TLI Staff
New Delhi: While depression and anxiety are tagged as the biggest villains nowadays that are eating into people’s mental health, anger management is equally important in today’s fast paced world where people don’t make even basic efforts to understand each other and there are a lot of suppressed emotions.
While suppressing anger in long term can lead to depression and anxiety, expressing it incorrectly can be equally problematic if not more. Things get irreversibly messed up when one is unable to manage negative emotions that take on the form of anger and gets spilled on to others.
Uncontrolled negative thinking while interacting with others can turn into unsavoury words that can in turn disrupt relationships. Chronic anger has been linked to health issues like high blood pressure, heart problems, headaches, skin disorders and digestive issues.
Unchecked anger can lead to violent crimes in extreme cases and emotional and physical abuse in many cases.
Signs that you may have anger issues:
1. You almost always want to win an argument even if you know deep within that you are wrong.
2. You can’t take criticism, even if it is a constructive one and tend to get defensive and lose your cool on a person who’s doling out the feedback.
3. If things don’t happen your way, you immediately get disappointed and anger starts building up and is taken out on the most vulnerable person around.
4. If you keep thinking about past issues and hold on to grudges for a very long time without any reason and can’t forgive.
5. When people around start telling you directly or indirectly that you need to work on your anger issues, it’s time to work on them.
But is there any way to keep your anger in check?
Anger like any other emotion can be managed by observing from a distance. It is an emotion that has almost always an underlying cause. Ranging from fear, sadness to poor self esteem, you express anger when you want to hide the way you are feeling.
The next time you feel a bout of anger, stop and take some deep breaths. Once the urge to act out of anger-shouting or abusing-settles down, ask yourself why you felt the anger in the first place. Is it because you felt somebody was trying to put you down? Is it because you felt someone is not respecting your authority? Is it because things didn’t happen the way you wanted them to? And other such things.
Your emotions have a root cause. You might be feeling this way because you crave acknowledgement, love, respect, support or may be power, but do not have control over it. It might happen because of a variety of external circumstances but it could stem from your low self-esteem or childhood beliefs too.
If you badly want to get out of this vicious cycle of getting angry at people and feeling guilty about it, which leads to you feeling bad about yourself and affecting your self esteem further, you might want to let go of these deeply rooted emotions that are building up your anger. It’s not worth it to waste your life pondering over things that are not in your control. Letting go is tough, but if implemented the most powerful tool of controlling your emotions.
One should not shy away from approaching an expert, if things don’t seem to be improving as nothing is more important than your mental health.
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