What is Anger

Have you ever wondered what is anger? What are the causes of anger? How does anger arise? Do you feel your anger?

I have no doubt that all of us often have to deal with anger in our lives, whether at work, at home or outside with people we don’t even know. I too have a tough time all my life dealing with my quick temper. I would thus like to share with you what I’ve learnt about anger at a talk I once attended, conducted by Doris Ang, a dedicated family life educator whom I admire very much.

What is anger?
Anger is an emotion that leads to certain psychological and/or physical behaviour. What happens to us when we get angry? Our blood pressure shoots up, we feel a rush in our adrenaline causing our face to turn red. Our heart beat quickens, leading to an insufficient supply of oxygen to our brain, causing a chemical imbalance, ultimately resulting in us experiencing seizures. And when we are seized by anger, we lose control of ourselves.

Causes of anger
We get angry when we feel we’ve been threatened or are powerless. We feel anger when we are demeaned or our goals are being blocked, a sense of injustice, a feeling of unfairness. When someone has a different opinion from you, do you get upset and try to defend your position and often end up getting angry? When something is not done according to your wishes or your set of principles, do you too get angry? Quite often right?

We often focus on the problems that we face rather than the solutions. By over focusing on the problem, the problem becomes bigger and distorted. Eventually, we become overwhelmed by the anger causing us to be immobilised, to feel helpless. Anger makes us narrow-minded, emotional and irrational, and actions that we take during these moments will normally be regretted later. How true this is…it always happens to me.

But Doris did advise that we should not suppress our anger within us and should learn to manage it instead. Anger that has been suppressed for too long may implode one day, leading one to take extreme actions such as revenge, getting even, possibly even causing harm to oneself or someone else. When we see someone totally seized by anger, we should never challenge them because they have no sense of shame and cannot be bothered about their surrounding anymore.

I am reminded at this juncture about the idiotic Wayne Rooney red-card incident that happened a few days ago. That nincompoop was stupid enough to allow Cristiano Ronaldo to challenge him, to arouse the anger in him, causing him to shove the opponent right in front of the referee. It was most disgraceful to be red-carded and banished from the game for such behaviour and now he has to bear the guilt of being partially responsible for his country not getting a place in the semi-finals. I am sure he must be full of regret now but it is of course much too late for that. He now has to wait another four years in order to make amends for his mistake.

How to Diffuse Anger?
When we think wrong, we feel wrong and we do wrong. We must thus learn to watch our thoughts, get our thinking right and break away from this negative thoughts pattern, this vicious cycle in order to conquer anger. How then do we do that?

First of all, we have to change a wrong belief system. We must remember that all behaviours are need motivated and created by our belief systems. Disturbances lead to irrational behaviour and in order for us to change, to diffuse our anger, we must look at our belief system, to see if we have read the situation wrongly. When we learn to be more objective and not allow negative thoughts to cause unwanted behaviour in us, we’ll better manage anger.

When anger does arise, we must learn to relax our muscles progressively, such as through breathing exercises. We can also practise walking away from the situation to minimise the heat, the confrontation. Lastly, learn to identify ways to de-stress, to desensitise through recreation. Always look for ways to re-create a new you.

I’ve not been very successful in preventing my anger from arising after all these years of practice. However, I have learnt to let my anger subside very quickly and do find it easier to let go of my belief systems nowadays. I don’t argue as much as I used to. Is that an improvement? I would think so.