today we're going to be talking about some practical tools to manage and control your anger
hi everyone we often think about anger as a negative and destructive emotion
however anger is actually a very important and valuable emotion because it serves as a sign that
something's wrong or something wrong is happening and anger activates you to address the situation
and to deal with whatever the problem is so anger in and of itself isn't a problem but
it's the expression of anger it's how the anger comes out that can be problematic so what we're
going to be talking about in today's video are ways that you can better manage and control anger
to minimize the negative consequences and maximize the benefits of anger
but before we get into that just a couple of disclaimers to go over i'm a registered
psychologist in the province of british columbia canada and this video is for informational
purposes only it is not intended as a substitute or replacement for advice from your doctor
or mental health professional now with those things out of the way let's start talking about
managing your anger now as i mentioned earlier and as i've explained in a previous video
anger can be a really useful and positive emotion as long as it's expressed in constructive ways
anger doesn't have to be about conflict violence or negativity but too often the case people can
lose control of their anger and it causes them to lash out in negative ways that leads to all
sorts of problems for the the person but also for other people around them or in their orbit
so how do you control anger what are the components of effective anger management
well the first step is to recognize when you're feeling angry
and to be more aware of the common triggers that contribute to you feeling angry
it's a lot easier to control your anger when you catch it earlier on rather than trying to manage
it when you're in a rage state so what are some of the things you can do to recognize triggers
and early warning signs that you're starting to feel angry well one thing you can do that
can be helpful is to make a list of common triggers that cause your anger to flare up
so things like other people being late or my kids leaving their shoes in the middle of the hallway
a work colleague who doesn't respond to emails getting cut off in traffic people talking
loudly on their cell phone on the bus being late for a meeting think about all of the things that
tend to be those sort of those fuse lighters for my anger irritability now notice uh some of
these things may may be avoidable like being late for a meeting while others of these things like
people talking loudly on the phone are not so for some of the ones that are uh avoidable that you're
aware of you can make efforts to try and avoid those situations so trying to avoid uh being
late by sort of planning your time a little bit better whereas someone talking loudly on the bus
you don't really have any opportunity to avoid or control that situation
so this list of trigger situations what it can do is to keep at the forefront of your mind
the most common situations that cause you to feel angry and so when you find yourself in
those situations or when you can recognize or plan ahead to being in those situations
you're more likely to be on the lookout for signs that you were you're getting angry
now in addition to this list of common trigger situations you can also make another list of early
warning signs that you're becoming angry remember it's much easier to manage anger when you're not
in a high anger state so if you can identify it earlier on and stop it that can be really helpful
now your physical reactions can be an important alarm bell that helps you recognize
your anger earlier on and your physical reactions can give you a better chance
to address the situation before your anger gets out of control so being aware of some of the
common physical sensations that you experience when you're angry can be really important
so things like increased muscle tension or clenching your fists or clenching your jaw
grinding your teeth when you notice your hearts racing or you have chest tightness or you feel
sort of hot or sweaty or you just get a sense of physical anger aggregate physical aggravation so
when you notice these physical sensations happening it's a sign to you that you're
getting angry um a good example of this was in the uh the marvel movie the hulk in which
edward norton is playing uh bruce banner and he's the hulk uh he has a heart rate monitor
that he wears and his heart rate monitor uh helps inform him and lets him know when he's
starting to get worked up and angry so he can try to calm himself down before he becomes the hulk
so it's the same sort of idea without the hulk part but it's the same sort of idea of
using your physical sensations your physiological responses as a cue to when you're getting angry
so you've identified your high your most common trigger situations and you've noticed
your early warning signs that you're starting to feel angry what do you do
now once you start noticing you you're starting to feel angry you can address that anger with
a variety of tools including behavioral tools thinking tools and emotional management tools
so in terms of the behavior tools there's a few things that you can do
and the first one seems a little bit obvious but i think it's an important one to point out
first thing you can do when you start to notice that you're feeling angry is to remove yourself
from the situation to allow yourself to calm down it's almost like giving yourself a time out
what this does is it gets you out of the trigger situation gives you an opportunity to calm down
and allows you some time to think through the situation rather than just reacting to it
so if you notice you're starting to get angry during an argument with your spouse
one of the best things you can do is step away from the situation go for a walk and resume the
discussion when you've calmed down a bit now if you can't remove yourself from the situation
another thing you can try is to try to distract yourself from what's making you so angry so
while this distraction isn't really a physical time out of removing yourself from the situation
it's almost like a mental timeout to take your mind off of what is causing you to feel
so angry get your mind off of thinking about that anger provoking incident or situation so
suppose you're stuck in traffic and you notice yourself getting worked up because you hate being
stuff stuck in traffic well one of the things you can do is turn on the radio and sing along
to a song that's playing on the radio or you can listen to a podcast and really think about what
they're talking about on the podcast you can count the number of pedestrians that you see out on the
sidewalk anything to get your your mind sort of shifted towards thinking about something else
now if your anger is being caused by a problem situation a good approach for anger management
in that case is to engage in problem solving to address the problem that's making you angry
because if you're able to solve the problem that's triggering your anger
then you're not going to feel angry anymore problem solving allows you to
direct the activation that's being caused by the anger to actually addressing the problem
so you're not taking out your anger on the people around you but you're using the anger to motivate
you to engage in problem solving and address the problem that's causing the anger now i've
done a video on practical problem solving skills if you're wanting to learn more about that about
this topic and ways of better problem solving i'd encourage you to take a look at that video
now one aspect of problem solving can be to be more assertive especially in situations
where the problem involves interpersonal conflict or difficulties with another person
the thing is people often confuse assertiveness with aggressiveness now aggressiveness that's an
unhelpful expression of anger that can lead to more conflict or problems with people however
being assertive with people involves respect respecting them respecting yourself
communicating how you're feeling showing understanding and trying to work collaboratively
trying to work collaboratively with the other person to try and address the situation
assertiveness is much different than aggressiveness
uh and if you're wanting to learn more about assertiveness and some of the differences between
assertiveness and aggressiveness i've done some videos uh on those topics which i'll link to above
and i encourage you to take a look at those if you're interested in learning more
so those are all behavioral approaches to managing anger what about some thinking tools what about
thinking tools that you can use to change how you view uh the anger provoking situation
well the first step the first thing you can do is to recognize some of the anger provoking thoughts
that you're actually having in the situation things like this is so unfair or i hate this
guy or i'm going to make them pay for this well think about it if you're thinking those types
of things what's that likely to do to your anger it's probably working you up it's probably making
those types of thoughts are probably making the anger more intense so the idea is to take a step
back once you notice yourself having these types of sort of anger provoking or anger
inspiring thoughts and to try and think about the situation more realistically examine the evidence
what's the evidence that supports my angry views of this situation yes my friend is late for lunch
but what's the evidence that my friend always treats me like garbage what's the evidence that
my friend doesn't value me i might be having those thoughts but what's the evidence to support them
because what this can do is it can give you an opportunity to look for alternative
explanations or alternative interpretations of the situation can i think about this situation
any differently are there any other explanations for why my friend is late rather than them having
a complete disregard and disrespect for me well maybe they got stuck in traffic or
got held up at work outside of their control it's a much different way of thinking about
it and that's much less likely to lead to me getting really worked up and more angry
is there evidence to support different ways of thinking about this situation has my friend ever
been respectful to me have they ever showed me that they care about me or value me if i
can think about these other situations that have shown that my friend respects and cares about me
it can help defuse some of those anger thoughts that i'm having tool that you can use to change
how you think about anger provoking situations is empathy um the thing with empathy is it's
it's just really about thinking about another person's behavior
in a different way thinking about maybe their behavior wasn't intended to hurt you
oftentimes the way a person behaves has nothing to do with us but we tend to assume that what
other people do does have to do with us like we're the center of the world and people are constantly
thinking about us when they do the things they do when in fact that's probably not the case at all
maybe it has nothing to do with me maybe their behavior is just a reflection on how they're
doing that day and how they're coping with things going on in their life so
the notion of empathy takes me out of my situation and gets me to try to think about how the the
situation may feel like for the other person what the other person might be going through
and what this can do is often diffuse some of the anger that we feel in these types of
situations when we're perceiving that the person's behaving some way because they're reacting to us
so finally let's talk about some emotion management tools now these are remote
these are approaches to try and and manage the experience of the anger emotion itself
now one of the most common emotion management tools that people use to try and regulate
anger and irritability is relaxation because our bodies can be strongly
affected and influenced by anger as i mentioned earlier
thing is it's really difficult to be relaxed and angry at the same time so if you can learn
effective ways of relaxing yourself what it can do is lower the overall physical arousal
that you experience when you're feeling angry um and that you're experiencing that can lead
to that boiling over and lead to the anger getting out of control the relaxation can bring down that
overall level of stress and tension and take more it can take more to get you to that angry state
and there's lots of different things that people can do in terms of relaxation
slow diaphragmatic breathing progressive muscle relaxation meditation all sorts of things
another way of regulating or managing the physical hyper arousal or physical arousal
that results from being in an angry state is engaging in physical exercise because physical
exercise can help burn off some of the physical tension that happens when you're feeling angry
now another emotion regulation tool to manage anger is one that you may not have thought of
before and this tool is humor it's really challenging to be angry when you're laughing
uh yes life can be extremely frustrating and it can be extremely anger provoking
but can be this way more so if you take all of the daily annoyances
too seriously by making an effort to see humor in those daily frustrations and annoyances
it can help defuse some of the anger that you experience
and finally anger can be a symptom of other underlying psychological difficulties like
depression anxiety excessive worry ptsd so if the problematic anger is a result or symptom of
these conditions learning better ways of managing these psychological conditions can be critical in
controlling anger so in this case in this type of situation the goal isn't so much anger management
but rather addressing the underlying root cause of the anger and so i've done lots of videos on
tools to help manage these types of conditions so if you're interested in learning more about
skills and tools to manage depression ptsd generalized anxiety i'd encourage you to take
a look at some of the videos on my channel if you're interested in learning more about that
so that's it for anger management i hope this gives you a better sense of some of
the various ways you can better control problematic anger through things like
earlier recognition of anger changing the situation changing how you think
about the situation and managing your emotional reactions better
i'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about this so please leave me some comments in the
comments section down below if you're interested in seeing more of my videos please hit that
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so that's all for today's video as always thank you for making it all
the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one