Blood boiling, red-faced fury, or raging on the inside... is there an upside to anger? Understand how fury may become your friend.

Text: Jennifer Norris

Most people at some point have felt annoyed, cross, heated, irate or even furious. It may stem from actions of a back-stabbing colleague, a friend who let you down, a jilted love, or a rude taxi driver. Ira, translated as vengeance or anger, is considered a “deadly sin”, and is a feared emotion because of the potential damage this feeling has been known to cause, in ourselves or others.

Shifting perspectives, however, reveals different evidence. Many of the world’s greatest social changes in the past have actually happened because an individual or group got angry and did something about it. Anger, rather than a curse, is simply giving an indication that we feel under attack or hurt, or that others have made a mistake that affects us negatively, or there has been some lack of justice or fairness in a situation. If we interpret it as a warning, are there ways to make what feels wrong into something right?

When anger strikes we first need to do a personal accuracy check: Is this really as unjust as I’m making it out to be, or may I be interpreting it differently? A moment’s reflection may help us put a situation back into perspective. Anger may also be asking you to right a situation. If this is possible, then anger also tends to dissipate.

Even when we can’t correct wrongs or have no actual control over outcomes, many people still choose to store anger, hurt and hatred from situations and people in the past. While an offence might have happened 10 years ago, people can act as though it happened moments earlier. Over time, the effect of holding on to anger can result in physical issues such as ulcers, headaches or hypertension.

Some cling to anger because of the misperception that others will feel badly about what they have done, or will ‘pay’ for their errors. It isn’t true. The only person hurt by anger is the one who’s feeling it on the inside – you. A wonderful metaphor about hurts places them as winged blips on an air traffic controller’s screen. All of the planes, or hurts, in the air have to be looked after – which takes energy, time and effort. All the landed planes – the situations and people that we’ve let go of and put behind us – no longer have to bother us, or take up our air-space.

Feelings are, for the most part, temporary, unless we hold onto them, so anger that we hang on to tends to not only linger, but also attract other unfair situations to our awareness. Similar to a just-boiled kettle, reheated again, anger doesn’t take long to bubble up again once we’re ‘pre-heated’. However, by looking at anger in a different way and following a few simple steps, you can take back this powerful force, for good:

If you think you’re going to get mad, you will – what you expect tends to be realized. If you think someone will get on your nerves “like she always does”, then she will. When you expect that a person will act in a certain way, we seemingly help that ‘bad’ behaviour with our words and actions. Start with the idea that people are a result of their own experiences and upbringing – while you don’t have to like it or agree, you may find greater compassion for others. Some things you have control over, some things you don’t. If you can pre-empt situations, then do so. However, you can’t control all the actions or feelings of others. And so, for your own emotional peace of mind, you need to let it go. You don’t have to forget what was done in the past, but if you realize that the only one hurting with this anger is you, it makes it a bigger priority to release it. You don’t have to take it on. If I threw an expensive watch at you, you’d probably try to catch it. If I threw a bag of rotting tomatoes at you, you’d probably not! People may be throwing rotten tomatoes at you, but once you see they are not your tomatoes, you can let them fall. Aim to imitate Teflon, so nothing sticks. Write your own story. Many history books are full of horrible stories. We may have ups and downs but rather than being a victim of our own life history, closing past chapters gives us the energy to focus on writing a great one in the now. We can learn the lesson from our past and move on. Take a couple of deep breaths. The mind and body tend to work together. Our breath tends to shorten when we’re under attack. Shallow breathing reconfirms a stressful or negative situation. Deep breathing (pushing your stomach out so the air is sucked down to the lower part of your lungs) goes against the physical reaction of anger, and helps to give your mind signals to relax, calm and become centred again.