Anger Management For Dummies
Overview
Learn to mitigate your anger and take charge of your life
Everyone experiences anger from time to time, but when left unchecked or unbridled, this normal human emotion can become disruptive and damage relationships. If you’re ready to stop letting anger control your life, turn to Anger Management For Dummies. This trusted source gives you tools to identify the source of your anger—whether it’s fear, depression, anxiety, or stress—and offers ways to deal with the “flight or fight” instinct that anger produces, allowing you to release yourself and your life from its grip.
Anger Management For Dummies outlines specific anger management methods, skills, and exercises that you can use to take control of your feelings and actions. It provides:
- Information on the different kinds of rage, including road, air, and office
- A look at Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) and how to manage aggression
- Advice on how to deal with angry children and teens
- Details on how anger is related to the "fight, flight, or freeze" response of the nervous system and prepares you to fight (for good or bad)
Overcoming anger issues requires support, mindfulness, and a bit of practice—all of which this book provides. When you’re ready to face your triggers and change your perspective on the emotions of anger or rage, let Anger Management For Dummies give you the helping hand you need.
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About The Author
Laura L. Smith, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and the former President of the New Mexico Psychological Association. She was co-author of Depression For Dummies and Anxiety For Dummies and is an expert on emotional disorders, cognitive therapy, and mental health issues.
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anger management for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
For most people, anger creates physical sensations that tempt them to explode. But before you open your mouth, take a look at ten ways to cool down. Then see how to express yourself more effectively with assertiveness. Learn about anger’s dos and don’ts, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief. Finally, check out some tips for managing work conflicts.
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Anger management is a case of mind over matter. What you have in your mind matters — it spells the difference between being full of anger versus anger-free. Here are ten thoughts that will help you manage anger — yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
No one can make you angry without your participation
When people say, "He (or she) made me mad," it's their way of trying to make other people responsible for their emotions.
Here are ten techniques for cooling down situations that threaten to ignite when you don't want them to. In all but the rarest of cases, you'll feel better and come up with more effective solutions when you contain conflict rather than give anger a free rein.
Listening deeply
When people attack, your best defusing strategy is to listen.
If you're one of those road warriors who drive with vengeance and anger in their hearts, you're in luck: Here are ten helpful ideas to use to combat road rage and learn to drive with composure.
Don't rush
If you're driving aggressively and getting impatient with everyone else on the road, chances are you feel that you're in a rush.
Being a parent is no easy job, especially when it comes to your child’s emotional development and anger management. If you’re a parent, you know all too well the angry cry that your baby lets out when she’s hungry, lonely, or in pain. Anger is her way of telling you, without using words, “I need something!” The louder the cry, obviously, the stronger and more urgent the need.
Alexithymia is a word used to describe people who appear to lack emotions — including anger. Alexithymia is thought to be a fairly stable personality trait but isn't a formal, psychological diagnosis in and of itself. Alexithymics tend to
Have difficulty identifying different types of feelings
Appear stiff and wooden in relating to others
Lack emotional awareness
Lack enjoyment
Have trouble distinguishing between emotions and bodily feelings
Appear overly logical when it comes to decision making
Lack sympathy for others
Appear perplexed by other people's emotions
Be unmoved by art, literature, and music
Have few, if any, emotional memories (for example, memories of childhood)
Don't disconnect from your feelings to manage your anger.
You can get what you want in life through appropriate behavior or attempt to do so with anger, aggression and obnoxious behavior. You’ll get more cooperation and succeed more often with the former approach. Here’s a list of a few anger do’s and don’ts to help you see the difference.
Do be competitive. All successful people are competitive.
For most people, anger creates physical sensations that tempt them to explode. But before you open your mouth, take a look at ten ways to cool down. Then see how to express yourself more effectively with assertiveness. Learn about anger’s dos and don’ts, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief. Finally, check out some tips for managing work conflicts.
When you find yourself getting angry, it’s time to take immediate action. It takes only 90 seconds to defuse your anger because anger is a brief, transient emotion, especially if you take some of the following steps:
Close your mouth.
Your odds of saying something useful when you feel intense anger are precisely 1 out of 1.
Anger Management
In today’s demanding, fast-paced, opportunistic world, it’s easy for life to become unbalanced and for people to feel anger as a result. All kinds of factors contribute to an unbalanced life.
Age
As with any skill, you find how to balance out your life by living. As you get older, you get wiser. Young people have a tendency to be one-dimensional.
Anger Management
Bad, terrible, and downright outrageous things happen with regular frequency at work, home, and with friends. If you have trouble managing your anger, you need to try and not think like a victim. For example, people get laid off, couples get divorced, friends betray friends, and kids misbehave and show disrespect.
Anger Management
Humans are the only animals that have a choice about how they view the world. Cats, dogs, squirrels, hamsters, goldfish — they're all creatures of instinct, which means they respond in predictable ways that are prewired into their nervous systems. Instincts are universal — scratch a Golden Doodle's tummy and he'll instantly begin shaking his hind leg.
An early step in managing anger at the moment you experience it is to assess the intensity of the feeling. This is the rate-and-label step. To assess your own anger, follow these steps:
Think of a number between 1 and 10 that best describes the intensity of your emotion, with 1 being mild and 10 being severe.
A rating of 2, for example, suggests a barely noticeable change in your emotional state, whereas a rating of 8 signifies very strong negative feelings.
People who go through anger management generally manage to reduce their anger problems a great deal. They go through days and weeks without losing their temper. They feel great about the progress they’ve made. And then something odd happens. They don’t feel that they’re being true to themselves. Somehow they actually seem to miss their anger but don’t know why.
Anger Management
Often, people confuse social support with a social network. Support has to do with the quality of your relationships with those closest to you — family, spouse, friends, children, neighbors — and, at its best, reflects a state of intimacy or emotional connection with others. A network, on the other hand, simply defines how many such relationships you have (the quantity).
Before you can manage your own anger, you need to be aware of what anger is and isn't. Unfortunately, myths about anger abound. Here are some of the myths you can dispel right from the get-go:
If you don't express anger, you just might explode. The truth is, the more often you express anger, the more likely you will feel angry in the future.
Anger Management
Behavioral medicine (the science that connects mind and body) advises that excessive inhibition of emotions, especially strong emotions like anger, is unhealthy. That’s right — holding back on emotions can actually make you sick. It makes sense if you think about it.
Holding back on emotions is unnatural for humans.
A great strategy for getting an early jump on anger is to find ways of acting quite the opposite of how you’re feeling. Your brain has a way of observing your behaviors and often starts to make you feel the way you’re behaving. Furthermore, all of these techniques usually hold anger at bay for a long enough time for it to start coming down on its own.
Anger Management
To understand how much of a problem you have with anger, you need to look at how frequently you experience the emotion, how long it lasts, and how intensely you feel it. Obviously, if you feel frequent, intense, and long-lasting anger, you have a problem, and your anger likely interferes with your life and relationships.
Everyone gets angry — yes, even those people who seem impossibly zen at all times. After all, anger is one of those universal emotions — along with sadness, joy, and fear — that people throughout the world recognize when they see or hear it.But everyone experiences and expresses anger a little differently. Following, are descriptions of the many ways people show their anger or, alternatively, hold it in.
Anger Management
The link between emotion and physical health can be both direct and indirect. Anger, for example, has an instantaneous effect on your blood pressure — but that effect is short-lived and generally doesn't cause any immediate harm, although chronic anger appears to increase your risks of heart disease and possibly high blood pressure.
Your body is the first responder to anger triggers. These responses happen almost instantaneously and often without awareness. People all have their own unique pattern of physiological responses to anger triggers. Here are two examples of different responses:
Melissa notices her palms getting damp on her commute to work.
Anger Management
Managing your anger is a major life change. Everybody needs support — nobody can go through life completely alone. When you're embarking on a major change in your life, the help of other people is especially important.
Support comes in many forms. To manage your anger effectively, you need all the following kinds of support:
Carefully selected family and friends: You need people who are behind you 100 percent, people who know about your problems with anger and are cheering you on as you figure out how to manage it.
Knowing your anger triggers — the events and situations that make you mad — is important because you'll respond more effectively to your anger when you feel prepared for it. Anticipating the possibility of anger increases your ability to express it more constructively. Here are some common anger triggers.
Being treated unfairly
Many people feel annoyed, irritated, or even enraged whenever something unfair happens to them.
To get your anger under better control, figure out what sets you off. In the following table, the broad categories of common triggers are listed. The first column lists the trigger categories.
In the second column, you rate each trigger category from 1 to 5 in terms of how often it has occurred for you. For example, a rating of 1 means you rarely or never encounter this anger trigger.
Anger has a lot to do with feeling that you're not getting what you want (or what you feel entitled to). You're not getting recognition at work or making the money you feel you should. Your kids don't show you the respect you feel entitled to as a parent. Your dog doesn't come when you call him. So you get mad.
A plethora of scientific evidence supports the fact that regular physical exercise improves moods and can help you reduce your anger. If you choose to exercise regularly, you can expect to
Concentrate better
Sleep better
Show a greater interest in sex
Have more energy
Be less tense
Enjoy life more in general
Feel less alienated from those around you
Make decisions easier
Be more optimistic
Complain less about minor physical ailments
Be less self-absorbed
Think more clearly
Be less obsessive
Be more active
Be less irritable and angry
Even with all these benefits of exercise, people have many excuses for not exercising.
When you think of domestic violence, what comes to mind? If you're like most people, you immediately conjure up an image of a couple engaged in an angry, violent exchange. This couple could be two men, two women, a husband and wife, partners, or cohabitants. What makes it domestic violence is that they live together in some sort of committed relationship.
Anger Management
One step toward truly managing your anger is to learn to keep your cool at work. If you’re tired of being disgruntled, dissatisfied, and disheartened at work, here are some things you can do to remedy the problem:
Accept the reality of your situation. Not everything in the workplace can be changed. Stop focusing on how things should be and instead deal with them as they are.
Most anger-management treatment programs don't address the issue of medications. In part, that's probably because medications aren't actually a way of managing your anger. And studies on the effectiveness of medications for anger have been somewhat inconsistent.However, you should know that medications may be an option for some people, especially when other emotional disorders, such as depression or anxiety, accompany their anger.
First you're hooked on anger, and then you become hooked on substances. In addition, caffeine and nicotine are stimulants that have the capacity to overstimulate your nervous system, thus making it easier for you to get angry the next time you get frustrated or provoked. In effect, you end up in a vicious cycle where anger leads to chemicals and chemicals lead to anger.
Compassion is the opposite of anger and violence. All world religions, regardless of their differences, have one thing in common — they teach and preach compassion. When the Bible talks about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, it's not talking about anger and violence — it's talking about love of your fellow man and woman (or, for that matter, your cat!
Anger Management
Because slips, backslides, and lapses are virtually inevitable in your anger management journey, you need to plan for them. And in the process, you can probably reduce the frequency of those setbacks by looking ahead and mentally preparing for problematic events. You may want to consider seeking professional help if you haven't done so previously.
Anger Management
If you're feeling like your anger has ruled your life or is ruling your life, try this exercise, which helps you put the values you want on center stage.
Take out a sheet of paper and write the word I on the first line. Then spend 15 minutes writing an essay about your life up to now; include anything and everything you think is relevant and important.
When you're confronted by a loved one's anger, clearly the anger is the major problem. But anger isn't a reason to feel like a helpless victim. To keep that from happening, try the following:
Get help. Your friends and family are great resources. But, when dealing with an angry loved one, they can't give you an objective perspective.
Anger specialists have described the difference between what’s known as state and trait anger. Trait anger refers to a chronic, long-standing personality characteristic that shows up as an almost constant tendency to become angry at the slightest provocation. State anger refers to temporary, short-lasting outbursts of anger.
Anger Management
You need to make an informed decision about whether you want to make changes and control your anger. To do that, you need to understand what the process of change looks like.
Drs. Prochaska, Norcross, and DiClemente, in their highly acclaimed book, Changing for Good, described the process of changing human behaviors, emotions, and habits.
Anger Management
Substances of various types exert effects on the body that trigger anger. If something is legal, some people tell themselves it can't harm them. But common sense tells you otherwise.
For example, cigarettes are legal, but everyone knows that nicotine is an addictive drug and that smoking leads to the untimely death of millions of people.
All emotions (including anger) have benefits at various times to varying degrees. Anger also has an extensive array of possible costs. Businesspeople use what's known as a cost-benefit analysis all the time to improve their decision making and increase their odds of success. A cost-benefit analysis involves a systematic approach for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of any kind of option under consideration.
Anger Management
Anger can be your ally in constructing a happier, healthier, and more productive life. To reconstruct your anger and turn it into assertiveness, you have to think a bit. Assertiveness, as opposed to aggressiveness, is direct communication without rancor or sarcasm — and it’s usually expressed firmly but gently.
Anger Management
People have reasons for continuing to express their anger. They hesitate to change because of beliefs that they hold about feelings, anger, and change itself. These beliefs can be quite powerful, so it's useful to examine them. Then you can decide whether you want to consider alternatives to these beliefs.
The alternative perspectives listed under each reason or belief for not changing your anger are exactly that — another way you can choose (or not) to look at the belief.
Not only can anger rob you of energy and end up making you sick, it can also drastically affect your career — and not in ways you want.
Once, a 35-year-old unemployed man called in to a syndicated talk show that offered career advice, telling the host that he needed advice on how to get a good job. The host asked him about his educational background — he was a college grad — and inquired about his last job.
Anger Management
If you're on the receiving end of the anger, the most important thing you can do is to stay out of harm's way. Your job isn't to fix your loved one's anger — that's your loved one's job.
Most people who are on the wrong end of a loving-but-angry relationship have four options:
Hope and pray that the angry partner will change.
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