Why Managing and Regulating Your Anger Is Good For Your Health...

Anger is normal

Anger is a normal biological emotion that we all experience. Anger is mostly a physiological response to some real OR imagined threat, either physical or emotional.

Anger is the most contagious of emotions. If we are around angry or agitated people we will start to feel angry and agitated also.

Anger can range from very subtle feelings that we may not even be aware of, to extremely violent and dangerous behaviours. Subtle forms of anger feel like an emotional wall between us and someone else, and range up to feelings of resentment.

Anger is mostly a physiological response...

Anger affects our whole body; it triggers our fight/flight system which is there to protect us from real life and death situations, not for solving family or social problems. All our thought processes are severely affected, so that when we are angry we do not think clearly or make good decisions.

Anger is an automatic response and is not for thinking. The only purpose of anger is for fighting, it is not for solving problems. We need to use a different part of our brain for thinking and solving problems. Anger is always about blame. “I feel bad, and it’s your fault.”

Our behaviour goes through discrete steps during anger arousal. It starts off with attempts to control or neutralise the threat, to warning, threatening, or intimidating. If that does not work we will go right to injuring the body. So don’t think that anger is for solving problems. Once you are angry, it means that your feelings have been hurt and you want to hurt the other person back.

The principal function of anger in modern times is to protect us from psychological pain. Virtually all the anger we experience that is not directly related to physical pain originates from feeling disregarded, feeling unimportant, feeling accused, feeling devalued or disrespected, feeling rejected, feeling powerless, or feeling unlovable.

Our basic biological motivations are:

• Approach
• Avoid
• Attack

Approach motivations require emotional investment, which means going beneath the surface to understand, appreciate, or enjoy.

When we don’t regulate our vulnerable feelings, our brain will automatically try to avoid them by:

• Attacking others
• Attacking self
• Withdrawing
• Avoiding

Attack/Avoid Motivations are filled with:

• Anger
• Disgust
• Guilt
• Shame
• Fear

When we are feeling hurt we are motivated to:

• Stop them
• Get even
• Get back
• Hurt them

When we are feeling good about ourselves we are motivated to:

• Heal
• Improve
• Correct

What is the best emotional investment in your short and long-term best interest?

Do you want to blame and punish?

Or, improve correct, heal?

Why Should We Manage and Regulate Anger?

Apart from the social and family problems anger causes, anger is dangerous to your health. Biologically, anger is only meant to be experienced for a few seconds. The adrenalin your body produces during anger arousal damages your immune system by destroying your T-Cells in your blood stream. These T-Cells are there to protect you from invading organisms.

The First Rule of Anger

The angrier you are the more hurt you are. The angrier someone else or your partner or your child is, the more hurt they are. Anger is always a response to hurt or a sense of self-diminishment.

How Do We Manage and Regulate Anger?

Because anger is an automatic response to a real or imagined threat and those threats in modern life are mostly psychological we need to have a skill that our brain uses automatically in a fraction of a second to avoid anger and anxiety arousal. The purpose of the emotional regulation technique we teach in our anger regulation program is to give you a skill that you will never have to use consciously.

The problem with anger is that you're feeling bad about yourself. That's why you want to regulate it. You don’t deserve to feel bad about yourself. Learning these skills are more about caring for you, not the other person.