12 tips to control anger and aggressiveness

How many times have we been angry in life? During the development of our daily activities, we must respect certain norms imposed by society regarding modes of behavior in various situations. In this sense, one of the teachings that circulates corresponds to good treatment with other people in any area of ​​life despite exposing ourselves to certain frustrations.

However, anger may end up dominating the situation and we respond through this emotion. Given this, it is important to know more effective alternatives to face these moments. If you recognize that your emotional management could improve in this area, the topic that we will address here may be useful to you. Do you want to know more about this? In this Psychology-Online article, we will provide you with information about how to control anger and aggressiveness.

Index

1. Perform psychological therapy
2. Think before speak
3. Doing physical activity
4. Do relaxation techniques
5. Perform artistic activities
6. Reflect on the consequences of anger and aggressiveness
7. get enough rest
8. take deep breaths
9. Change your approach to situations
10. Put role-playing into practice
11. appeal to humor
12. practice empathy

Therapy consists of a space that enables the identification and resolution of personal conflicts. Faced with situations of anger, we work on the emotions, thoughts and behaviors that produce anger and aggressive responses in the person. The goal of therapy is to provide tools to cope with unpleasant experiences without the need to appeal to anger as the main engine.

If you are wondering how to control anger, this technique will help you. And it is that, when we are in a state of anger and aggressiveness, we feel the desire to say words and carry out actions that can harm other people.

Put thought before action or reproach it can prevent an uncomfortable situation from developing as well as allow the intensity of anger to subside. In this sense, when we reflect on what has caused the anger we can understand the situation in a more global way.

Anger and aggressiveness is felt in the body. In the moments that anger dominates, it usually happens that we feel muscular tension since our body is rigid from some complex situation. On the other hand, it is common for there to be an increase in heart rate accompanied by excessive sweating, dizziness, nausea and even vomiting in some cases.

These are predictable responses that can arise in a wide variety of situations from person to person. Before these moments, the accomplishment of physical activity offers the possibility of discharge tensions. Consequently, this will allow better coping with stress situations since we can count on a way to reduce effective stress.

Emotions have a relationship with the body, since it is possible that we express through the body something that happens to us on an emotional level. Given this, there are techniques that allow you to achieve body relaxation through a series of steps to follow. One of the best known is mindfulness, which consists of downplaying the unpleasant thoughts that we have as well as emphasize the present. It has been shown that this technique provides efficient results in the face of anger and aggressiveness problems.

Writing is a means of expressing personal feelings. The artists appeal to different artistic forms to demonstrate their emotions. If you want to control anger, taking this into account, you can sing, write, dance, draw and/or paint at moments aggressiveness to unload the contained tension. In other words, when we carry out an artistic activity, we deposit the emotion in said circumstance instead of carrying it out with other people.

As we have already seen, anger and aggressiveness generate unfavorable effects for people who are carried away by emotions as a way of resolving conflicts. Because of this, reflection on the possible consequences of coping with these emotions can help control them.

One of the examples of activities to work on anger in adults is to carry out the following reflection: we could solve in another way a moment of work discomfort with a colleague if we think about the fact that reacting with anger and aggressiveness could lead to a dismissal.

It has been shown that there is a relationship between the levels of stress and/or anxiety with respect to the sleep we have. In other words, stress increases as the night's rest is of lower quality since the levels of certain hormones linked to mood are affected. This accounts for increased irritability in the person. In short, getting enough sleep can help control anger and aggressiveness.

Another of the exercises to control anger is that we take deep breaths since, when we are angry, breathing is usually accelerated given the adrenaline of the moment. For this reason, appealing to deep, slow and controlled breathing can decrease emotional intensity of the situation. While it may be difficult to achieve at first, repeating this technique can be gradually improved over time.

Next, we leave you our post diaphragmatic breathing exercises so you can learn how to control anger and aggressiveness through these techniques.

When we feel angry we tend to see the negative side of situations since anger and aggressiveness will monopolize the entire range of responses. In this sense, an alternative to control these emotions consists in modifying the focus we have on the moment.

For example, if faced with a job dismissal we think that said circumstance could represent an opportunity for a better job to appear, possibly anger and aggressiveness may give. This advice can also help you if you don't know how to control your anger with your children or with your partner.

Role playing is a technique used in some psychotherapeutic approaches that consists of people represent characters referring to a particular situation of the patient. An example of this could be three people impersonating family members such as another person's mother, father, and sister.

If there was a situation of anger about the inequalities that the person feels with respect to her own family, those three people could act like your family members so that ways of resolving conflict other than through anger and anger can be practiced aggressiveness.

Sometimes the best way to control anger and aggressiveness is to take things with humor, this can cause us to change our perspective of the facts. In this way, it is possible soften moments of anger in front of other people to prevent our reactions from being in accordance with the emotion that dominates us.

If you want to learn how to control anger in a discussion, you should know that empathy is fundamental, understood as the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes to understand her emotions, behaviors and thoughts.

Taking this into account, reactions of anger and aggressiveness could be avoided if we reflect on how the other person would think and feel in case of attacking them with words and/or actions. In this way, it would be possible to resolve conflicts in another way through empathy.

If you have found this post on how to control anger and aggressiveness interesting, we recommend you read our article Outbursts of anger: why they happen and how to control them.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to How to control anger and aggressiveness, we recommend that you enter our category of Emotions.

• Fisher, M. (2018). The art of managing anger. Find serenity through meditation. Madrid: Siruela Editions.
• Morente-Oria, H.F. (2017). Anger control. Corporal expression in early childhood education. Institutional Repository of the University of Malaga.