Anger Management Tips

Anger Management Tips

Regardless of how unexpressed anger affects your health, it's important to get it out. Learning healthy ways to express anger can strengthen relationships and improve communication skills – if you do it right (which can be difficult!). People may become offended, hurt, defensive or upset when you share angry feelings, even if you apply healthy anger management tips. People may feel blamed, inferior, or guilty.

Healthy Ways to Express Anger or Hostility:

Share your angry feelings when you're calm, not furious.
Be tactful in expressing your angry feelings.
Use "I feel" instead of "You are" or "You did".
Refuse to criticize or blame.
Talk with the person about how to prevent future occurrences.
Exercise or write to release angry feelings.
Let it go. Don't hold a grudge.

Unexpressed anger can cause depression, which is why anger management tips are important. Accepting and expressing angry feelings is one of the healthiest things you can do for your emotional and physical health.

Express Anger Appropriately

Understand how we express anger.

Usually, anger manifests itself in one of three ways. Outward expressions of anger include yelling, screaming or violence, and even less threatening approaches like sarcasm. Inward expressions include feelings like seething, biting your tongue, or suppressing angry feelings. Neither of these approaches is healthy. The third way to express anger is control and channel it into more acceptable methods of expression.

Realize that anger is a choice.

One of the great things about human existence is our ability to interject something between stimulus and response. Thus, no one can really "make us mad;" we choose in each instance to become angry. So if we are choosing anger, then we also have the ability to choose another response. Taking responsibility for choosing to express anger in unhealthy ways is an important step in learning to make other choices.


Figure out your triggers.

An angry response is triggered by some stimulus. For each of us, that stimulus may be different. For you, it may be walking into the garage and finding all your tools out and not put back where they belong. For others, it may be hearing a child talk with disrespect to you or to his mother. It is a helpful exercise to try for a week or two to jot down at the end of each day the things that happened to trigger feelings of anger, and to look for patterns.