Firstly, we’re going to make it clear that anger is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s very often used in negative situations which makes it seem like a bad thing but as is the case with all of your various different emotions none of them are actually bad in themselves. It’s just that sometimes we are perhaps using them in a way which is quite harmful to ourselves and then it makes it seem as if that particular emotion is bad.

Ultimately, every emotion has the opportunity to be helpful or useful for you in some way. Even with anger, there are times when it is important that you learn to get angry, that you get angry, in certain situations. If you had someone in your life who was constantly pushing their luck with you, taking the mickey out of you, or maybe even you’re in a situation where someone like really tries to overstep a boundary and they try and steal something from you. Getting angry is the right response because if you were to be laid back about that kind of thing it could cause people to think that you’re a bit of a pushover and then that could lead to all sorts of other much bigger problems.

The challenge is keeping your anger under control at times when it flares up or making sure that your anger doesn’t start flaring up at times when it’s really not supposed to be there. It can become an emotion that becomes a go-to whenever something doesn’t work out in our favour because we found that in the past that anger maybe gave us a little bit of Drive to get what we wanted or to speak up when we perhaps wouldn’t have otherwise felt comfortable to do so. Our anger emotion can become a challenge for us. I talk to you about today how you can start to use all of the energy from that anger for better things because we’re not going to get rid of anger from your life completely. It’s important that you have anger there but what’s even more important is that you know how to use it, when to use it and how to control it.

Here’s the benefit of anger from a sort of an emotional perspective. Anger has loads of bad energy in it. Imagine if you had something important that you needed to do but you just didn’t have the motivation to do it. There is no energy in being demotivated. If you’ve got an essay or something like that to do and you don’t want to do it but you know that you will eventually have to do it – this is called ‘procrastination’. It’s where you kind of sit around like waiting for the feeling that drives you to do it, to show up. Sometimes it doesn’t show up you just kind of sit there oh yeah and that feeling to get you motivated never comes along so in that feeling of procrastination where you have no motivation there is no energy that’s what holds you back with anger there is tons of energy in it. There’s a lot of movement in anger. It’s almost like an explosion of adrenaline when we get angry. It can be useful to us at times if we can apply those same sorts of emotions may be to the things in our life that we’re really flat and demotivated about. If you could get angry with yourself about the fact that you haven’t got that essay done that you needed to do then suddenly you can give yourself a wave of enthusiasm and energy to be able to get up and move and do something about it.

The other way in which we can start to use our anger, a more positive way, is by taking those situations where we’re having an angry reaction and thinking about that energy as a message for us to do something positive. The key thing is something ‘positive’ so that might take a little bit of evaluation at the moment to decide what that positive thing is going to be but rather than using up that fuel by having an outburst or maybe even behaving violently. If you could use that fuel and go, you know, just take a minute to go right ‘how can I use this fuel in the most positive way, how can I use this energy up in a really positive way’ then you can start to turn your anger into like your motivation to be able to move forward in positive ways and to turn bad situations into better ones.

The really important thing to help you get on top of that anger so that it doesn’t become a burden to you or it doesn’t become too problematic for you in the future is that you start to take time to slow down and think before you take any action. NLP for children or counselling for children can be a great help here. When we are in a state of anger is causes a big burst of adrenaline. When this happens loads of energy flows into our body and we quickly want to use it up and that can cause us to say to the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, react the wrong way and all of those that can end up making our anger really problematic for us. Those are the sorts of things that get you into trouble. What we want to be able to do is to take a moment to make decisions about what we’re going to do with all of that energy from the anger rather than just reacting and using it up straight away.

In some ways, it kind of annoys us that people say this but there is some evidence that this is a useful thing to do so you’ve probably heard people say if you’re an angry person someone at some point in the past has said to you ‘just take a moment to count to ten’ but the reason why they’re saying that then and this is what annoys me, is people don’t explain the reason why it’s a useful thing to do. For that reason, it just sounds like a stupid idea! But it’s not, it is actually a good idea. But let me explain why and then that might help you to feel more compelled to do it. The reason why stopping and counting to ten is a good idea is not because it’s going to make the anger go away like you’ve got like built-up fire in your belly like that’s not just going to vanish. It gives you that period of time to think about how you use it so that you don’t make a kind of spur of the moment bad decision. You don’t have a reaction to what’s going on and then regret that reaction later instead you get a few moments to think about how you’re going to use that energy in the right way.

Taking that moment to stand there and count to ten could be what you need to do. it may be the case that you need to step away from the situation at that moment to calm down. You might also need to write it down that can really slow things down. On a personal level, writing stuff down really works very well for me because it makes me slow down my thinking and sometimes we get angry because our thoughts are moving around our head so fast. If you can take that time to stop or slow things down then you can examine stuff properly before you make a decision about how to move forward with it and what it is that you should do next.

The key message from this article today is don’t beat yourself up about the fact that you get angry. You’re supposed to get angry, it’s an emotion! You’re supposed to have that emotion in there but what we do want to do is to get better at managing it. It time to make better decisions about how we use it when it shows up and to start using the energy that it delivers to us in a useful way because what will start to happen then is that your feelings towards negative situations will begin to change instead of having that uncomfortable angry response to things. Your brain will start to learn when something like that happens and will turn it into a good thing. Therefore, we can skip the bad feeling in the middle we can just go straight to being thoughtful and creative and coming up with solutions to the problem without having to get angry in order to get there.

I hope that’s been useful for you today. Please comment on the box below with any tactics that you’ve developed around managing your anger. If you’ve found a way to deal with it. Write it in the box below in what has worked for you.

By Gemma Bailey

www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org