Finding Your Calm: Effective Coping Skills for Anger

You’ve probably found yourself in a situation where you felt angry. Your anger might have been directed at a specific person, or just at the circumstances. Also, you may or may not have gone on to act on that anger.

One of the things that anger does is that it moves us to act. When you feel angry, it activates your body’s fight or flight response, which floods the body with stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart rate and blood pressure go up. All of this gears you up to do something about the situation that may have provoked feelings of anger. Anger makes you want to act, but those actions can prove to be unwise and/or unhelpful.

Anger is a natural, adaptive response to perceived threats that help us to survive. As a result, when anger crops up, it tends to bring about physiological changes which allow us to fight and to defend ourselves when we are attacked.

Unfortunately, this can look like lashing out at others, whether they were the ones that provoked the anger, or not. This is why it’s important to understand your own anger and develop healthier and more workable ways to respond to and express it .

The Value of Keeping Anger Under Control

Anger can range from feeling mildly irritated because you can’t remember your login details, to experiencing a full-blown rage because a loved one has been endangered or treated poorly. When these feelings of anger arise, they can be expressed in several ways, that include yelling, getting physically aggressive, crying, pouting, or breathing and finding other ways to calm down.

There is great value in being able to keep your anger under control. Keeping anger under control doesn’t mean denying that you’re feeling angry or choosing to suppress those feelings. In fact, these are simply other unhealthy ways of dealing with anger. It means becoming more aware of how your anger works. It includes understanding that anger often stems from how you interpret a particular provocation.

Anger can impair rational thinking. It can affect the decisions that you make. Dealing with anger is thus an issue of being able to have mastery over yourself and how you respond to situations so that you’re not reactive or led by your emotions. To this effect, Proverbs 25:28 (ESV) says, “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.”

A city in the ancient world needed its walls. They functioned as the primary defense against attack. Behind those walls, one could take shelter against an invading army. Walls made a huge difference in the ability to defend oneself and weather an attack. In the same way, a person lacking self-discipline is also defenseless and vulnerable to the circumstances and situations they find themselves in.

Being self-disciplined helps one to master emotions such as anger so that anger doesn’t lead them astray. That’s one reason why Paul writes in Ephesians 4:26-27 (ESV), ^“Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil.” It’s one thing to be angry, and another to then sin on account of your anger. When anger is given its head, it can lead to broken relationships and regrettable actions.

Effective Coping Skills for Anger

Dealing with anger doesn’t need to happen the moment you feel your hands ball into a fist, your cheeks flush, or your heart rate beating staccato in your chest. Although all these signal that you are angry, you can choose to control and delay your response. You can begin to deal with anger at its roots, by understanding what makes you angry, as well as knowing how to calm yourself down when you’re on the road to anger.

Some of the healthy and effective coping skills you can develop for handling anger include the following:

Reinterpreting provocations

When something provokes you to anger, how you interpret a particular provocation matters. If you’re having dinner with some friends, and one of them insults you, you can decide how much it matters that they insulted you by how you choose to interpret and ultimately respond to what happened.

You may quell anger by aligning yourself with your values and responding accordingly. On the other hand, if you run with thoughts like, “Oh my goodness. Who do they think they are? They can’t get away with this! What will my other friends think?” You might become even more angry. How you choose to interpret and respond to the provocation matters for whether you’ll get angry, or how angry you may become.

Be aware of your moods and triggers

Have you ever wondered why something that didn’t bother you last week drove you nuts yesterday? The same provocation can elicit a different response depending on certain factors that affect one’s mood. For instance, if you’re feeling stressed, tired, already angry, hungry, or overwhelmed, a simple provocation can make you angrier

As your mood has an impact on whether and how angry you get, it’s a good thing to understand these things about yourself. If you notice that you get cranky when you haven’t had a decent night’s rest, you can deal with this by making sure you sleep well, or by taking steps during the day when you know you’re sleep-deprived. Knowing your moods and your triggers helps you to better manage your anger.

Watch your thought patterns

Thoughts can have a huge impact on how you experience life. If, when something provokes you, you may lean into overgeneralizing or catastrophic thinking, that can work to fan the flames of your anger. For instance, if you’re in a traffic stop that delays you, and you overgeneralize by saying “Why does this always happen to me?” that could make you angrier than you otherwise would be.

Suppose you think of that traffic stop, “Well, my whole day is now ruined.” That catastrophic thinking makes you angrier because you’ve blown the trigger way out of proportion, making it seem larger than life. Similarly, apart from these two patterns, if you label people or situations in inflammatory ways, that too, can make you angrier.

Understand what’s underneath your anger

The thing about anger is that it can serve as a mask for other emotions. For instance, if someone insults you or says something about you in a meeting, feelings such as vulnerability, fear, insecurity, embarrassment, shame, anxiety, hurt, or sadness might be what you’re really feeling, but the knee-jerk response of anger might cover up that fact.

Instead of yielding to that instant angry reaction, it’s helpful to understand what is causing you to feel insecure or embarrassed, and to attempt to deal with that. Additionally, sometimes anger issues may be symptoms of another underlying problem, whether that’s trauma, experiencing chronic stress, or depression in men. Getting to the bottom of it will help you address the true root of the feelings of anger.

Learning to unlearn how to express anger

Part of coping well with anger is knowing and understanding the patterns of behavior we’re exposed to and typically default toward. For instance, if as a child you saw family members hit, scream and yell, throw things, act aggressively, give the silent treatment, or otherwise express anger in unhealthy ways, you’ll likely express your anger in the same manner.

The issue with anger is not that we have it, or that it begs for expression. The issue is that we often express it in unhealthy ways, or we try to suppress it. Anger is an informative emotion. It indicates what’s going on inside us, and it can be expressed well, calmly, and assertively. While there may be a bit of a learning curve, you can ultimately move away from old patterns of thought and action toward healthier ones.

Help is available

Through the help of an anger management counselor or therapist, you can come to understand your anger and learn various ways to express it well. Your counselor can illuminate the patterns in your life. They can walk with you to develop better coping skills, such as prioritizing self-care because it impacts your ability to regulate your own emotions.

If you are ready for counseling, reach out to our offices today! We will set up an appointment with a counselor in our directory.