Change your mind

Anger is an emotion, while aggression is a behavior. They differ entirely in one central dimension - control.

• You can't control your emotions directly. In the legal system, nobody gets sent to prison for how they felt, regardless of how angry they were. They get punished for what they do.
• You can influence your emotions indirectly by how you think and behave. For example, when you focus on how terrible all the drivers in your town are, your anger will likely increase. But, if you listen to music and think about how grateful you are, your anger will probably subside.

While you can't control your emotions of anger directly, you have control over your aggression, which is a decision to express your anger.

Aggression does not only involve acts of violence. Being overly-critical or judgmental of someone in your mind is an act of aggression, as is replying sarcastically or rolling your eyes at someone.

• physical (the way your body responds when you experience an emotion),.
• cognitive (the thoughts that go along with the emotion).
• behavioral (the things you do or have urges to do when you experience an emotion). 

• We can try and validate the anger felt by an individual by making them know that their anger is maybe justified while putting firm but respectful boundaries on their aggression.
• We then need to be clear about what type of aggression we are willing to tolerate, setting boundaries on the unacceptable.
• We may have to put our foot down and be ready to leave the conversation or escalate the issue, without falling into the trap of guilt and emotion.
• If possible, we need to restart the conversation when things have cooled down, and diffuse the issue in a calm way.

Unchecked self-talk can easily turn into self-delusion. The stories we create almost always make you look like the good guy and cannot be termed as objective.

• The way to get out of this speculative self-delusion is to avoid any speculation about other people's anger, at least initially.
• Make sure to note down the facts of the situation. This can make the story less according to your gut instinct, and more towards the objective reality.

Repeated, consistent practice of meditation enhances our ability to cope and sit with negative emotions like anger without reacting.

Studies suggest that, regardless of the practitioner’s experience, meditation can help reduce the body's response to anger, reducing the toll frequent anger takes on you.

Anger and frustration cause us to be stressed, activate our sympathetic nervous system, and produce shallower, faster breathing, a rapid heart rate, and raises blood pressure.

1. Sudarshan Kriya: a breathing technique that releases stresses accumulated as impressions.
2. Sahaj Samadhi Meditation: through mantras, it helps the meditator to clear the layers of consciousness from the impressions stored in it, bringing better perception and calmness.
3. Be aware of the emotion rising: it helps you to control it but regular meditation is required to sustain it.
4. Accept anger: just accepting yourself for getting angry calms you down.
5. Show anger, don’t get angry: showing and being angry are different. The former is an appearance and can be done without affecting your inner calm.
6. Smile more often: you cannot get angry when you’re busy smiling.
7. Recognizing anger's transiency: you get angry at something in the present. With proper training, you will be angry less frequently or for less time and prevent anger from becoming hatred.

Managing your anger is all about managing your thoughts. Your thoughts will determine how you respond.

Strategies like cognitive behavioral therapy can teach people healthier thought patterns.

It helps a user read a set of blood-boiling scenarios and rates how likely they are to have each of six possible reactions. It enables you to recognize unhelpful thoughts that cause a knee-jerk reaction. For example: When you are driving through a residential area, and someone backs their car out of a driveway and nearly hits you. There are six possible reactions:

• "They did that just so I'd have to stop." This is a fallacy known as misattributing causation - you don't know the other person's intentions.
• "They almost totaled my car." It catastrophizes a scary situation into utter destruction.
• "Nobody knows how to drive anymore" overgeneralizes a specific situation into a universal truth.
• "I was here first. They shouldn't have gotten in my way." Here you make an unreasonable demand that somehow other people should know where you're going.
• "That dumb jerk!" is inflammatory labeling that dehumanizes and insults the other person.
• "He must not have seen me" is adaptive and more likely to calm you down.

Sometimes suppression is the only thing you can do to avoid an escalation. And sometimes reappraisal can cause you to tolerate bad situations.

But that said, telling yourself a more compassionate story about what’s going on inside the other person’s head is usually the best way to go. 

• Self-awareness: it involves knowing your own feelings. 
• Self-management: it involves being able to keep your emotions in check when they become disruptive.
• Motivation, for the sake of personal joy, curiosity or the satisfaction of being productive.
• Empathy: the skill and practice of reading the emotions of others and responding appropriately.
• Social skills: this can include finding common ground with others, managing others in a work environment and being persuasive.

• Keep a journal of your emotions. At the end of every day, write down what happened to you, how you felt, and how you dealt with it. 
• Ask for input from people who know you well about where your strengths and weaknesses lie, to gauge your perception from another’s point of view.
• Slow down (or meditate). The next time you have an emotional reaction to something, try to pause before you react.

• Practice meditation
• Keep a journal
• Do exercises
• Prepare your favorite food yourself
• Take steps towards accepting yourself and your emotions.

Learning to accept and deal with one's anger is an important step to happiness.

Once you have accepted and come to release all the anger within, you will most certainly feel a huge amount of relief while actually avoiding possible internal illnesses.