How Do I Manage My Anger?

Anger is an emotion that is triggered when someone or something interferes with a person in a negative or hostile manner. Anger is a normal response that is experienced by both adults and children. Depending on the individual’s personality anger can be expressed from mild irritation to extreme fury. Some people become defensive and lash out. Others bottle all the hurt and negative emotions while others become abusive when they become angry. Anger is an extremely harmful emotion and if left uncontrolled can really cause a lot of damage.

But since a person cannot get rid of or even avoid people or situations that can cause anger the best way in dealing with anger is to control or manage your reaction to it. There are several ways and methods a person can choose from in trying to manage anger all of which have the main goal of reducing the physical and emotional arousal that anger causes.

Anger Management Techniques

Self Awareness is the primary key in anger management. A person should be aware when they are about to explode and being conscious of the onset of anger. Developing this awareness will always give someone time to control the emotion by either counting from one to thirty or by physically removing oneself from the argument for a time before calmly reentering the area.

Effective Communication is also a good anger management technique. Whether we admit it or not most of all misunderstandings are caused by miscommunications especially when we start assigning blame for causing the problem. A lot of arguments are also started by bringing in other issues that does not have any bearing on the current problem. So as much as possible, try to explain the way you view the matter at hand and do not allow yourself to attack the others.

Stress Management is being able to identify the pattern of your anger. Keeping track of how or why certain people, places or events trigger your anger will go a long way in identifying your pattern for anger. Careful study of this pattern will show you irritants or triggers that set you off. Once these have been identified the only thing that a person should do is avoid or not allow the triggers to affect the person.