How to control anger and let it go

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

Anger is a normal and natural emotion experienced by virtually all humans. However, uncontrolled anger can cause damage to our life and the people around us. For example, your colleague has better performance than you, your supervisor promoted him even though you join the company earlier than him. Your anger starts to rise and you purposely go against him and even shout at him in some circumstance. This ruins the harmonious work environment and your supervisor will notice that you have anger controlling issue, leading to a tougher path toward promotion. 

Another example, you are having trouble with your work. When you back home, you throwing your emotion toward your family member, yelling at them, scolding without reason. Even when they try to comfort you or help you by providing opinions, you shout at them. What makes it even worse is you physically abuse your family members. You not just pushing them away, you also hurt them badly. In the end, they have to leave you.

Hence, learning to control anger is not something unusual in our daily life, there are courses about how to control your anger. Learn to control anger need a lot of practice, it's not something that we can just learn the theory and success in controlling anger. When we are able to control our anger, we will be able to create a more peaceful life, to the least we will able to avoid a lot of unnecessary arguments and damage. Here are some practices that we can do.

1.    Stop talking

When we are angry, we might unintentionally attack other people as we loss control of what we should say and what we should not say. We just say it out without thinking much about it. This will hurt other people and we often will regret on what we have said after we calm down. So, the first practice is to stop talking when we are angry. 

2.    Take a deep breath or leave the place a while

Take a deep breath to slow down the racing heartbeats. If it's not working, leave the place for a while, go to toilet or have a drink. If you have some other ways to relax, do it. Just don't let the anger control over you.  

3.    Put your foot in their shoes

Try to think on their side, why they are doing it. We normally just see the issue from our point of view, we can try to see the issue from their point of view. That will help us understand why they are saying those words or performing certain actions. When we do that, we will have some clue on why they did it, probably we will do the same if in their situation. Eventually, the reason for anger will be gone.   

4.    Know that everything will pass

Things that seem big today will be small after 5 years. Time can change everything, we can be poor today but rich after 5 years. We can be living happily today but involved in an accident tomorrow. Whether it's good or bad, it will pass, we just need to live the best out of the moment. After all, we only have around 30,000 days to live our life. Whether it's happy or angry, a day is a day and we won't be able to get it back. Why do we spend our day with anger?