Q.Rohit just found out he scored much lower than expected in an important test, and he feels a surge of anger — he wants to snap at his younger sibling who is asking him an unrelated question. Using the anger-management principles discussed in the chapter, explain what is really causing Rohit's anger, and suggest at least three specific things he could do instead of snapping at his sibling.

Anger is a negative emotion that, in the chapter's own description, can 'carry the mind away', causing a person to lose control over their behaviour. Its most common underlying source is the frustration of one's own motives — being blocked from, or falling short of, a goal one was working toward, such as a desired test score. A crucial and repeatedly emphasised point in the chapter is that anger is not an automatic reflex, and it is not something other people or events directly and unavoidably cause in us; rather, anger results from one's own thinking about an event, which means it is, at its root, a self-induced — and therefore genuinely controllable — response, even though it can feel completely automatic and overwhelming in the moment.

Because anger arises out of a person's own interpretation of an event rather than the event itself, several concrete anger-management practices, described in the chapter, follow directly from this understanding: recognising the real power one's own thoughts hold in generating anger in the first place, rather than treating the anger as simply 'happening to' oneself; realising that only oneself, and no one else, can actually control this response, which shifts responsibility for managing the anger onto the person feeling it rather than onto whoever happens to be nearby; avoiding 'self-talk that burns' — that is, deliberately not feeding or magnifying negative feelings through one's own inner running commentary about the situation; not automatically assuming hostile intent or ulterior motives on the part of other people, especially people (like a younger sibling) who have nothing to do with the actual source of the anger; resisting irrational beliefs about people and events; deliberately looking for constructive ways of expressing the anger, while keeping a check on both how intensely and for how long the anger is allowed to continue; looking inward rather than outward when working on anger control — that is, focusing on managing oneself rather than blaming or lashing out at whoever is nearby; and, finally, giving oneself time, since changing an ingrained habitual reaction takes sustained effort. …