How to Deal with Anger: 9 Techniques to Shift Your Emotions

The good news is anger can be used to find a positive realization. Once you have these techniques, you will better understand how to keep your emotions from running your life and how to deal with anger in a productive way. What I’d like for you to do is ask yourself if u have a temper.

A temper doesn’t have to act out by throwing things, hitting or screaming. It is more often than not masked by passive aggressive and vindictive words that sting and hurt emotionally. This temper stems from anger and if you don’t learn how to manage it, it can isolate you from loved ones, ruin relationships and hurt you for a lifetime.

Anger is an emotion that stems from having a victim mentality. It makes us feel like the other person is doing something to us. When we are angry we are giving the other person control over our experience of life and how we feel. When we take responsibility for our emotions, a whole new world opens up, and suddenly, no one can ruin our day.

Use your anger as a sign that you are giving away your power and let it be a reminder to choose a positive and compassionate thought. Anger can be used to help us empower ourselves and learn not to give it away, to become our most positive selves, and to manage our emotions by dealing with them in healthy ways instead of blaming people.

Here are some tactics to switch from victim mentality to compassion, and get control over your emotions so no matter what life throws at you, you will look at it as a learning opportunity to become a more compassionate and generous person.

1. Find an outlet

Emotions, according to ancient Chinese and Indian medicine, get stuck in our body. Those emotions can cause physical symptoms if they do not have an outlet. So what would a good outlet be? For some people it’s surfing, for other people it’s painting, for you, maybe it’s yoga or running. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with anger, you should not turn to the glass bottle or the aluminum can (wine or beer).

If you take a depressant for an emotion that is already low vibration, it will only leave you feeling worse, understand? A pub is not a sufficient outlet for anger and drinking away your sorrows with a bottle of wine is a rookie move.

2. Sound healing

What in the world is sound healing? It’s actually an ancient practice of using the vibrations of sound waves to unblock the emotions from your physical body. You just lay there and feel the vibrations, and notice how strong your emotions get. I remember in acting school we had one person lay on the ground, and everyone else was instructed to make sounds close to their bodies.

We all got to be the person on the floor, and we felt the sound vibrations tickling our organs and bouncing off our bones. Certain areas made different sounds depending on what the area was and how dense or cavernous it was. If you have ever been in a car and felt your chest thump from the base, you know what a sound vibration feels like.

Many techniques for sound healing now use tuning forks, singing bowls and gongs that are ancient healing tools. Just because it’s old, doesn’t rule out its effectiveness in modern life.

3. Polarize the anger to love

Now comes the tricky part, we must recognize what loving part of ourselves is creating the hatred. Do we wish someone was a better person? Do we feel guilty or angry about something we did or said? Usually, anger comes from a frustration about unmet expectations. When things don’t work out as planned, which is 100% of the time if you really look at it, we get angry. When people say things that we find offensive, we often get angry.

We need to learn to step back and take a bird’s eye view of the entire situation. Think about older people you have met that never let their feathers get ruffled. Then think about hot heads who will throw blows just because you look at their man wrong. What do you think the difference between case one and case two are? Perhaps it’s one thing, perspective.

When we come from a place of love and want the other person to be happy, we are then focusing on a different emotion. If we are being vindictive and trying to heal our own wound that a person is poking, we will show no regard for their feelings.

The only way out of anger is to let go of your own feelings and feel love for the other person as a fellow human being, trying to figure out this complicated life.

4. Stop resisting your anger

My teacher and mentor, who is an accomplished motivational speaker, says that the emotion itself is not what hurts, it’s the resistance to that emotion. When you feel tired, you fight it. When you feel angry, do you fight it?

What if we started looking at each emotion as the exact emotion we are supposed to be feeling at that time and that we need to feel at that time? It will then pass sooner and not create so much resistance pain. When we stop resisting, we are able to accept and move on.

When you start to feel anger, sit down and sit with it. Say this to yourself: this is me experiencing anger. I feel my heart racing and my body temperature raise. I feel the discomfort, and I choose to experience it because I need to, so it can pass. This exercise can help you overcome a lot of grief from your past and things you may have been holding onto since childhood.

It’s helpful to make a list of things from the past that are still making you angry. Take time to sit with each of them and then burn the paper to represent the end of your anger. When we burn paper, it changes the form of the paper into ash, heat and smoke. When we stop resisting our anger, it turns the stored energy into a powerful and positive emotion that can fuel us just as the fire uses the paper as fuel.

5. Cleanse your emotions with breathing and stretching

I’ve heard that anger is stored under the ribs and in the hips, now what does that mean? It means that our cells store emotional memories. They have also found that certain types of emotions relate to certain types of cancer. Stomach cancer relates to anger. In our lifetime, we will likely see more of this research become more main-stream.

What can we do in the meantime? Breathe deeply and stretch those hips. Deep hip opening stretches often leave people in tears as swarms of emotion overcome them and are released. If you have ever been in a yoga class and tears start coming in savasana, you know what I mean. This is natural and healthy though.

Honestly, if you’re feeling aggressive, angry or hurt, just take deep breaths for a minute and you will feel slightly better right away. Often when we are feeling negative emotions we stop breathing, and the cut off oxygen supply puts our system on alert making our anxiety skyrocket.

6. Connect to nature

Now if this isn’t the most cliché tactic in the book, I don’t know what is, but know this, nature deficit disorder is a real thing that affects people. Just as seasonal affectedness disorder creates depression, and lack of vitamin D from the sun creates mania in tribes in Alaska, the lack of nature in many people’s lives creates a disconnection with human nature and an imbalance in human emotional health.

So if you’re feeling verklempt as they say in the tristate area, take a walk, go to a park and chill.

7. Do something kind

When you need to shift your emotion from anger to something positive, one of the easiest ways to do that is to stop focusing on yourself. This is actually resisted by almost everyone in our culture, because most people are extremely selfish. Break the mold and do something without trying to get anything in return.

When you’re kind to someone who you know has been having a rough time, or doing something to help someone because they need it, you will shift your perspective from first world problems to gratitude and compassion. It’s important we don’t let our emotions control us, we step back from the experience of anger, and choose to focus on helping other people.

If you can’t find motivation to help anyone but yourself, you’ve got a bad case of narcissism and need to work on your own ego. Narcissism is a slippery thing to identify because it makes us think we are doing the right thing, but we don’t realize that we create a world that essentially revolves around us.

If you’re a narcissist, step one is admitting, and step two is doing something for someone else. Start complimenting people and don’t say judgmental things. Build people up instead of breaking them down. Give to charity, don’t brag, and don’t hang out with people who tell you how great you are all the time. Anger is an emotion that many people that are narcissistic feel often.

They often can spot other narcissists but do not realize they themselves are one. If you have trouble taking criticism, chances are you have narcissistic tendencies. The sooner you come to terms with it, the less time it will continue to cause you and those around you emotional pain.

8. Remind yourself of what you’re grateful for

What are you angry about? Did someone steal your car? Did someone punch you in the face? That’s probably not the case. Usually what we are angry about is actually very unimportant in the grand scheme of things; we are just creating problems to focus on that don’t actually exist.

Anger only stunts your own progress and distracts you from being productive and loving life. The next time you feel angry, try to laugh at yourself and realize how good your life is compared to a lot of people, and realize that no one is perfect. Don’t take yourself too seriously and let the ego go.

When I feel angry, I tell myself that I am grateful for the kind people in my life. I’m grateful I have a place to sleep and food to eat. I’m grateful I have a job and my health. There is always something to be grateful for, and these shifts in thinking will build momentum in your default thinking patterns that will become less angry and bubblier. Positive people are contagious and fun to be around, which do you want to be?

9. Put yourself in their shoes to connect to your compassion

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is an exercise that diffuses anger. This is really an effective technique that can help you to go from feeling the bitter sting of anger to feeling the other person emotions. I’m afraid the ability to have compassion is dying in our American culture because so many cultural tendencies are isolating, and promote instant gratification.

We have to make the decision every day to be more compassionate. We have to make the decision to not let the trends take control of our emotional wellbeing and our physical health. Start noticing the attitudes of healthy people and you’ll start to see the correlation between compassionate intentions and vibrant health.

Music lyrics that promote compassion last, when people feel distraught, they look to people who taught compassion for advice. The Dalai Lama, Buddha, Jesus, John Lennon, Mother Theresa, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and many more leaders all promoted compassion and their timeless messages resonate the chords within us that heal our anger and replace it with happiness.

I’d love for you to give your valuable insights below and share this with women who might like it… We strive to bring you helpful advice daily on YouQueen.