Getting angry at once or flared up suddenly with or without any relevant reason is not new but is the common trend in each and every human being’s life. This tendency is followed by regret and guilt feelings at later stage. But why?.The reason behind it nobody knows. Even if they know, it may not be optimum true and vague in nature.
Do you find yourself getting so angry with people all the time?
It can be frustrating and often you’ll feel bad afterwards for having been so out of control with your anger. But, you don’t know why you do it or how to control it. So, where to start?
A great place to start when trying to gain control over your temper is figuring out the real feeling behind the emotion. So, the next time you get angry with someone, take a step back and ask yourself, “Why am I so angry?” What’s really going on here?
If you answer something like, “I’m so angry because my work didn’t get materialize the way I planned or the opposite person didn’t do or act what I told him to do.”. The other person is just a trigger for your emotion. They do something and you feel an emotion in response (anger). That’s what you need to figure out. It’s your reaction that’s more important, not what the other person actually did.
A situation just “is” until you give it meaning. Something happens and you make the decision (whether you’re conscious of the decision or not) as to whether it’s “good”, “bad” or “neutral”. And, that decision is often based on an emotional response. So, you just need to figure out why you’re choosing the anger as your response.
The reason why you choose anger can be for quite a few different reasons but this is what you need to figure out. You need to know where your anger is really coming from.
Anger can be a tricky emotion because it’s often covering up other issues. Anger is used as a sort of mask. It covers up the true feelings like fear, jealousy, frustration, or annoyance. It’s a way of dealing with the situation when you haven’t processed the real feelings behind it.
There’s always something behind anger. Anger doesn’t really come by itself. It’s always attached to another emotion. In that sense, anger could be thought of as an intermediate emotion. An event happens, the brain doesn’t have time (or doesn’t want to) to fully process the situation and it needs a reaction, so anger is what’s used until there’s more time to examine everything in more detail.
To help you figure out what your true emotions might be behind “why you’re feeling so angry”,
Here are 11 different reasons and emotions that could be happening:
1. Fear
Anger is often caused by fear of something happens and it scares you in some way. You fear losing control, looking foolish, being in trouble, feeling guilty or may be even getting hurt. Anger is in response to being afraid of something being insulted by others or feels bad because of the bad, embarrassing situations which we never thought about it. It is that whole fight or flight concept happening. Anger is the fighting back at what scares us. So, ask ourselves, if we are really feeling afraid and what is it that scares us the most?
2. Powerlessness
There is a great quote which says, “Anger is a chosen response to the feeling of powerlessness. Anger is how we attempt to reassert control over situations that baffle us.”So we may be feeling helpless or like a victim with something and we use anger to try and regain some sort of control in our life.
Something to watch out for this one is that you could be feeling powerless in one situation and it will cause you to react with anger at anyone who upsets you.
For example, say you are very practical, punctual, neat and straightforward person and you are feeling frustrated because you can’t get the things in order the way you want by others of your own. So you feel powerless in this situation.
Also, another example, say we have a health issue and we are feeling frustrated because we can’t get into see the specialist, Here again we feel powerless probably also a little scared and frustrated.
That is the feeling percolating in the back of our mind and we need a way to release that so as soon as someone or something annoys us,all our pent up feelings are vented on that person. They may have absolutely nothing to do with why we are feeling powerless. But they have become a handy way to release all those negative feelings we have bottled up.
So, if we find ourselves over reacting to situations, check and see if we are feeling powerless in a different situation.Again, we are figuring out where our real anger is coming from.
3. Frustration
If we are feeling frustrated with something in our life, we might respond with anger. We are just so frustrated with something that we are annoyed and angry.
For example when we are learning something new like software programme.We just want the program to do something and it is so frustrating because we don’t know how to get the software to do that. So we are feeling impatient and we respond by getting angry at the computer or the program.
Or if we stuck in a traffic jam and we are frustrated because there is nothing we can do. This one can also be caused by fear though we fear that we are going to be late due to the traffic jam and our imagination starts going wild with all the bad things that are now going to happen (eg: lose our job because we are going to be late or someone is going to be mad at us etc).But the anger starts with feeling frustrated or powerless with the situation. We don’t know what to do.
To deal with this one, it can help if we take a step back and just look at the big picture again. What do we want to achieve in this situation?.How can we do that rather than focusing on the obstacles or thing that is frustrating us.
4. Pain from the past
Often anger is associated with pain from the past.A traumatic experience happened in the past that the
Person has never really dealt with. Abuse as a child for example or feeling abandoned as a child. In this
Case, often the anger is not even associated with the current event the person is experiencing. The
person is just so angry at the entire world due to something that happened a long time ago. They hit out at everyone they come into contact with due to the constant pain they have deep inside. Or they feel so hurt that they don’t want to let anyone come close to them. They use the anger as a way of protecting themselves from further hurt or a situation happens and it reminds them of that event that happened a long time ago and they automatically react with anger.
5. Bad Habit
Sometimes anger comes because it is easier to blame others for problems rather than taking responsibility
for our own life or we don’t want to come up with a solution ourselves. It can feel like the quickest way to.
It is a bad habit which will be making our life much harder than it needs to be as you will alienate our family
and friends and could also cause you to lose promotions or eve our job. Being angry all the time is terribly
draining way to live as well. If it is a habit for us, it is definitely worth taking the time to change it.
6. Feeling overwhelmed or Exhausted
If we are overly exhausted all the time, we might be just too tired to mentally deal with situations that
happen. We don’t have the strength to have patience with the situation. This is one we often find with new
Parents but it can happen to anyone if they are overly tired.
Or we might just have too many things happening at once and it causes overwhelm for us. We are at the
limit of what we can handle at the moment.It can feel scary and we might react with anger at the next event
that pushes us over our threshold of what we can deal with.
7. Jealousy
We feel jealous about what someone else has or has done. It might remind us that we want that as well
Or it tells us that we are not following our own dreams. But instead we get so angry at the person for having
something we want when really we need to turn it around and start thinking.”That’s” something we would
like to have in our life too. How do we start to work forwards getting that for ourselves?.
8. Approval Seeking
If someone is looking for validation or approval from others, they might go to incredible lengths to
Please the other person and when the other person doesn’t react the way they want them to, they
feel hurt but they respond with anger as a way to deal with those feelings. They don’t feel good enough
inside or they feel like a failure so they try to get others to tell them how good they are. But it doesn’t work
and they end up feeling angry at everyone because they have gone to so much effort and it wasn’t
appreciated.
The answer to this one is that we need to deal with those feelings of why we don’t feel good enough and
Start to approve of yourself first. Once you approve of yourself, so will others.
9. Hurt
If we feel hurt by someone’s actions part of we might not want to deal with that emotion so we
Choose to respond with anger instead.
10. Manipulation
Sometimes people use anger as a way to get others to react in a certain way. For example, they want
The other person to do them a favor and if the other person hesitates they get mad. So the other
Person will do what they want. Or they want to gain control over the other person and they know if they get
angry the other person will back down. Or they want to make the other person afraid of them.
Sometimes people even use it as a way to get out of doing things. Someone asks them to help them
With something and they get mad at the other person not only to get out of the current situation but to
discourage the other person from ever asking again.
11. Health
Certain medications like antidepressants can cause people to feel irritable or feel uncontrollably angry.if we
We have just started any new medication and suddenly feel irritable, we should discuss it with doctor.
Certain deficiencies can also cause anger issues. For example, a deficiency in magnesium is thought to
Cause depression and quick tempers according to Dr.Sircus.
Shekar Moily
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