Changing destructive anger into healthy anger

Anger is an emotion that can be harnessed, with collective anger being able to spearhead entire movements and disruptions.

Anger has a strangely energizing effect and helps people deal with trauma and grief. Anger is the one emotion that encourages action.

People listen to an angry person, making it a salient powerful emotion for interpersonal connections.

Entire movies are made of characters taking revenge as they are angry and resentful due to a reason that the audience loves to hear about.

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.

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.

When we notice some tension in your work relationships, it is better to reset the emotional tone rather than pulling away. Do this by bringing up positive memories with your colleague, which can strengthen your bond and counterbalance the negative feelings so you can express them effectively.

The purpose is to create a supportive environment where you can talk about the issues without creating further damage to your relationship.

• Raise the issue. "I know that we are not seeing eye-to-eye on this issue right now, and it is upsetting for both of us, but I'm really optimistic we can work this out."
• Suggest a time out or try a brief topic change.
• Commit to a shared relationship goal. Agree that your relationship is important and that you both want to restore mutual positive feelings.
• Craft your shared narrative to increase the willingness to forgive and reconcile. Reflect on how both your actions contributed to the failure. Assume the best about the other person's intentions.

Boredom is sometimes described as the plague of modern society.

• Back in 2016, a French worker sued his former employer for "bore-out." He won.
• Many people, especially those born between mid -1990s and late 2010s, scrolls aimlessly through apps and find nothing of interest.
• People are even diagnosing their pets with boredom.

Psychologists differ in their definition of boredom.

• In the 1960s and 1970s, boredom was defined as the feeling generated by a repetitive task. Researchers found that boredom increased alertness to the things happening around you (distractions).
• From 1986, the opposite was found. A study found that boredom caused less concentration.

• 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.

It happens when other people's bad experience is reimagined by you, sparking memories of your own similar experience, triggering strong reactions.

Deeply buried events that were supposedly forgotten are resurfaced, leading to traumatic feelings that can be hard to understand by others, like grief, frustration, helplessness and agitation.

Anger, surprisingly, can be constructive, an active ingredient to energize and motivate a person. It can be useful and powerful if channelled in the right way. The adrenalin that flows during a fit of anger can blind a person if not handled appropriately.

If left unchecked, anger can lead to nightmares, chronic anxiety, and panic attacks.

Having a self-defeating state of mind makes one believe that he or she is not able to achieve certain goals, by providing a logical reason to give up.

According to the psychology professor Michael Inzlicht, the individual is able to control his or her willpower, taking into account current feelings and events. 

This is perceived as a decision-making tool that enables its owner to have full disposal of the mental energy and, therefore, to accomplish even the most challenging tasks.