Managing your Anger

Anger is a negative emotion that can, quite literally, carry a person's mind away, causing them to lose control over their own behaviour. Its most common underlying source is the frustration of one's motives — being blocked from a goal one was working toward. It is important, however, to recognise that anger is not an automatic reflex, and it is not something other people or events directly cause in us; rather, it is the result of our own thinking, which means it is, in principle, a self-induced and therefore controllable response. Because anger arises out of one's own interpretation of events, several concrete practices can help manage it: recognising the real power one's own thoughts hold in generating anger in the first place; realising that only oneself, and no one else, can actually control this response; avoiding 'self-talk that burns' — that is, not feeding or magnifying negative feelings through one's own inner running commentary; not automatically assuming hostile intentions or ulterior motives on the part of other people; resisting irrational beliefs about people and events; deliberately looking for constructive ways of expressing anger, while keeping a check on both how intensely and for how long one allows the anger to continue; looking inward rather than outward when working on anger c …