Anger management: tips to tame your temper.
Anger management: tips to tame your temper.
A reddened face, thrashing heart, the affinity to say words that were best left implicit: these indicators will be agonizingly familiar to anyone who has ever touched angry.
The Roman philosopher Seneca defines anger as a “short madness” that sets us on the path to self-destruction – “very like a falling rock which breaks itself to pieces upon the very thing which it crushes”. He declared that anger is our most hideous and wild passion and also fundamentally wicked and argued that no pest has cost the human race more dearly as like it.
However, it doesn’t need to be this way. While obvious anger is clearly an unhelpful force, some recent experiments suggest that anger, and connected emotions like frustration or irritation, can also bring some returns – provided we know how to channel the energy arising from those feelings.
Indeed, the specialists argue tapping our angry feelings to good use may be far more effective than simply overwhelming them. R David Lebel who is an organizational scientist at the University of Pittsburgh describes that suppression just leaves anyone feeling exhausted.” So he feels that all of these are depending on where we’re going to direct our energy.
So what are those welfare measures? And how can we join them?
Mobilization
As the first example of anger’s possible benefits, let’s activate with fitness which makes sense that the feeling of preparing the body for a fight and might outcome in a rush of strength – and there is now a lot of proof that this may give you the power in many sports. Brett Ford explained, “Anger is a kind of mobilizing emotion that is physiologically activating and you can use that activation to serve a physical goal.”
In an experiment, sports scientists in the UK asked participants to imagine a strongly irritating situation, before they felt a test of leg strength, in which they were asked to kick as hard and as fast as they could for five minutes while a machine stated the force of their movements. The anger controlled an important boost in their performance, as they controlled their frustration into the exercise, compared to participants who felt more neutral. Later studies found the same profits in ball pitching, and jumping: the angrier they felt, the faster their pitch and the higher they jumped.
Anger can also rise accuracy besides providing a blast of energy- which is analyzed for NBA players. The researchers examined players for responding free throws after a “clear path foul”, in which an opponent purposely makes contact with a player just before they are about to take a shot at an open, unobstructed basket and a clear path foul is thought to be especially egregious because the shot would have been so easy to score.
Anger also causes stress hormones like adrenaline to overflow your system. Those hormones can raise your blood pressure, heart rate, and even your cholesterol level. Unclear anger may also activate your odds of rising:
- Eating disorders like bulimia
- Type II diabetes
- Obesity
- Sleep disorders
Angry bursts can activate heart attacks and, for people who already have heart disease, repressed anger may lead to worse long-term health outcomes.
How to safely express anger?
Wait until you’ve had time to cool down before challenging the other person and enter the conversation with an open mind. You should have a good open mind to change your thought and even willing to accept your fault.
You should be aware of the tone, pitch, and volume of your voice. Use “I” statements. For example, I’m feeling that I’ve been shouldering most of the housework lately. This statement is showing the other person about your feeling but it’s not making them feel attacked.
Practice constructive listening. You should listen without any agenda so that you can truly understand why the argument started in the first place. Don’t just think about your next attack line while the other person is speaking. Instead, you should give them time for finishing their thought, after listening to their thought, process what they said, and carefully respond.
A short temper can indeed shorten your life! Anger can get you into cardiovascular worry, and deep worry at that. When you get fired up passionately, you’re doing the comparison of setting a torch to your arteries. Medical research has frequently renowned the danger of anger and chronic stress.
Here are two examples of a psychologist from his personal and professional life:
His (psychologist) grandmother died from a massive stroke when he(psychologist) was 13. He remembered enquiring his father what had caused her stroke. He said that his mother’s oil burner had been smoking and she became sensitively sad about it. Within a few minutes, she became confused and then distorted to the floor.
Later in life, he became deeply aware of how such a thing could happen and happen so quickly. As a doctor, he studied the psychological connection to the heart and physical disease, and he normally distributed the consequences of stress and anger in patients’ lives.
He remembers brightly the case of an attorney whose new and elegant car was scratched from one end to the other by a teenage inferior. The lawyer- when he saw the damages became angry and had a heart attack on the spot. He treated him later in the emergency room and he was quite highly stressed. He calmed him down. He said the car wasn’t worth the price of his life.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff because it is all small stuff…”
That’s what he told all of his patients who were stressed to the gills and who were angry people. He told them about the lawyer and his grandmother, and about Bob Eliot- a great cardiologist from whom he learned a great compact.
While standing at a hospital platform in the mid-1970s and delivering a lecture on how to prevent heart attacks, Eliot suffered a heart attack. He was only forty-four years old.
Eliot survived the incident and made a full recovery, during which time he recognized that stress had taken him down. He realized he had to make theatrical lifestyle changes or else he would be a goner. He was his own first anxiety patient, as he put it.
With a new agreement on life, he went on to begin the Department of Preventive and Stress Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He became an honest advocate for output without self-destruction.
Eliot wrote a book and became a national courtesy” Is It Worth Dying For? (New York: Bantam, 1984).” He instructed that the best way to switch stress − particularly intense situations of hostility, anger, and explosive rage − was to be aware that these emotions carry a heavy price, including the probable for sudden death. His word was: “don’t sweat the small stuff….it’s all small stuff anyway.
The book is too funny to read with a serious subject. The title of the book is perfectly created. The important fact is that a wave of short anger doesn’t make for long life. And if anyone has high blood pressure it could ever hurt him badly.
Chronic anger and stress cause the body to over-discharge stress hormones and chemicals. Developing evidence indicates that overproduction stokes inflammation and a wide multiplicity of illnesses, including cardiovascular disease. Blood vessels constrict, causing blood pressure to rise and the heart rate to increase.
Serious situational anger can actually stimulate clot formation. This effect may advantage a soldier wide-open to life-and-death battle situations. The clotting breaks down or plugs up blood loss. It’s not very good, however, for everyday life. Anyone doesn’t want blood with the consistency of red ketchup. He/she always wants it to flow like red wine and reach the corners and crannies of the body through thousands of miles of tiny passageways. The thicker and stickier blood, the greater risk of cardiovascular and other circulatory problems, as like diabetes.
Anger by the numbers
In the 1990s, a series of Harvard lessons on anger and its effect on the heart identified anger as a common cause of heart attack and life-threatening arrhythmias. The main researcher Murray Mittelman, M.D., said that “the scope of the problem is sizable − at least 36,000 (2.4% of 1.5 million) heart attacks are precipitated annually in the U.S. by anger.”
Mittelman and colleagues investigated the question of whether greater levels of anger concentration mean greater levels of heart attack risk. To find out the answer to the question they analyzed the database of the Determinants of Myocardial Infarction. They studied almost four thousand cases who had experienced a heart attack. The results exposed that 38% of the contributors had had outbursts of anger in the year before their heart attack, and within this subgroup, there was a stunning two-and-a-half-fold incidence increased risk of heart attack within two hours of the outburst compared to other times. And yes, they found the more intense the anger, the greater the risk.
Israeli researchers reported on a study of 200 consecutive patients who had experienced a mini-stroke. They found that anger and intense negative emotions could increase the risk of stroke by as much as 14 times.
Anxiety and Anger related to each other
Anxiety is tightly related to worry and fear that is out of the normal for everyday activities. Many persons with an anxiety disorder become angry fast and also, they are always short-tempered. however, the link between anger and anxiety is often missed. Anxiety is frequently connected with overstimulation from a stressful environment and combined with the apparent inability to deal with that risk and anger is often tied to frustration. Regularly when anxiety is leftward unacknowledged and unexpressed that could turn into frustration, which can lead to anger. It is because a specific person who expresses anger will have an original fear about something in their life. When one becomes afraid of something, they often select anger, and unconsciously they feel as though they are in control of their anxiety.
Read: High cholesterol? causes and risk of high cholesterol.
Unprocessed Anger
Anxiety not only presents as a beating heart, shortness of breath, damp skin, and running thoughts, but anxiety can also present in more indirect ways like anger or frustration. Persons with undiagnosed anxiety may find themselves heavy out and becoming frustrated over everyday incidences that usually do not permit an expressive response. A perfect example is road rage. Traffic and crowds are repeatedly activated by anxiety, which can result in becoming angry with people on the road. Maybe they are going to be late for work, are in a bad temper, or have a stressful deadline pending ahead. Sitting in traffic is only calculating fuel to their fire. As a result, these people strike out at other cars when, in actuality, they are anxious about the stressful atmosphere and personal issues they have going on in their life.
Relationships can be broken for anger and have adverse effects on every aspect of rough behaviors. When individuals feel defenseless, their fight or flight response kicks in, and individuals go into defense mode, which sometimes means fighting.
Not all anger is related to anxiety, but regularly if individuals take a step back and uncover what is generating their anger, they may discover that they are showing signs of fear and panic, which may be the origin of an anxiety syndrome.
How Symptoms of Anxiety Can Trigger Anger
Individuals with anxiety usually have difficulty staying asleep and, as a result, may be sleep underprivileged. So that lack of sleep can trigger characters to become more sensitive to small problems and, as a result, are fast to anger. Shouting at the dog for barking, becoming angry in traffic, getting upset because of a long line at the grocery store, or smashing out over an honest mistake are all small causes that turn into monumental experiments for an individual who is fraught with anxiety and is sleep-underprivileged. Anger does not have to be purposeful, and with those who have an anxiety disorder, this anger is repeatedly an automatic reaction to a nervous cause or the properties of long-standing anxiety.
Anxiety disordered persons are frequently unbending in their daily routines since the fear of the unknown is regularly a cause for their anxiety. When something disturbs their daily routine, it is rare for the person to not know how to handle the change and, as a result, smash out in anger.
Seeking Help for Anger?
A combination of anxiety and anger can be toxic. Looking for treatment for anxiety disorder can help a person discover the reasons for their anger. Keeping a journal of anger related to knowing that and taking time for handling mental health is good for reducing anger.
Reference:
1. Reference 1
2. Reference 2
Writer: Nabila Rab
Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology
East-West University
Editor: Al-Resalat
BA in English Literature