Anger Management Part 1 of 3

Don’t Lose It! Learning to manage your anger in your life

Part 1 of 3

By Daniel Theyagu 

Too often in our life, we might succumb to losing our temper and just as we do so we regret our action.  Anger is a powerful emotion. It has both a positive and negative effect in our lives.  More than two thousand years ago, Greek philosopher Aristotle said: Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.  

Anger management is not about anger control.  When you control your anger you are just delaying the inevitable in that you are already angry and that feeling of anger is being suppressed temporarily.  Sooner or later it will re-surface and when it does the feeling might be magnified and become deadlier.  What you need to do is to learn how to manage your anger.  That way you will have an effective control of this powerful emotion and use it in a more beneficial ways. 

The objective of managing your anger is in your ability to channel both your emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that anger causes towards a more constructive course of action. It is important that you realize that you can’t get rid of or avoid anger. There will be people or events that occur in your life that will enrage you and there is nothing you could do to change these things.  However, if someone is able to make you angry it just goes to show that they can get into your mind and manipulate your reasoning to generate the feeling of anger.  This makes them more powerful and you will feel emotionally inapt.  Such a weakness of the mind might enrage you into taking drastic actions believing that this will compensate for your inability to deal with the feeling of anger.  

The first thing you need to understand in managing anger is that anger can be either positive or negative.  

Positive angerPositive anger can arise in several ways.  If you feel that some thing is being done unfairly or that people in your life have not got their fair share of justice, although it may not concern you directly you feel a sense of anger.  Such anger may trigger you to take action to see what you can do to alleviate the situation.  In this way you will feel energize as you have a cause to live for and this might inspire you to take positive action.  Further such a positive anger will also allow you to communicate your feeling about the issues that are bothering you and perhaps get other people fired up as well to take action.  This might help you release tension in a constructive way.  As you are motivated by this feeling of positive anger you might also be able to resolve hidden conflicts and discover new information about the situation that shed some light on what you can do to change it.   

Negative AngerIf anger is used inappropriately, it may cause other symptoms that give negative results.  When channeled ineffectively, anger will disrupt your life and your relationship with your family, friends and working colleagues.  Negative anger will also control your thought process and leaves a negative impression of the thing or person you are angry at.  This will inevitably disallows you from looking at the situation objectively and you might become biased and opinionated.  Your action or words might hurt others and cause them to lose respect for you which in turn will cause other forms of emotional problems.  This can be epitomized by the quote from Chinese philosopher Confucius who said: When anger rises, think of the consequences.   

There is a saying that healthy body gives a healthy mind.  The reverse is also true in that a healthy mind makes a healthy body. In a journal published by the American Heart Association, a study conducted showed that people who are more prone to getting angry are three times more likely to have a cardiac arrest leading to fatality as compared to people who are less anger prone.  

 Negative anger clouds your rationality and good sense of judgment.  This in turn will make you feel physically and emotionally drained.  Just like you manage the other attributes in your life, like money, time, change and work/life balance it is equally important that you need to manage your anger as well.  Greek thinker Epictetus said: If you do not wish to be prone to anger, do not feed the habit; give it nothing which may tend to its increase.  

This in principle espouses the need for you to manage your anger. The choice to be angry and stay angry is one that only you should be allowed to make. If you want to resolve any matters or conflict with others you first need to be in control of your own feelings.  As the late Indira Gandhi puts it: “You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.”  In the next article, I will share some insights on how you could manage your anger in your life. 

 

Article contributed by:Daniel Theyagu is a keynote speaker and seminar leader for conferences and training programmes. He runs Lateral Solutions Consultancy which designs and conducts competency-based training for organizations  E-mail:
dtheyagu@singnet.com.sg; website: www.lateralsolutionsconsult.com.