Three tips for being a lot less angry
Our current culture gives most of us plenty of reason to feel angry on a daily basis, and thanks to our amazing technological advances the source of our anger is often delivered to us in HD. Here are three tips to help you catch your anger before it has a chance to cause muscle tension, headaches, an increased heart rate or worse:
- Beware the sound bite – Keep in mind that those annoying teasers by the news stations are designed to grab our attention—not inform us. Realize that the goal of most of the outlets “serving us the news” is to get us to tune-in or to stay tuned. News outlets and even co-workers and family members sometimes arrange words in the most controversial, attention-getting manner to get attention.
- Personalize—don’t generalize – The other day I heard the following factoid: Americans spent around 53 BILLION on their pets in 2012. I became outraged, thinking about what that kind of money could do for our broken school systems, etc. Then I caught myself and remembered to personalize it. I thought about when our dog Chauncey blew out his knee and we spent $1400 on his surgery. That thought helped me get some perspective, and I reasoned that most people truly love their pets; how much they are willing to spend on their pets is essentially not my business. There are countless reasons to be upset in our culture and generalizing will only add to your anger—once you have some perspective it just loses steam.
- Ask yourself if you are avoiding something by being angry – Sometimes when you are feeling really righteous and outraged at home or at work, asking yourself this question can help you snap out of it. For me the answer to this question is almost always something really important like work, my life, feelings I don’t want to admit, my to-do list, etc.
Anger is essentially a habit—a pattern of thinking that is more within our control than we might think.
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