How to Eliminate Anger
“He who conquers his anger has conquered an enemy” - German Proverb
Anger is a volatile emotion that actually creates physiological changes in the brain. A part of the brain called the amygdala swells up and puts us into fight, rather than flight, mode. It’s a primitive survival response. Once this occurs it becomes difficult to exert conscious and rational control over our reactions.
A lot of destructive results can come from anger. It can cause people to say awful things about other people, even loved ones and in the extreme it can lead to physical violence.
The best way to deal with anger is to never let it happen in the first place. It is possible to completely eliminate anger and angry responses from your life. It all comes down to understanding the mechanism that causes anger. Once you understand it, you can change the mechanism, or change the input to the mechanism and get a different output. Through understanding and applying this, things that once caused you to go berserk can end up causing no more reaction other than a raised eyebrow.
The Anger Mechanism
Anger occurs because a desire that you have is not fulfilled. In your mind you have a mental rule where a condition, or set of conditions, must occur or else something ‘wrong’ has happened and the response is anger. Implicit in the rule is an underlying reason for making such a rule in the first place. The rule is then followed by the response to take, should the rule be broken.
For example: A person must never steal from me, because it takes resources from me. If someone steals from me then I feel anger and I fight to get back what’s mine.
Often, you will be unconscious of the specific terms of the rule, as many rules form subconsciously. However, once you question your anger and analyze your responses, you will find that this structure of rule, reason and response always exists.
The depth and intensity of the anger that you feel is directly related to the nature of the desire, how much value you attach to it, the extent by which the rule was violated and the immediacy of the event. Sometimes events occur that are so shocking that they can send you berserk, as this little story demonstrates:
I was in a bar some years ago and had drunk too much. As I was leaving I made a foolish comment and the bouncer in the bar literally jumped upon me and pinned me to the ground and started cursing me and seemed all fired up to give me a beating. I was totally shocked and backtracked and managed to wriggle out of the situation and I left.
Although I got out physically unharmed, I was in a furious rage. For me, a sacrosanct rule that no one must carry out physically violent actions upon me had been violated in a manner that was totally and shockingly overboard as a response to what I had done. I tramped up and down the street and ideas of revenge swept over me. I even went as far as to pick up a brick to hurl through the window. Fortunately I considered the downside and the consequences and the futility of such an action, but I really had to exert massive will power to accept the indignity, drop the brick and move on.
The occurrence or threat of actual physical harm is mercifully very rare for most us. However, many people get angry over relatively trivial issues, for example, if you open the door for someone and they give no word or gesture of thanks or appreciation, that can cause anger, but it’s a minor offense in the grand scheme of things.
Many people also get angry over issues that they simply cannot control. For example, if someone cuts in front of you when you are driving then that is alarming, but you can’t control the other person’s action and it’s an event that is already in the past, so getting angry only harms you.
If you find yourself frequently angry then you can take control and eliminate anger by identifying the rule and the reason that sets up the anger mechanism and change either one of them so that no angry reaction is generated. When you get good at this, you can eliminate all useless, trivial and destructive anger from your life.
How You Can Take Control
The next time that you get angry, try and isolate yourself before responding. Once the amygdala is enlarged it takes at least 30-minutes to calm down and during this period rational control is very hard to exert. Counting slowly from 1 to 10 really is excellent advice, but if you feel like responding by lashing out in some way, either with words or actions, then shout the words out where you can’t be heard, or take out your anger on an inanimate object, or write an angry letter (but whatever you do, don’t send it!).
Once you have calmed down, think about the event that caused you to react emotionally with anger. Identify the specific thing that ‘should have happened’ or that was ‘wrong’ and write it down. Work out the rule that was broken.
Once you have the specific rule written down, consider whether it is a good rule to keep hold of. Good rules to keep are ones that protect you and your loved ones from immediate or long-term serious harm. Bad rules are ones where triggering events are always outside of your control, where other people have no idea what your rule is (so they break them without any awareness of them), where it’s always too late to do anything about it, where the angry response is out of proportion to a trivial cause.
Next think beyond the normal knee-jerk reaction to identify what’s really at stake and what the real reasons for action are. For example, if you open a door for someone and they show no appreciation, then question your reason for helping out in the first place. If you do it because you are naturally generous and helpful and because you get pleasure from it, then realize that when you open the door you are totally congruent with yourself, i.e. you would do it even if you knew in advance that the person would not thank you. If you open doors because you want recognition and gratitude, then you are doing it for the wrong reasons. Those benefits should come as an occasional byproduct of your generous action and not as the purposeful desire.
Rewrite your rule and your reason and your chosen reaction, e.g. I prefer it if people show appreciation for me when I open the door, because it’s polite and it demonstrates reciprocity. However, if it doesn’t happen then I don’t mind, because I have acted in accordance with my good standards and I thus fulfill myself.
In the case of someone cutting in front of you: I prefer it when the people around me drive safely and don’t take alarming risks, because this lowers the risk of accidents. However, it occasionally happens that people make mistakes, so I accept that I can’t control that.
It’s a bit of a chore to go through this process, but it does get to the root cause of the problem and allows you to know and understand exactly what is going on. By changing your rule, by changing your reason or by changing your interpretation of the event that sparked off your anger, you can change the mechanism. When you have no rules, or rules that are incredibly hard to break, the result is no anger.
The Benefits of Eliminating Anger
Every desire that you have becomes another opportunity for reality to disappoint you. When you don’t get what you desire, you feel bad. Every time that you abandon or modify a rule to make it easier to manage you simultaneously make it easier for you to be happier and more cheerful. Remember: The people with fewest rules are happiest.
On top of that, anger leads to damaging responses and if that occurs over trivial issues or things that are impossible to change, then it wreaks unnecessary and avoidable damage. That just creates a catalog of human misery and tragedy. That can be eliminated through understanding the mechanism. It’s really very simple. You have no excuse to let anger wreak havoc and damage in your life.
If you are frequently angry, then you have a lot of work to do here, but after a while you stop responding with anger to events. As soon as a bad result occurs and you feel anger starting to rise, you instead shrug your shoulders, or give a little sigh and say to yourself, “Oh well, that’s my reality. I didn’t get the result that I wanted and I accept that. What’s the best way to respond now?”
This is a nice place to get to. Instead of letting your emotions control you (and anger is one of the worst because of the physiological changes that occur), you manage your desires and hence have mastery over yourself. Instead of responding with damaging verbal or physical violence you bypass that reaction immediately and instead tap straight into your personal resourcefulness, where you think ‘What’s next?’ or ‘How can I get that result that I want?’
Related articles:
Detachment - The Key to a Balanced State of Mind
The new book, ‘Make Things Possible’ is now available. It details all the things that you need to know to manage your mind and to fulfill those things that you desire. It’s available here: www.makethingspossible.com
#1 - Permalink Newton October 17th, 2008 at 8:17 amNice post thanks
#2 - Permalink Cathy October 18th, 2008 at 2:31 amNick,
I respectfully, yet vigorously, disagree with you.
This article starts: “The best way to deal with anger is to never let it happen in the first place. It is possible to completely eliminate anger and angry responses from your life.”
On the contrary - anger is a basic human emotion. Just like sadness or fear, anger is part of who we are as a species. Therefore, it *cannot* be eliminated.
On the other hand, I do agree with a lot of the other ideas in this article, but for very different reasons. I do agree that it is healthy to examine why we have out of balance reactions to seemingly minor events or occurrences. I also agree that working with finding out the “rule” that was broken. Both of these actions are the start of the process of healing from emotional pain.
Over the past couple of years I’ve been working on healing hurts from my past and changing my limiting beliefs, what you refer to as rules. I guess you could say I’ve been rewriting the rules. This is been enormously effective in carrying me toward true happiness. But, I haven’t done it by eliminating emotions. Quite the opposite - I’ve done it by finally expressing my emotions that I’ve been pushing away over the past 30+ years.
The one emotion that has been the most healing for me? Anger. If I was to eliminate anger from my life, I would *never* heal. In fact, as I’m discovering, one of my “rules” is that my feelings don’t matter and I’m a bad person for getting angry.
Slowly, I’ve come to honor my anger and my right to my anger. I do agree with you that expressing anger *against* someone is very harmful, especially if it’s against yourself. But the act of expressing anger - and then accepting that you are not wrong or bad for being angry - is *fundamental* to personal health and happiness.
I’m interested on your thoughts in response.
Cathy
#3 - Permalink admin October 18th, 2008 at 4:18 amHi Cathy,
My theory about emotions is that they arise out of the difference between what we desire and what we get in reality. If we get more than we desired then we feel positive emotions. If we get less than we desired then we feel negative emotions. The nature and intensity of the emotion depends upon the difference between the desired result and the actual result.
Desires are created in the mind and so you can change them. Through managing desires in the first place it becomes possible to eliminate, or to at least seriously curtail, many emotions. Without a cause, the brain and body simply don’t produce an emotional response and the need to deal to emotions with some form of physical response simply vanishes.
I don’t recommend repressing anger. What I recommend is to accept reality. Accept that you didn’t get what you wanted and that the moment has passed. It’s history. No amount of rage is going to change that result one little jot. Interpret anger as a message that something has to change. Learn from it.
If you got angry in the first place and you don’t change your rule or your reason then you will always become angry when that rule is broken. If you don’t want to feel anger then question the rule and its validity and its usefulness. If the rule is structured in such a way that you’re always fighting an uphill battle, because ‘life’ continually breaks your rule, then I suggest that what you want is probably not possible to have. Since I don’t like to get angry then I adapt my rules to my reality. In doing so, I eliminate anger.
I don’t compromise myself or impoverish myself by doing this - quite the contrary. People with fewest rules are happiest. When nothing can ‘go wrong’ in your life there are no grounds to get upset.
Instead of raging against the world because it doesn’t live up to my expectations, I adapt so that I can make better use of what’s available to me. These days and under most situations, when something bad happens to me I immediately say to myself, “Ah well, that’s my reality.” In doing so, I accept what has happened and that my desire has gone unfulfilled. This generally prevents negative emotions from being triggered. I then think something along the lines of, “How can I make the best of things now?” This puts me back into a resourceful and adaptive mode and I can get on with whatever it is that I want to achieve.
#4 - Permalink Chris October 22nd, 2008 at 10:22 pmI really like this article a lot! “People with the fewest rules are happiest.” That makes so much sense. I have definitely seen that that is true since living with several roommates the past few years.
Thanks Nick!
#5 - Permalink admin October 23rd, 2008 at 4:06 amIt’s quite a challenge living with other people, isn’t it? It’s amazing what different rules people have and which they think are ‘totally normal’ and yet rub other people up the wrong way. To make living with other people work you have to develop a lot of tolerance. The mantra “it’s not right or wrong, just different” helps a lot when living with other people or spending time living in a foreign country.
#6 - Permalink Andrew June 23rd, 2009 at 2:25 amI’ve always been aware that “reality” is how one perceives and chooses to interpret it. That awareness hasn’t helped reduce my anger at work though. I told myself that anyone that walked in my shoes would agree with my justified anger. I’m at a point where I’m constantly angry and realize it’s harmful effects.
Your explanation in “The Anger Mechanism” section really helped clarify where anger stems from, particularly the “rules” we unconsciously create for ourselves.
I will make to effort to eliminate unnecessary anger from within myself, but I know it will not be easy. Right off the bat, I’m sure the need to create these rules has something to do with my childhood. This process is essentially recognizing and reconditioning 15+ years of negative thinking/attitude. It will take much effort and persistence.
Thanks Nick.
#7 - Permalink admin June 23rd, 2009 at 6:15 amIf you can, keep a record of what happens when you get angry and see if you can find the rules behind it. That’s the best way to get some value from angry outbursts. Rationalize the rule and then see if it’s worth keeping hold of. If not then consciously say to yourself, “I’m no longer going to hold to this rule. It’s no longer true in my case.” If you detach any desire that you previously had it becomes quite easy to drop rules.
#8 - Permalink dave December 6th, 2009 at 1:48 amI am only here looking for ways to reduce my anger, I dont think anger should be eliminated, if that was done then wrongs may never be righted. u dont need to fly into a sycotic rage to right the what some of us may see as wrongs but we need to learn how to take that rageing anger and tune it down and try to turn that wrong into a right in a more sensible way. although i have just said this like i believe it, I just want to get vengence in the worst way imaginable, and at the moment i have such rage for some realy dumb reasons i truly know that r realy no reason for me to feel this way but for some reson i just cant turn that anger off when i think of how i feel i was done wrong. I have enough common sense to know never to act upon all the terrible thing i would like to do to get revenge, but when i think of the reveng aspect of thise actions it seem as though i just get more and more angry and i just cant stop till i fall asleep or my mind finaly just has to move on to lifes other thing. i know there are other out ther that feel this way too, all i can say is dont act on it, but u r heading in the right direction like my self if we r here and at least trying to figure out why or how to deal with it all, good luck ragers, i say just keep looking at fourms like this and sometime u find things that are written about anger that u can realy identify with, and will help calm us in the future,