you pulling at the other end. Yet no matter how hard you’ve pulled to defeat the anger monster, it has always come back stronger, pulling harder at the other end.

While you were engaged in this endless and exhausting fight, with both your hands firmly clenching the rope, it probably never occurred to you that you don’t need to win this fight. What would happen if you decided to stop fighting? You could simply surrender and end the fight by dropping the rope.

The mind is a mysterious atmosphere and everyone has a different source of thinking. We all have our problems, some of us more so than others do.

Most of us have emotions, which include sadness, anger, joy, and so forth. The trick is learning to deal with it in our own way.

Since anger has a strong physical reaction, healthy anger management involves learning skills to calm your body.

If you are angry, deeply inhale and exhale three times. However, taking time to practice ways to relax one’s body is even more effective.

Visual Imagination

Visual imagery offers a major strategy to relax one’s body. Spend 10-15 minutes imagining a place that is relaxing. Attend to all of the details of the scene to make it as real as possible. Notice the colors, the sounds, the air, the lighting, and even the feel of objects in your scene.

Then shift your attention to how relaxed your muscles are, gradually scanning your muscles from head to toe. Through practice, you will increasingly be able to direct your body to become calm when you experience the arousal of anger.

We must learn how to cope up with anger as it is one of the leading problems in society.

There is not one time in our lives that we all have not experienced anger and maybe even acted out of control.

When someone hurts us, irritates, threatens, aggravates, harass, or let us down we call get mad.

Anger is either our worst enemy or our best friend. For instance if another person threatens us and we act out in anger in a managed way, most likely we are going to have good results.

On the other hand, if we act out aggressively we are losing control and the other person most often will have the upper hand.

When we have control of our emotions and feelings, it not only protects us, but also helps us to become successful in life.

We know how to deal with situations when they arise, including financial problems, medical emergencies, and so forth. On the other hand, if we are entanglement then we is at risk, our health is in danger and problems are definitely going to rise.