Anger can eat you up inside and slowly wreck your life. While anger is a natural emotion and a healthy response at times, hanging onto anger can be dangerous. You need to learn to let it go for your own sake. Here's some advice about how to do just that.
EditSteps
Part One: Essential Steps
- Understand anger. When held over an extended period of time, anger is an emotion that hurts the person experiencing it more than the person or people that anger is directed toward. Anger is often produced when someone wants to avoid feeling hurt over a situation, but that anger may only end up hurting him or her more.
- Anger can impact your emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical health when held in the long-term.[1] Even anger toward one person can eventually make you less willing to accept others into your life, especially if the person in question once meant a lot to you.
- Anger can drive a wedge between you and others and you and your faith. It can even cause you to turn inward and against yourself.
- On a physical level, anger can also cause problems with high blood pressure or other elements of your circulatory system.
- Identify the root of your anger.[2] Figure out what, specifically, you feel hurt over. Only in identifying the loss or underlying problem can you begin to confront that issue and let go of it.
- For instance, if a spouse cheated on you or left you, you would understandably feel angry. The sense of loss you feel likely stems from the loss of being loved and being appreciated or respected.
- As another example, if you feel angry after a friend betrays you, the loss driving you to sorrow and anger is the loss of friendship and camaraderie. The more important that sense of friendship was to you, the greater you loss will be and the greater your anger over it will be.
- Let yourself grieve. Since anger is often a mask to conceal pain, remove that mask when you find time alone and let yourself properly grieve over that pain or loss without feeling guilty or weak about doing so.
- Denying your grief is not strength, even though many people mistakenly believe grief to be a sign of weakness. When something upsetting happens, there is no real sense in denying just how much pain it brings you. The pain will not vanish just because you refuse to acknowledge it. If anything, it will stick around longer after being bottled up inside.
- Instead of saying “I'm fine,” admit “I'm hurting.” In the long run, this admission will help you release your pain and anger more effectively than denial does.
- Replace resentment with compassion. Another way to put this would be to “walk in the other person's shoes.” Consider the reasons the offending party may have had for acting in a hurtful way. You might never completely understand another's motivations, nor may you agree with them upon identifying them, but it is easier to let go of anger for someone after you spend a little time in his or her head.
- People rarely hurt others if they are not hurting in some way themselves. Negativity spreads like a disease, and if you got caught by someone else's negativity, odds are, that person caught negativity from someone else before that.
- Forgive. This does not mean that you have to condone, respect, or excuse the wrongdoing that triggered your anger. In this sense, forgiveness only means to make a conscious decision to let go of your grudge and desire for revenge on the party that did you wrong.
- Understand that forgiving someone may not prompt the other party to change his or her behavior. The purpose of forgiveness, in this sense, is to cleanse yourself of the anger and resentment building inside you. Forgiveness is for your own benefit and is an internal necessity, not an external one.
- Forgiveness can help you build healthier relationships, reach a higher level of spiritual and psychological well-being, reduce stress and anxiety, lower your blood pressure, give you fewer symptoms of depression, and lower the risk of alcohol or substance abuse.
Part Two: Approaching Anger from a Personal Level
- Look for a bright side. Find that silver lining on the storm clouds of life. Even though a situation causing you anger might be overwhelmingly negative, there might be a few positive gems or side effects that are actually beneficial to you. Identify these and cling to them to help you cope.
- In particular, examine any ways that your pain has helped you to grow as an individual. If this does not work, consider if your pain has put you onto a new path leading to good things that you may not have experienced had you missed that path completely.
- If you cannot look at the good brought about from a hurtful situation, then look at other positives in your life and other things you can be thankful for.
- Write a letter or a journal. If you keep a diary or journal, write about your anger as often as necessary to help you release it. If you do not have a journal, you can write an angry letter to the person who triggered your anger to get the feelings off your chest. Do not actually send the letter, though.
- Sending the letter is almost always a bad idea. Even if you phrase it as politely as possible, the other party is likely to take it poorly, especially if he or she is suffering from low self-esteem or other personal pain.
- Ideally, you should write the letter, read it out loud, and tear it up or burn it as a form of symbolic release.
- Scream. There are times when a person feels so angry that he or she feels the desire to scream. If you are facing this sort of anger right now, pause your reading and go scream into a pillow. Screaming offers you a physical release. The mind and body are connected, so by physically relieving your anger, you can also help relieve some of the mental emotion itself.
- As a word of caution, you should try to make sure that your scream is well-muffled by the sound of your pillow to avoid worrying any neighbors.
- Exercise. As with screaming, exercise provides you with a physical release for your anger. If you are not a big fan of exercise, you can still start small by talking more walks.
- This works best when you manage to choose a form of exercise that you enjoy. Take a walk in a scenic park, go for a refreshing swim, or shoot some hoops.
- Replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. When a memory connected to your old anger begins to resurface, quickly replace that thought with something positive to prevent your mood from sinking too much.[3]
- You can think back to a positive memory, think forward by thinking about something exciting coming up, or think completely outside of the box by indulging in a daydream.
- As a general rule, though, you might want to avoid thinking about things involving anyone who hurt you, even if those thoughts are positive. Remembering how good things used to be might intensify the hurt you feel over how things turned out, only increasing your anger as a result.
- Metaphorically throw it away. If there are a lot of details about a given situation that make you upset, you can find something symbolic to represent these components of your anger before throwing those symbolic elements away.
- You can collect stones alongside a river and throw them into the water after you have assigned a component of your anger to each one.
- You could also buy a bundle of tennis balls and label each with a component of your anger. Throw them as far as you can in your backyard or at a tennis court, and pick them up when finished.[4]
- Find a hobby you enjoy. Sometimes, you might have more luck working past a negative emotion like anger is to give yourself a positive distraction that you are more eager to invest yourself in.
- If you do not already have a hobby, try a few out. Take a class on painting, cooking, knitting, or any other potential hobby that catches your attention.
Part Three: Approaching Anger from a Spiritual Level
- Pray. If you believe in God, pray for the strength and willingness to let go of your anger. When letting go of anger seems out of your ability to handle, petitioning for divine help can help soften your heart enough to let you release that anger for good.
- If you cannot find the words to express your anger and pain as you pray, you can also look online and in prayer books to find pre-written prayers that accurately describe how you feel.
- Meditate. Whether you believe in any particular faith or not, meditation is a good way to stabilize your body, mind, and soul. There are many types of meditation you can try, so choose which is best for you and your needs.
- When learning how to meditate for the first time, choose a basic meditation program and create a space for yourself that calming, yet not so relaxing that you will fall asleep during your meditation exercises.
- Turn to your faith. Again, if you believe in a higher power, than leaning on that higher power for the strength to get you through your anger and resentment can prove successful.[5]
- In particular, if you believe in God and also believe that God is loving and takes an active role in the course of human events, release your negativity and accept that God has a purpose for your pain and has not abandoned you.
- Consult with a religious leader at your center of worship or others who share your faith for support and guidance. Read from your faith's scriptural texts, or read spiritual books written on the matter of anger and forgiveness.
Part Four: Approaching Anger on a Social Level
- Surround yourself with positive people. Simply put, by exposing yourself to the optimism and positive thoughts expressed by other people, you introduce positive thinking back into your own life. As time progresses, you may even start to develop positive thoughts of your own to replace your anger.
- Do not trap yourself into thinking that you are only limited to one group of people, especially of those people continually cut you down or contribute to your feelings of anger.
- Consciously decide to leave a positive influence on the world. You can let your anger spill out and affect those around you, but then you would only be spreading it and making those negative feelings stronger. By consciously deciding to spread a positive influence to others, you can transform the way you handle social interactions in a way that leads to less anger.
- The world is filled with enough pain, sorrow, and anger as it is. By deciding not to contribute to it, you can help heal yourself and heal others.
- Take responsibility for your own actions. When dealing with someone who triggered your anger, think about the situation and honestly determine if there was anything you handled poorly, should have handled differently, or otherwise did wrong. Accept your own responsibility for these actions instead of pushing all the blame on the other party.
- This does not mean that you cannot acknowledge the poor treatment given to you by the other party. It simply means that if you did wrong, you should be honest about it, especially if you ever plan to reconcile.
- Avoid social functions as necessary. If someone who makes you angry will be at a social engagement and you want to avoid the temptation of getting into an argument or stirring up old feelings of resentment, there is nothing wrong with skipping that social event, even if others do not entirely understand why.
- At the same time, you should also avoid letting the person who makes you angry ruin your life. If the two of you share most of your friends, go out of your way to schedule time with your friends away from the offender's company.
- Give yourself a rant window before meeting people who make you angry. If you work with someone who has angered you or are otherwise forced to interact with that person, give yourself 30 minutes or so before seeing him or her. During that time, vent aloud and to yourself about how angry that person makes you feel. By the time the meeting itself happens, you might be too worn out to deal with your anger in person.
- Determine if reconciliation is a option. Understand that forgiveness does not automatically lead to reconciliation. If you suspect that the party responsible for triggering your anger feels remorseful and wants to make amends, reconciliation might work out.
- On the other hand, if the other party is not open to setting things right, or if the nature of the pain is such that you can never trust the other party again, reconciliation might not work out.
