Here’s the best advice I’ve received on how to deal with my anger.
I have always been a short-tempered person.
Ever since I was a young child, when someone or something ticked me off, I would burst into an angry fit.
For example, if I couldn’t beat a level in a game by the third try, I screamed and hit the table.
Or if I couldn’t solve a math problem, I screamed and swore at my textbook and (very occasionally) threw it against the wall.
And after every fit, my mom told me I had to get rid of my anger. I didn’t know how or exactly what this meant, but I tried it anyway.
It was my mom telling me to do something, after all.
However, it didn’t work. I still got angry and I still erupted.
For a while, I thought this was part of my personality and I couldn’t do anything to change it, despite disliking the tantrums I threw and hating the feeling of shame and embarrassment afterwards. I thought I had an angry gene I couldn’t get rid of.
But recently, I read Donald Robertson’s book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor (affiliate link) and learned something fascinating about my relationship with anger.
Robertson, who’s a cognitive-behavioural therapist and Stoic, says it’s okay to get angry because it is a natural emotion. However, he adds that you should try to calm down by breathing deeply or taking a “time-out” and you shouldn’t let that anger dictate your thoughts and behaviour.
“For Stoics, full-blown anger is an irrational and unhealthy passion that we should never indulge. As we’ve seen, though, it’s human nature to have some automatic feelings of irritation in response to life’s problems. The Stoics consider these ‘proto-passions’ inevitable and accept their occurrence with an attitude of indifference” (Pg. 228).
Here, he says since we are humans, the feeling of irritation and anger will rise from time to time and we can’t get rid of it. Thus, we have to find ways to ease it so that we don’t make rash decisions and/or behave like an ass.
Robertson also included the techniques Stoics used to calm down and be indifferent to their irritation.
“As we’ll see, the Stoics had many specific techniques for anger management. One of them is to wait until our feelings have naturally abated and then calmly consider what someone wise would do in a similar situation” (pg. 84).
How I Deal With Anger
After learning this, I started to take deep breaths every time I felt my anger elevate and as soon as I regained my composure, I asked myself why I got so angry.
And more times than not, my anger was triggered by something stupid, such as a slight attack on my ego or a test of my patience.
And when it wasn’t “stupid,” I asked myself why, for instance, that person upset me. I would analyze them and come up with potential reasons for why they said what they said or did what they did.
The majority of the time, this process would completely calm me down.
Final Thoughts
Contrary to popular belief, anger is not something you can get rid of.
It is a natural feeling, much like joy and embarrassment. But anger is not a productive feeling, and as in most cases, it will cloud your judgment.
So, the best thing to do when irritation arises is to try to not let it affect your thinking and your actions.