Its weekend once again, I’m quite sure you must be relaxing from the hassles and all kinds of stress of your daily work. In one way or another you might have been angry or provoked by someone from your home or place of work. Well, here are a few tips on how to effectively manage anger. Here then are five tips which will help you release anger to improve emotional and physical health.
1. Yourself Permission to Express Anger: Our society does not allow us to express strong feelings or emotions such as anger for instance. We are taught to hold in our emotions from the earliest age. This can have a profoundly negative effect on our overall health. It’s not wrong to express anger, fear, sadness, rage. In fact, it is indeed very healthy to release these emotions regularly for as long as you know how to handle it. What’s wrong is when we hurt someone in the process. It is preferable to find safe ways to dump the negative feelings. In this way it would surely be good for you.
2. Combine Mental and Physical Effort for Anger Control: Mental therapy alone may be extremely helpful for anger release, but it can only take you so far. Similarly, the physical act of doing exercise can help many people let off steam, but it may not remove deep-seated anger.
The most effective process is when you can combine both the mental and physical effort. This is when you do a particular physical activity along with the mental intention of releasing the anger. Please see the next step for specific examples of how to combine the mental and physical effort to help release your anger. In each example, don’t just pound pillows, or rip paper, but you must truly feel the heavy anger emotion with its full intensity while you are doing the physical activity.
This is so important and will assist you to finally release the anger energy so that it won’t come back. You may have to do the process repeatedly because it releases layer by layer and it is doubtful that you will get to all of it in one session. There are many studies recently showing that doing this type of activity could possibly make someone more aggressive.
This is a complicated issue. Let’s say that the type of people who hold in their anger their whole life needs to learn to become more aggressive in order to become balanced. It is important to learn how to not be a doormat and have people walk all over you. It is important to speak up for what you believe and not take garbage from everyone.
3. Never Hurt Others in the Process: Give yourself the opportunity to express anger but always in a safe way, without hurting anyone else. Most people will benefit by having a private room to pound pillows with their fists or legs, or with a plastic bat. Some people may prefer ripping pages of paper, screaming, throwing plates (old ones). Many people find it helpful to use anger-release music as a stimulus or catalyst for this process. Remember, never hurt yourself in the process and never aim your anger literally at another person. What is important here is your expression of the negative emotion, and not who receives it. If the anger (or other emotion) is traced to a specific individual, some people have found it helpful to have a symbol of this person at which they can direct the anger. This could be an enlarged photocopy of a photo on a piece of paper which you then scribble-over, tear, burn, or otherwise destroy. Be open to discovering your own dynamic anger-release method.
4 Totally Let Go, Without Hesitation: It is also important to suggest that if you feel the need to express yourself in any of these ways, that you either are totally alone so that you don’t feel inhibited, or that you are in the surroundings of a group of people who are supportive of this type of activity. If you don’t have a private room in your house, maybe you can find a secluded area, where no one will hear or see you — even the inside of your car may work. (Don’t do any of this while actually driving!)
5 Strive to Forgive: The final step in maintaining anger-release is to truly forgive the person who wronged you as well as to truly forgive yourself.
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In conclusion, expressing your anger won’t totally do you harm for as long as you know how to manage it and you know how to deal with its consequences. Becoming the controller of your emotions will definitely make you a better person, a person who can always decide in view of what to do with what he feels. Anger management is therefore therapeutic and healthy.
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