Do you ever have those days, weeks(??), when you are just angry at everything and everyone?

Or maybe, just that one person that pushes your buttons? And you just don’t know why!

Anger is a completely normal emotion and is healthy in the right situations. Anger is there to protect you when something is felt to threaten you. This was incredibly important when we were defending our evolutionary ancestor selves against attack to enable you to defend yourself. In the modern world, this is triggered when we feel that the situation we are in is unfair, that it is unavoidable or it can make you feel powerless. The fight/flight system is activated to energise us into action against something that goes against the unwritten rules that we hold.

The strength of our response is not only because of the situation, but how we think about it:

• We may catastrophise the situation by making it an absolute disaster and the consequences will ruin your life
• We put blame on something else so that it isn’t our fault
• We may overgeneralise by think that this always happens to me
• We put our needs before those of others so they shouldn’t be doing what they are to annoy us

Put on top of how we are feeling at the time of provocation, our anger is inflamed. Nowadays, we can feel threatened by the constant pull of technology- those notifications that never stop- or by something not working when you need it to. We can by overloaded or have deadlines to meet that we can consider to be life or death. An underlying level of stress will decrease the level of provocation needed to push us into anger.  It tells us when we have had enough.

Many of the stimuli in the modern world trigger this threat response. However, this normal emotion can be deemed inappropriate in the modern world as we have labelled it as a bad emotion. We can use this increase in energy to motivate us to respond to that threat in an appropriate manner.

We can feel like our anger is out of control for a variety of reasons. Living with a high level of stress will allow us to flare into anger more easily. Allowing our thoughts to catastrophise or distort the situation, will increase our sense of threat

By working on our normal level of stress and our thinking patterns we can modify our response to one which is more appropriate. Examining our boundaries and protecting them, will reduce the intensity of the provocation and so reduce the chance of flaring in anger.

We can regulate emotions- channel anger