8 Most Effective Anger Management Tips

Ok, so you have a temper. You have been called angry. What are you going to do about it? Here are eight anger management tips that work.

1. Willingness to Change: The first question you need to ask yourself is “Am I willing to change?” If you want to change, you will. But you need to want to do it for yourself.
2. Make a Commitment:  Make a commitment to yourself to start changing your patterns of behaviour. Sometimes this cannot be done alone and outside help is needed but where there is a will, there is a way.
3. Awareness:  Becoming aware of your emotions and how you deal with them is often the first part to managing any emotion. It is important to start noticing when you are getting upset, what is happening, what is upsetting you. In the awareness stage, you do not need to do anything to change what is happening, you just have to start noticing.
4. Understanding your anger process:  If you can’t understand or identify your own anger process, it will always feel like your anger comes on very quickly because you won’t know how to notice the beginning of your own anger process. This is a crucial step and the more aware you become of your own process the more you will be able to slow down your anger outbursts.
5. Finding an outlet:  It is important to find a healthy emotional outlet. Within our anger response, we are getting an adrenaline rush. Those who produce more adrenaline need to find a way to decrease their adrenaline so it doesn’t get stored in the body. The more adrenaline that is stored in your body the faster your anger outburst will lead you to an explosion.
6. Breathing:  Diaphragmatic breathing is the only tool that we carry with us 24/7, that is free to use and that is 100% guaranteed to calm your body down….if you are doing it right. The problem is that most of us do not breathe correctly and when we are not breathing correctly we are actually using our breath to increase our anger, anxiety and stress responses.
7. Pause the process:  Taking a pause during a conversation or an argument is often priceless. When we get upset and arguments escalate, we reach a point where we cannot think rationally and we often say things that we later regret. When we can take ourselves out of a bad situation and calm ourselves down, we then have the ability to re-enter the discussion in a rational way.
8. Communicate:  Healthy communication is key to any healthy relationship. Communication helps us to work through conflict and let others in on what we are thinking, instead of stuffing our emotions or exploding. Often not telling others how we feel for fear of conflict will cause more conflict in the end.