Angry feelings are powerful. It can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Denying justified angry feelings can be crippling and damaging. It is important to learn and practice how to use angry feelings in constructive and responsible ways.

Anger management techniques can restore a sense of self-control to your responses to situations. Manage it in productive ways. Use your favourite strategies each time you feel anger getting the best of you, and it'll help you in the long run to have a more balanced perspective.

Experiment. Feeling angry helps to set us free.

What is anger?

• Natural: A certain amount of anger is necessary for our survival. Anger is a natural, adaptive response to threats and the instinctive way to express anger is to respond aggressively. It inspires powerful feelings and behaviours, which allow us to fight and to defend ourselves when we are attacked.
• Normal: The feeling of anger is normal, and often it's healthy. It is a 'gift' which motivates and energises us to express strong feelings and deal with difficulties.
• Signal: Angry feelings signals the need for evaluating negative aspects of one's life and address them constructively. It is a wake-up call.
• Range: Feelings of anger can range from fleeting annoyance to full-fledged rage.
• Problem: Anger becomes a problem when it creates trouble in your life, when you scare or hurt people and they feel they cannot talk or disagree with you.
• Physical Effect: Feelings of anger may cause you to shake, become hot and sweaty and feel out of control. It also affects your heart rate, blood pressure, stress energy levels, hormones, adrenaline and nor-adrenaline.
• Quality of Life: Being angry a good portion of the day at one thing or another, will negatively affect the quality of your life and warrant that you take action.
• Unmanaged Anger: Unmanaged anger creates problems such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, psychosomatic illnesses and problems with alcohol or drugs. It is important to manage anger before it leads to other serious problems.
• Behaviours: Angry behaviours may include yelling, throwing things, criticising, ignoring, storming out, withdrawal, doing nothing, can lead to violence.
• Individual: As the issue of anger varies from person to person, the coping strategies will be unique to the individual.
• View: In modern society anger is viewed as immature or uncivilized, whilst keeping calm, coolheaded, or turning the other cheek is considered more socially acceptable.
• Term: The term anger management commonly refers to a range of techniques aimed at reducing the triggers, degrees, and effects of an angered emotional state.
• Inappropriate: Inappropriate expressions of anger may include uncontrolled outbursts or at the other extreme concealment of feelings of anger.
• Unhealthy anger: Mechanisms for coping with anger may become habits that is used inappropriately and indiscriminately whenever loss or frustration is perceived.
• Passive anger: can be expressed in the following ways:-
  • Secretive: Stockpile resentments, silent treatment, avoid eye contact, put people down, gossip, stealing, conning.
  • Manipulation: Provoke aggression, patronise forgiveness, emotional blackmail, tearfulness, feign illness, sabotage relationships, withholding.
  • Self-blame: Apologising too often, overly critical, inviting criticism.
  • Self-sacrifice: Overly helpful, make do with second best, making long suffering signs but refusing help, lapping up gratefulness.
  • Ineffectual: Setting self and others up for failure, depend on unreliable people, accident prone, underachieving, frustrated with insignificant things, ignore serious things.
  • Dispassionate: Gives cold shoulder, phoney smiles, oversleeping, not responding to other's anger, frigidity, talking of frustrations without showing feeling.
  • Obsession: Need to be clean and tidy, habit of constantly checking, over-dieting, overeating, demanding everything is done perfectly.
  • Evasiveness, such as turning your back in a crisis, avoiding conflict, not arguing back, becoming phobic.
• Aggressive anger: can be displayed as:-
  • Threatening: Frightening people by threatening to harm them, their property or their prospects, finger pointing, fist shaking, slamming doors, etc.
  • Hurtful: Physical violence, verbal abuse, unfair jokes, breaking confidence, loud music, foul language, ignoring, discriminating, false blaming, etc.
  • Destructive: Harming objects, wasting resources, polluting the environment, destroying relationships between people, driving recklessly, drinking too much.
  • Bullying: Threatening, persecuting, pushing, shoving, using power to oppress, shouting, playing on people's weaknesses.
  • Unjustly blaming: Accusing other people for your mistakes, blaming people for your feelings, making general accusations.
  • Manic: Speaking, driving or walking too fast, working too much, expecting others to fit in, reckless spending.
  • Grandiose: Showing off, expressing mistrust, not delegating, poor loser, wanting centre stage, not listening, talking over people's heads.
  • Selfish: Ignoring other's needs, not responding to requests for help, queue jumping, 'cutting in' when driving.
  • Revengeful: Over-punitive, refusing to forgive and forget, bringing up hurtful memories from the past.
  • Unpredictable: Blowing hot and cold, explosive rages, attacking indiscriminately, dispensing punishment out of the blue, using illogical arguments

Anger-arousing causes:

• Patterns: Negative patterns may be expressed as feelings of anger: Self-blame, blame of others, negative thoughts and fantasies, limiting beliefs, excuses to take drugs, desire for revenge, escapism, intense long-existing frustration in relationships, brooding about personal problems.
• Feelings: Negative emotions may be expressed as feelings of anger: deprivation, disappointed, helpless, injustice, fear, humiliation, shame, embarrassment, hurt, worried, frustration, self-hate, hate of others.
• Avoidance/Diversion: A desire to avoid solving current problems, may generate anger about other things you can't do anything about.
• Past suffering: Focusing on past suffering or things that cannot be changed diverts attention away from situations that need to be improved.
• Expectations: Anger may rise from expecting instant gratification, not getting one's way and expecting perfection.
• Trapped: Circumstantial problems and responsibilities may make you feel angry at all the people and things that form that trap.
• Impatience: Impatience easily gives rise to a general feeling of anger - patience is an excellent antidote to anger.
• Misunderstandings: Anger may also result from misunderstandings or poor communication between people.
• Conclusions: Angry people tend to jump to and act on conclusions, and some of those conclusions may be very inaccurate.
• Memories: Memories of traumatic or enraging events can also trigger angry feelings.
• Vicious cycle: Angry feelings stir up more angry feelings in oneself and escalate into ever-angrier exchanges with others.
• Substitute: Anger also may rise when its hard to express the feelings underneath the anger, like hurt, sadness or grief.
• Abuse: Anger is often used as an excuse for being abusive and violent towards others and to gain control over another person through creating fear.
• Medical conditions: Anger may be related to an injury to the brain, drug or alcohol use. It is important to get medical treatment for these problems.

Suppress/Misplace/Express/Release?

• Suppression: If you hold in your anger, it will hurt you. We become angry at ourselves without realizing it.
  • Health: If the reaction of angry feelings is suppressed or denied, the simmering anger disturbs psychological and physical well-being.
  • Concealed: Anxiety and depression is often the only evidence of suppressed anger, very deeply concealed from ourselves.
  • Bottled: Constantly bottled-up anger may lead to violent thoughts, nightmares, headaches, ulcers, hypertension.
  • Sarcasm: Harsh sarcastic humour is another form of unhealthy anger suppression.
• Expression: When angry, most people desire to hurt the one whom they feel has wronged them.
  • Hurtful expression: Retaliation, bitterness, blaming, name-calling, insults, destructiveness, belligerence, relentless fault-finding, withdrawal, letting it simmer, leaving the relationship, compulsive complaining, wrath, temper outbursts and rage, hurting the other psychologically, violence.
  • Scapegoats: People may displace anger from those who have actually harmed or wronged them, to others who are innocent.
  • Misunderstanding: Often people misconstrue that others have wronged them, when actually they may not have. People also often misconstrue the behaviour of others as being good, when they are actually being wronged, hurt and harmed quite badly by them.
  • Substitution: The anger gets buried under tears.
  • Venting: Researchers have found that venting anger actually escalates anger and aggression and does nothing to resolve the situation.
  • Bad language: People tend to curse, swear, or speak in colourful terms which reflect their anger - this alienates and humiliates people who might otherwise be willing to help.
• Release: Expressing feelings of anger in a controlled way, helps discover underlying feelings, which you can start to deal with constructively.

Management process

• Anger management: A process to find better ways of expressing anger, to learn what triggers the anger, to notice the warning signals, to learn how to prevent inappropriate anger from occurring and how to calm down and manage the situation.
• Take responsibility: The first thing to do if you're becoming angry in a discussion is to slow down and carefully think through what you want to say. Don't say the first thing that comes into your head.
• Listen: Listen attentively to what the other person is saying and to what is underlying the anger. Take your time before answering. It may take a lot of patient questioning on your part to get to the real problem.
• Responsive: Don't allow anger to let a discussion spin out of control. It's natural to get defensive when you're criticized, but don't fight back. Commit to acting on anger responsibly and responsively.
• Choices: Learn how to make intelligent and fully responsible choices about issues that need to be addressed rather than evaded by indulging in angry behaviour and actions. Decide whether the situation can be dealt with realistically and constructively, or not.
  • Let go: If not, the other person may not care at all about what we may or may not like, and may in fact be glad that we are angry or that we suffer and will regularly disturb our equanimity and well-being - this may be a harmful, anger-arousing relationship. One can learn how to let go of it, move on, and not focus on it.
  • Focus: If one can deal with the anger arousing issues calmly, responsibly and realistically, then one can focus on what one can actually do and what the situation realistically and morally calls for. Anger and disappointment then helps us to finally see the truth it points to. It puts us on the road to self-growth and the development of a joyful and spiritually fulfilling life.
• Evaluation: Evaluate in a thorough and calm manner the context and nature of the real underlying reason for the problem. Evaluate your role in the situation, fears, insecurities etc.
• Honesty: If one is radically honest about the real roots of one's angry feelings, one can often find intense and long-existing anger-arousing causes behind the anger.
• Scapegoat: Think about who you express your anger to, and take care that you aren't just dumping your anger on the people closest to you, or on people who are less powerful than you.
• Signal: Use the feeling of anger as a signal to talk, to think, to calmly evaluate, and act constructively in responsible and moral ways and absolutely without blame. This is one of the hardest achievements to attain for most people, until they actually learn how to do it. In any responsible, authentic, loving and good-will relationships we use feelings of anger as a signal to assert ourselves. 
  • Signals: Notice the things that happen to your body that tell you when you are getting angry - pounding heart, flushed face, sweating, tense jaw.
  • Triggers: Identify and make a list of triggers and warning signs that often set off your feelings of anger - recognise the situations that make you angry and your body's warning signs of anger eg. being late, can't find parking, dirty dishes in the sink
• Prepared: If you know what makes you angry, you may be able to avoid those things or do something different when they happen.
• Recognise: The earlier you recognise warning signs of anger, the more successful you will be at calming down before your anger gets out of control.
• Strategy: Skill up in some anger management strategies - next section.
• Prepare for change: Become increasingly aware of anger, recognise problem areas, find motivation to change. Be aware why change is desirable - that will be key to successful change.
• Changing. Be assertive, avoid or escape from anger-invoking situations, and do relaxation techniques.
• Adjusting. Reconceptualise anger triggers, accept and let go, forgive others.
• Counselling: If you anger is out of control and impacting negatively on your life, consider counselling to learn appropriate ways to express justified anger and use techniques for changing your thinking and behaviours to cope more effectively with anger provoking situations.
• Planning: Make a plan, and check your progress along the way. Which actions would be in your best interest short-term and long-term?
  • Values and Purpose: Identify your spiritual and moral values and your purpose - such as gratitude, forgiveness, kindness, honesty, integrity, mercy, respect for self, others and society, investing effort in work, in building a good personal-life and family relationships, and in contributing positively to the society.
  • Brainstorm: How can you practically go about to manage angry feelings and thoughts, limiting beliefs, behavioural expressions.
  • Options: Work out some practical options for changing your situation.
• Empower: Practice how to choose, to calmly evaluate and discuss angry feelings and refrain from angry actions. This may require dialogue, self-assertion,  actual force and assertive action or even avoidance of a relationship or situation. Practise, practise, practise.
• Maintaining change: Continually update your plans. Plan how to prevent relapses and how to disarm new triggers which could re-ignite anger.
• Cured: This is the point at which you can finally free yourself from pervasive anger or rage. Once your responsible and constructive choices have been enacted, it is almost impossible to stay angry. The otherwise devastating effects of intense or lingering feelings of anger will disappear over a short time.
• Impulsive: The impulse to act with anger will remain just that - an impulse.
• Well-being: Anger management is a very necessary skill to have if one strives for greater well-being and happiness.

Strategies

Some of the following anger management strategies will suit you better than others:

• Skill-up: An area in your life where you require better skills, may generate feelings of anger, eg. assertiveness, communication or parenting.
• Assertiveness: Through assertiveness, anger is channelled and expressed in clear and respectful ways.
  • Clear: Be clear about what your needs and wants are, feel okay about asking for them, respect the other person's needs, be prepared to negotiate.
  • Style: Be assertive, rather than aggressive. Practise saying things in an assertive, accurate way.
  • Direct: Do not beat around the bush.
  • Focus: Stick to issue of concern, not bringing up irrelevant material.
  • Body language: Use body language to indicate feelings clearly and honestly.
  • Honourable: Make it known that there is a clear moral basis for your anger, never use manipulation or emotional blackmail, never abuse another person's basic human rights, never unfairly disempower the weak or defenceless, take responsibility for your actions.
  • Prepared: Be prepared to argue your case.
  • Persistent: You may have to repeatedly express your feelings in the argument, standing your ground.
  • Courageous: Take calculated risks, endure short term discomfort for long term gain, risk displeasure of some people some of the time, take the lead, do not show fear of other's anger.
  • Protect: Develop and use self-protective skills.
  • Passionate: Show the true intensity of your feeling, be excited and motivated, act dynamically and energetically, initiate change, show fervent caring, be fiercely protective, enthusing others.
  • Creative: Think calmly, but quickly, use wit, spontaneously come up with new ideas and new views on subjects.
  • Forgiving: Demonstrate a willingness to hear other people's anger and grievances, show an ability to wipe the slate clean once anger has been expressed.
• Change or Accept: We find ourselves in situations we can change and ones we cannot change.
  • Can: If I can change the situation, I should do something about it instead of getting all worked-up and angry. Not acting will cause frustration.
  • Can't: If I cannot change the situation, I will have to accept it. If I don't, it will cause frustration and a negative and unpleasant state of mind, which will make the situation worse.
  • Not sure: Be realistic. Unrealistic expectations may be reduced by learning that it is a basic fact of life that nothing is perfect, so don't expect it.
• Forgiveness: The past cannot be changed. Holding on to anger, is giving the past power over your wellbeing. When blaming others, one will be victimized, trapped in an emotional prison. Wounds left by the impact of anger against those who have wronged us must be healed through forgiveness and letting go. Otherwise the unresolved resentment poisons our relationships with others and ourselves.
  • Relief: Forgiveness is something you are doing for yourself on your own terms in order to relieve your own pent-up emotions.
  • Benefits: Forgiving is good for your health, peace of mind, wellbeing and will reduce anxiety and depression.
  • Realism: Forgiveness is a form of realism. It doesn't deny, minimize, justify or condone the actions of the offender or the pain that we have suffered.
  • Reflection: Forgiveness encourages us to see our wounds for what they are and show us how much energy we waste and how we damage ourselves by not forgiving.
  • Personal: Forgiveness is an internal process. Be patient with yourself as you work through your choices and decisions, you have to be ready, it can't be forced. Forgiveness is possible when one wants to heal and when one is willing to work for it.
  • Refocus: Refocus on positives and find ways to see love, beauty and kindness all around.
• Patience: Great patience brings a certain element of charm, joy, happiness, love and calmness to your life and the lives of your friends, your family, and the community - they sincerely long for your presence and respect you simply because of your nature of patience and dignity.
• Self-talk: Replace exaggerated and irrational self-talk with useful, rational self-talk to reduce anger. Eg. change "It's awful and everything's ruined" to "It's frustrating and getting angry is not going to fix it".
• Self-talk list: List things to say to yourself before, during and after situations in which you may get angry - focus on how you manage the situation.
• Admitting: Admit to yourself and others when something made you angry, telling them that you felt angry is more helpful and healthy than just acting out the anger.
• Take time-out: When your anger gets out of control, take time-out - go for a walk, but first set a time to resume when everyone calmed down. During time-out, plan how to remain calm.
• Distractions: Distract your mind from what is making you feel angry. Play soothing music, talk to a good friend, or focus on a simple task like polishing the car or fold laundry.
• Timing: Set times to talk about important matters so that you're not perhaps tired, or distracted or times when talks are likely to turn into arguments.
• Relaxation: Reduce the feelings of tension and stress in your body - you can't be relaxed and angry at the same time.
  • Breathe: Take long deep breaths from your diaphragm and focus on your breath - breathing from your chest won't relax you.
  • Self-talk: Slowly repeat calm words or phrases such as relax, take it easy while breathing deeply.
  • Triggers: Trigger relaxation in an anger-inducing situation by repeatedly using calming words, phrases or images.
  • Visualise: Visualize a relaxing experience from either your memory or your imagination. Do that over and over again.
  • Stretching: Yoga-like exercises can relax your muscles and make you feel much calmer.
  • Breaks: Take regular breaks from work to stretch and do something relaxing.
  • Personal Time: Make sure you have some "personal time" scheduled for times of the day that you know are particularly stressful.
• Meditation: Do regular meditations on compassion, love, forgiving and analytical meditations to reduce anger from your mind. It tames the mind to be calm and concentrated during an actual difficult situation.
• Buddhism: When one realises one's interdependence with all beings, it rids oneself of unrealistic negative emotions like anger.
• Identify: Identify factors that prevents us from expressing our anger appropriately: past experiences, attitudes, convictions, fear, denial, ignorance.
• Writing: Write out a response to a problem before tackling it in debate.
• Rehearsal: Rehearse some anger management strategies with a friend by acting out, imagining or remember situations that sets off your anger. Imagine how you could resolve the situation without getting angry.
• Mental gymnastics: Ask yourself questions to regain control over runaway emotions before they cause damage. What is the source of my anger? What's the other person's role? How would I want to be treated if the other person felt as I do?
• Accuracy: Using words like never or always is inaccurate and also make you feel that your anger is justified and that you can't solve the problem.
• Thoughts: Changing very exaggerated and overly dramatic thinking by replacing these thoughts with more rational ones.
• Substitutes: Remind yourself that getting angry is not going to fix anything, and may actually make you feel worse.
• Realistic: Saying "'its awful, everything's ruined" can be substituted by saying "it's frustrating, I'm understandably upset, getting angry won't fix it"
• Logical: Cold hard logic defeats anger, because anger, even when it's justified, can quickly become irrational - the world is not out to get you.
• Demanding: When people are demanding, and their demands aren't met, their disappointment turns into anger. Translate expectations - I must have - into desires - I would like to have.
• Counting: To soothe your flare-ups, count to twenty before saying anything.
• Interruptions: When you feel the rage start to rumble, cause an interruption in the situation for reflection.
• Leaving: Before discussing sensitive issues that may provoke anger, leave the room, take a fast-paced walk down the hall or outdoors.
• Approach: Take time to think about the best approach to a problem rather than responding with random anger.
• Talk: Talk calmly about what it was that made you feel angry, then you can discover and feel the feelings behind the anger.
• Problem solving: Practice constructive, non-angry, problem-solving dialogue and constructive actions.
• Diarise: Write about negative emotions to get them out of your system. It helps put things in perspective and help you understand your feelings.
• Pets: Petting a pet helps to reduce blood pressure and harmful substances in your system that can damage blood vessels if left unchecked.
• Fists: Making fists when we get angry may water the seeds of anger. When you make fists, feel the tension, the aggression and the fear which it contains. Then open your fists and place the palms together over your heart in the prayer position to dissolve to the anger.
• Discussions: Talk over situations with a trusted friend or a trained counsellor.
• Alternatives: Explore all healthy alternative ways of dealing to anger and routes for avoiding anger-arousing thoughts and situations.
• Avoidance: If something infuriates you every time, avoid it. The objective is to keep yourself calm.
• Humour: If examined, the ideas that accompany anger can make you laugh - this takes the edge off and remove tension and give you a more balanced perspective. Be cautious to not just laugh off your problems; rather, use humour to help yourself face them more constructively.
• Unimportant: Find ways to recognise how unimportant some of the things you're feeling angry about are and refuse to take yourself too seriously.