Anger is an emotion you feel when something may have gone wrong, or someone has wronged you. It is typically characterized by your feelings of stress, frustration, even irritation. Everyone feels anger from time to time. It’s a normal response to a frustrating or difficult situation.
Anger becomes more of a problem when it’s being excessively displayed and can start to affect how you function on a daily bases and how you relate with people. Anger can range in intensity, from being slightly annoyed to being rageful. It can sometimes be considered excessive or even irrational. In these cases, it can be hard for you to keep your emotions in check and could cause you to behave in ways you wouldn’t normally.
Characteristics
When we are angry our body goes through certain biological and physiological changes. Examples of these changes your body might go through include:
· Increase in body temperature
· Increased energy levels
· Raised blood pressure
· Spike in hormones like adrenaline and noradrenaline
· Increased muscle tension
Anger doesn’t look the same in everyone and we all express it in different ways. Some outward characteristics you might notice when you are angry include.
· Raised voices
· Clenched fists
· Frowning or scowling
· A clenched jaw
· Physically trembling
· Rapid heartbeats
· Sweating excessively
Complications
Anger is a completely normal and typically a healthy emotion. However, it can be detrimental to both your emotional and physical health when you lose control of it. When you are angry your body goes through certain physiological and biological changes.
Your heart rate rises, and your blood pressure spikes up. Your body also releases hormones like adrenaline. Putting your body through these changes often, by repeatedly getting angry, can lead to medical conditions and complications such as:1
· Depression
· Anxiety
· Diabetes
· Insomnia
· High blood pressure
· Substance abuse
· Gastric ulcers
· Bowel disease
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Identifying Anger
Anger doesn’t look the same in everyone as we all express it differently. For some people, screaming might be an outlet for their anger while others might express it by physically hitting an object or even another person.
Anger is a normal human emotion, but it’s important to find healthy ways to express it so as not to alienate people around us. Expressing anger is healthy it is also important for your mental health.
Causes
Anger can be caused by difference influences you’ve had. A person or even a situation could make you mad. You could be angry because someone stepped on your new trainers. You might feel angry when you are emotionally hurt, or threatened or in a confrontation.
Sometimes we use anger to replace other emotions we would rather not deal with, like emotional pain, fear, loneliness, or loss. In these cases, anger becomes a secondary emotion. Anger could be a reaction to physical pain, a response to feelings of fear, to protect yourself from a perceived attack, or in response to a frustrating situation.3
Anger is often caused by a trigger this could be either rational or irrational. Some common triggers that cause anger include:
Dealing with the loss of a loved one
Losing a job
Going through a breakup
Failing at a job or a task
Being fatigued
Getting in an accident or getting a condition that causes physical changes in your body (for example, losing your sight or your ability to walk)
Anger could also be a symptom or response to a medical condition. Anger could be a symptom of depression, substance abuse, ADHD, or bipolar disorder.
Types of Anger
There are three main types of anger.
Passive-Aggressive Anger: Here, a person tries to repress their anger to avoid dealing with it but typically ends up expressing it in unhealthy and undermining ways.
Assertive Anger: This can be considered a healthy option for expressing your anger. It involves handling your anger in a controlled manner by using your words to calmly explain and diffuse a situation. Here, anger is expressed in a non-threatening way.
Openly Aggressive Anger: This type of anger might be accompanied with physical or verbal aggression such as hitting things or screaming. The aim of this type of anger is typically to hurt the person that they are directly at upset at.
Anger can also be expressed in either one of two ways: verbally or nonverbally.
Verbally: When a person expresses their anger verbally, you are likely to see them raise their voices. They might become insulting and say hurtful things if their anger is directed at another person.
Nonverbally: You’ll notice some slight physical changes in a person who expresses their anger nonverbally. They might frown or scowl and clench their jaws and fist. They might also lash out at another person or object, sometimes causing physical damage to the person or object and in some cases even hurting themselves.
The two ways people express their anger are not mutually exclusive and it’s possible to see a person expressing anger in both ways.
Treatment
Anger is a normal emotion we all feel, and for most people, they can find ways to express it in a healthy way. However, some people need treatment. The most common way to treat excessive anger is with therapy.
Therapy
For most people, it’s easy to identify the triggers and emotions behind their anger. But some people experience anger suddenly and intensely without being able to curb it or identify the triggers behind it.
If you are experiencing frequent and intense bursts of anger that are causing physical and emotional damage to you or the people around you then you might need professional help with dealing with your anger.
Anger management therapy is used to help you learn healthy ways to cope with the emotion.
Coping
Finding ways to cope with your anger are important. If we allow anger to take control of our lives, it can affect things that we do. And it can damage relationships with our loved ones and even cause problems in the workplace. If you’ve been finding it difficult to keep your anger in check in certain situations, there are a couple of coping mechanisms which can help you out.
Identify the Cause: The first step with coping with anger is to identify the root cause of your anger. It could be another emotion. It even could be due to an altercation you had or an unpleasant thought that came to mind.
Meditate: Meditation can be very beneficial in helping to control your emotions. You can start with the simple meditation techniques first like deep breathing exercises. When faced with a situation which made you feel mad, take a second before reacting. You can take several deep breaths to calm yourself or try to countdown from 5 or 10 until you feel yourself become calmer.
Work Out: Exercising isn’t just a good thing for your physical health—but it also has it’s benefits for your mental health. It’s also a way to channel out emotions like anger in a useful and productive way. Going for a quick run or swim when you are angry could help defuse the emotion.
Avoid Triggers: If you are quick to become angry, it’s very useful to try to identify and avoid what triggers you. If you are often triggered when having a conversation with a particular person or a particular topic, avoid both until you’ve learned how to better control your anger in that situation.
Let It Out: Don’t keep all your anger bottled up inside. Expressing your anger when you feel it is one of the healthiest ways to get through it. Bottling up your emotion is more likely to cause a sudden intense outburst when you least expect it.
When we become angry, our “fight or flight” response become triggered, releasing a rush of hormones that cause physical and emotional alarms. This anger is then carried out to impatience, yelling, frustration, even hurtful words.
Why Someone May Feel Angry
Anger is an emotion that can be triggered by many causes. Some of these causes are deep underlying unresolved conflicts within yourself that haven’t been addressed, whereas other reason can include the following:
· Being disrespected or treated unfairly
· Feeling threatened or violated
· Being physically harmed
· Feeling hopeless
· Feeling powerless
· High levels of stress or anxiety
Identify any problems in your past that could’ve contributed to your anger. Were you abused or punished harshly in your past? Do you have difficulty controlling your temper or your emotions? Do you feel like you lack sense of inner peace? You should identify issues that have an effect on your emotions.
Signs of Anger:
· Shouting and yelling
· Inflicting self-harm
· Swearing, name-calling, and making threats
· Becoming withdrawn and distant
· A physical expression such as hitting people, animals, or objects
How to Manage Your Anger
Suppose you are dealing with a stressful situation or are experiencing bullying or negative life circumstances. In that case, it is normal to experience anger and frustration, especially when dealing with chronic feelings of stress, isolation, and anxiety.
As a child or a young adult, you may have been raised around unhealthy and nonproductive ways to experience anger. Maybe your parents, caretakers, or elderly family members did not express their emotions in a healthy manner, which overflowed and carried into adulthood.
Recognizing that you did not learn healthy ways to manage your anger in childhood is the first step to understanding why your anger boils over into unhealthy emotions and circumstances in adulthood.
If you have experienced past traumatic events, it can be normal to feel residual anger as traumatic events can have a lasting effect on your psyche.
A licensed therapist or mental health counsellor can help you work through your past trauma, present stressful situations, and underlying childhood conflicts in hopes of offering you guidance and healing.
Anger and acting out
Anger is an emotion that does not always have to be acted upon. For example, we can become angry but not express our anger outwardly. Acting out our aggression often goes hand in hand with anger; however, not everyone who is angry will be aggressive, and not every aggressive behavior is fueled by anger.
Can Anger Be a Positive Emotion?
Our society views anger as a negative emotion. Therefore, we often do not want to address it or feel guilty addressing it, but can anger become a healthy outlet when addressed appropriately?
Anger becomes harmful when you don’t regard it as a signal to correct the underlying problem. You let the anger fester until you dislike your feelings, yourself, and the person who caused you to feel this way.
It bubbles to the surface in the form of aggression. Unaddressed anger can fester and create more significant problems such as depression, anxiety, aggression, and broken relationships. Emotions, even anger, serve a purpose.
Healthy Anger
Healthy anger forces you to fix the problem initially because you’re not going to let go if your behaviour goes uncorrected. Secondly, because you wouldn’t want to turn your anger into aggression, this can be helpful anger.
Recognizing your anger and addressing the triggers are the first steps into working through your anger and resolving the negative feelings and thoughts associated with your anger.
Anger could be a positive emotion when you use it to solve problems and recognize conflicts. It is important to accept our anger as a normal emotion, and by acting in negative ways, we should learn how to express it in healthy ways, so we do not have to carry it around like a heavyweight.
Expressing our anger in healthy manners means that we take time to breathe, work through our emotions, and develop healthy solutions.
This may mean writing down our thoughts, setting boundaries and limits before becoming angry, recognizing any unresolved conflict, or underlying ideas, forming a plan, talking to friends and family about our emotions, and going to therapy.
