Note: This is a rewrite of a post from an old blog of mine.

What can you do about anger?

Anger showed its face to me very clearly when this next thing happened.

I was walking along the concourse in a major airport a while back.  It was busy, crowded, people going every which way.  I happened to be carrying a book with the words “Anger Management” emblazoned prominently on the cover.  As I walked toward my plane, about every 20 or 30 steps someone would stop me to tell me that someone they knew needed that.

“Anger maanagement? My husband needs that.”

“My boss really needs that. He acts like he’s angry at everyone.”

Someone from the airline said, “We really need to curb the anger at work.”

The Anger Management Myth

I didn’t want to be the one to tell them that there was really no such thing as anger management.

You see, anger is invisible. It’s the inside scoop for someone whose current mental story says they have been wronged, whether it is factually true or not.

The trouble starts when someone reacts poorly to that feeling of anger. The feeling itself, although it’s not really healthy, doesn’t do anything noticeable.

Knowing this, unfortunately isn’t helpful in and of itself.  So here are some things you can do when it comes up.

1. Accept the feeling. It’s something we all have simply as a condition of being human.
2. Take a step back. Observe what is happening. There will be some functions in your body that will change. Your heart rate may go up;  Your breathing may become more shallow; Your hands and feet might even become cold.  In doing this…
3. Notice that anger is not one big thing. If you have seen underwater nature movies, you have seen schools of small fish swimming together in schools.  They do this, as a protective measure, to look like one big fish.  Anger can be like that.  I sometimes may even feel overwhelming because we take it as on big thing. Take each of those events mentioned in #2 as a separate event. Combined they feel like they are a cue to act.  Separately they are just heart rate, breathing, and cold hands.  Which one of those can you not handle?
4. Draw a big line between anger and hostility. Hostility you can manage. When I mention hostility, I mean the things you do with your hands, feet, and mouth.  These are the behaviors you can control, the aggression and hostility.  And remember this -
5. Anger does not cause hostility although they hang out together. To say the one causes the other is like saying that breakfast causes lunch.
6. Practice mindfulness. And by that I mean start a mindfulness practice. An often mentioned misnomer in mindfulness and meditation is that the goal is to rid yourself of thoughts and feelings and sit calmly. A better way of looking at this is it is an opportunity to observe your thoughts and name them. Try this -
   1. Put your hands right in front of your face, like you are doing the ‘see no evil’ posture.  What do you see?  Probably nothing, or if there is a little light, you may see a close-up of your hands or fingers.  They will be indistinguishable from each other.
   2. Now take your hands away from your face and look at them.  Count your fingers; notice the lines in your palms, and maybe see that your fingernails are dirty.
   3. The point is that you can now see these things individually, not a a conglmeration of skin.
   4. This is the goal of mindfulness, to be able to notice your thoughts, even your angry thoughts for what they are.  They are simply inventions of your brain in a certain situations.
   5. This way you begin noticing that it is you that is thinking your thoughts, and not your thoughts thinking you.
7. Reduce the stressors in your life. Stress and anger are closely related. In my experience, the only thing you can do to relieve stress is to take a serious look at your schedule and make some changes.  Other stress management techniques don’t really manage stress at all; they simply help you ameliorate the effects of stress. So how do you make those changes in your life?
8. Take a look at what is truly valuable in your life. When you begin to look at values, you may find that you are spending a lot of time and energy fretting about things that are really not all that important.

So, there are a few things you can do.   What would you add?  Remember, the idea is to change the behavior and let the feeling take care of itself.

Anger is part of life. It doesn’t have to be a problem in life.

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photo credit: left-hand