Anger is usually thought of as a negative reaction. Anger can be a a great tool to give us energy to manifest change. But just like fire, which can cook a wonderful meal or burn down the house, anger can also destroy us.
Anger is an emotional state that varies in intensity and creates physiological changes in the body. When we get angry our heart rate and blood pressure go up and so does also our level of energy. This is because it is a natural response that allow us to respond if we are attacked. For this reason most anger expressed through aggressive behavior.
Anger can be caused by. Internal or external events. We can be angry because of an event caused by another person or circumstance. Or we can be angry from an internal source like memory or self judgement. We mostly deal with anger through. Expressing, suppressing or calming.
Expressing our anger can be done through assertiveness without aggression. To do this means that we need to be able to express our needs, and how to get them met without hurting others. Assertiveness does not have to be demanding but it means being respectful to oneself and others.
Suppressing anger may turn inward and cause hypertension, high blood pressure or depression. Unexpressed anger can lead to pathological expressions of anger, such as passive-aggressive behavior or a personality that seems perpetually cynical and hostile. People who are constantly putting others down, criticizing everything, and making cynical comments haven’t learned how to constructively express their anger.
Calming means not only control in our outside behavior but also our inner response. Taking steps to lower our blood pressure, calming down until the feeling is resolved.
We need to define anger into righteous anger and entitled anger.
Righteous anger as an anger that lets us know when your boundaries have been crossed. Anger can be born from injustice. This reveals when our circumstances are misaligned with our worth. This anger tells you: I am worth more than this. I deserve better and love myself too much to allow this. Or these circumstances do not reflect the truth of who we are. This is the anger at the heart of the artist, the protestor and the organizer. This anger provides both power and fuel — as long as we control it. Anger need not harm. If we treat it with respect, it will teach us how to better humans.
Working with our anger means looking at our feelings, noticing, and listening to what our anger is telling us. What are we being called to do? What are we shown to heal? What boundaries are wea asked to build? What are we asked to teach? Where do we give away our power? What will we no longer tolerate? Working with our anger requires us too look at our needs and how to fulfill them. We can use our anger to discover who and why we are. But it requires patience.
Anger is a wonderful tool because it increases our energy if properly used and enables us to accomplish what we thought was impossible.
Anger can increase energy and performance of athletes. analysis of NBA players recently revealed that the responses free throws after a “clear path foul”, in which an opponent deliberately makes contact with a player just before they are about to take a shot.
If the traditional views of anger were true, you would expect the feeling of frustration, after the foul, would destroy their accuracy during the free throw, but the exact opposite was true. The players were more likely to score after the flagrant foul, compared with other free throws that had not arisen from such frustrating circumstances.
A burst of anger can also spark greater creativity. In brainstorming tasks, angry people come up with more original and varied solutions, compared to people who had been primed to feel sad or emotionally neutral. The increased arousal appears to super-charge the mind, allowing it to draw connections that are unavailable in other emotion states. This Energy burns out quickly, but these benefits maybe worth it.
When we decide auto express our anger to others in a controlled manner can be effective at changing opinions; moderately angry participants tend to perform better in negotiations and confrontations.
People with high emotional intelligence know this instinctively: working with Maya Tamir at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ford found that people who score high on tests of emotional intelligence are more likely to cultivate feelings of anger before a confrontation. Interestingly, this seems to be related to greater overall wellbeing: knowing when to express your anger, and how to do so appropriately, may help you to recover more quickly from a stressful situation, leading to better psychological health.
The guidelines to channel our anger to bring about positive change; we need to exercise patience. We need to plan our response before initiating a confrontation, so that we have enough time to articulate our feelings. Let us recognize our anger, and take appropriate action.
Entitled anger is what we see mostly. It is the anger when things are not going the way we would like. This anger can be very destructive and can overwhelm us. When working with anger we say to ourselves, I am getting angry. When we are at that state is when we need to address it quickly and turn it into a positive outcome. Because if we do not, we say “I am angry.” This is when we have become anger. In that state there is no reasoning, and our emotions are totally uncontrolled. We have become anger; we are not separate to deal with it. It is at that time we may say or do things that we later regret. Also, that anger jars our nervous system for 72 hours and weakens us.
Entitled anger is poison. Righteous anger is its remedy. Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy. Aristotle
