Controlling Anger

Controlling anger is a mind thing. And, once stretched to achieve a measure of control, your mind will not shrink back to its original state. Knowing and applying the right steps will still a troubling set of neural signals and build up a calmer signal pattern. The stressful anger signals originate from the amygdala, an almond sized organ in your brain. When they are stilled, controls pass to the common sense of your prefrontal brain. But, all this can be done only by your mind. Not you. But, once it is done, life gets to be way better.

You can't wish your anger away, because your mind disregards such wishes. But it will respond intuitively to practical experience. A few critical changes in your view point and a mental exercise can bring about this change. First, your mind needs to be convinced that anger is a problem and not a solution. Second, you need to come to terms with the pivotal sources of your anger. Third, controlling anger requires you to train your mind to detect the onset of anger, whenever it raises its head. Your attention to the telltale signals from your amygdala will gradually still your residual anger. Each time your common sense wins, your neural circuits will have put an end to one knee jerk response. Ultimately, you will stop seething against the inevitable thorns and barbs of existence and accept life as it is, with all its quirky roadblocks.

• Nature developed emotions to precisely control primitive behavior. Fear can cause you freeze, love to protect and anger to destroy opponents. In today's world, inappropriate anger makes you needlessly tense, suspicious and aggressive.
• While some think that anger can be a useful tool, it actually makes people hostile and blinds their common sense. Anger is an ineffective strategy, which should be abandoned.
• Anger is triggered from the amygdala ahead of your conscious awareness.
• LTP circuits in the amygdala sustain your anger over long periods. Those circuits also make you vulnerable to impetuous responses.
• While the neural memories, assembled over a lifetime make you prone to quick anger, your mind has the capacity to change your viewpoints in a flash. Abandoning anger as a strategy is the critical change in viewpoint required from you.
• The Self Improvement Plan in this website suggests a routine to enable you to recognize and subdue the pivotal anger within you.
• After coming to terms with your primary anger, you will stll be the victim of anger triggered by the LTP circuits in your amygdala. Such residual anger can be stilled one by one, by recognizing their outward symptoms. Many typical symptoms are listed.

Controlling Anger - How Anger Programs Your Mind
Anger undermines you by manipulating you like a puppet! Nature developed emotional controls to precisely control behavior. Fear paralyzes you and love makes you protect your loved one. Fear can destroy your simple ability to walk on a board. It will freeze you in place, unable to take a single step, if that board is fixed at a great height. Love motivates mothers to protect the young. For a mother who loves her child, its persistent cries trigger concern and care. For an angry neighbor, such incessant cries merely increase hostility. Anger hardens the heart.

Anger makes you avert your eyes and prevents you from smiling at your opponent. Anger removes the normal sympathy and respect you feel for a person. Subconscious anger constantly seeks to reinforce itself. Without your conscious awareness, it will instill within you an enduring contempt and distrust for people. Such distrust will appear to be perfectly natural. Hidden anger will impel you to harm, or hurt the people you interact with, including your subordinates. To reinforce its existential hostility, covert anger could induce you to cripple your own project. You could also make needless sacrifices to bolster the same sense of injustice. With overt anger, you will attack others so that they too will respond angrily. If the anger emotion controls you, your life will be troubled.

Controlling Anger - Anger Is Irrational
The approach of Sue Parker Hall towards anger prevents you from controlling anger. Her view is that anger is a positive, pure and constructive emotion, which provides the motivation and energy for a person to assert his difference. She considers an undifferentiated pre-verbal rage to be the problem, which causes irrational and violent behaviors. While supporting anger, she suggests an empathic therapeutic relationship to deal with rage. But anger is an unmanageable emotion, which can boil over from mild resentment to unseemly profanity.

Nature developed emotions to control behavior. The primary objective of anger is to destroy opponents and that of fear, to escape danger. But, nature also programmed fear and anger to amplify their own influence on your mind. Nature's objective is to make you escape faster, or to fight more vigorously. Nature's secondary goal works to make you more fearful, or more angry. Fear will intensify into panic by recalling past events, which made you fearful. Anger will choose past behaviors, which originally triggered your anger.

Anger impels you to provoke your opponents so that their increased hostility intensifies your anger. Or, anger will subtly guide you to fail in your project to intensify your resentment against a malicious fate, which “destined” you to failure. Fear will make you lose sight of your strengths and anger will initiate past behaviors, which fueled your resentment. When your anger gnaws in your subconscious, you will have no awareness that the hidden emotion is making you irrationally seek confrontation, or frustration.

Controlling Anger - Only Common Sense Works
When you need to confront someone, your common sense has to be in charge. Then you can pretend to be angry, without losing control. There are school teachers, who use a controlled glare to bring about disciplined behavior in class. A glare merely thrusts your eyeballs forwards a millimeter. That process intimidates people and can substantially modify behavior. Try whispering “Do it!” with a glare. If you glare, you will find that even your language becomes more assertive. But, that is controlled assertiveness, not anger. Controlling anger is critical, because anger is a primitive and erratic emotion.

Anger fails to achieve worthwhile goals. They have overbooked a flight and offloaded you. The airline official expects trouble. Actually, he shares your values and knows your problem. It is bad to be offloaded, but he has too few seats. Politeness may only get you a brush off. Calm assertiveness may intimidate the official and even get you a seat. But, anger will blind you to the limitations faced by the official and antagonize him. You will spend the night in a hotel. If the official yells back in anger, you will still sleep in the hotel - after an unseemly brawl. Controlling anger is vital, because anger escalates quickly and ruins relationships. It spoils the chances for a comfortable coexistence with your opponents.

If, on the other hand, your objective is the total annihilation of your opponent, you need all your senses around you, not blind rage. In his famous novel, James Clavell outlines the strategy of Lord Toranaga to conquer his last powerful rival and become the Shogun of Japan - wait patiently until “one day, he will make one mistake and then, he too will be gone!” That requires an unparalleled level of clear sighted vision, not blind rage. In normal social life, or in a life and death struggle, anger fails to find the best solution. Anger is an unsuitable strategy for life. Total abandonment of anger is the key to controlling anger. To achieve that, you should first know your defenseless role in the process, which sets off anger.

Controlling Anger - The Amygdala Responds Faster Than Your Common Sense
The emotional signals, which trigger your anger originate from the amygdalae, organs in the limbic system, which control your feelings and emotions. The amygdala interprets sensory signals, including smells to trigger the fight, or flight response. Initiated within 20 milliseconds, those signals heighten your reflexes, activate facial nerves to express fear or anger, increase heartbeats, respiration and the release of stress hormones. While the amygdala responds quickly, your prefrontal regions take up to 300 milliseconds to reach a common sense view of the same situation. Paul Eckman, the famous emotions scientist said "We become aware a quarter, or half second after the emotion begins. I do not choose to have an emotion, to become afraid, or to become angry. I am suddenly angry. I can usually figure out later what someone did that caused the emotion." Controlling anger becomes difficult, because of this problem.

Controlling Anger - The Amygdala Sustains Your Anger
Laboratory tests show activity in the amygdala of a rat, when it learns to avoid a compartment, which gives it a mild footshock. Your amygdala becomes active when you are faced with problems. Nature wants you to retain those memories, to make you respond quickly to dangers. While most neural signals fade with time, a process called long term potentiation (LTP) heightens the neural responses by the amygdala. LTP makes you remember and respond more strongly to stinging events from the past. If someone insults you, the amygdala will signal a potential for stress on detecting any hint of the culprit. While you may forget a compliment, the amygdala will not let you forget a slight. If anger is a problem for you, it is because your amygdala has become over sensitive to many real and imagined stress points. The logic of your intuitive decision making (IDM) process further aggravates the problem of controlling anger.

Controlling Anger - Higher LTP Signal Strength Initiates Anger
Your mind makes instant decisions by focusing on a single emotion. When your friend insults you, what should your response be? Ignore the barb. Change the subject? Laugh at his weakness? Smile benevolently? Feel irritated with his constant carping? Common sense, humor, kindness and anger are all possible emotional response strategies. If you are prone to anger, the LTP circuits in your amygdala are overactive. Because of those loud signals, within the blink of an eye, the IDM process chooses anger as your current emotion and inhibits other responses. Visceral reactions are triggered, intensifying your hostility. In the meanwhile, a few milliseconds too late, your common sense discovers the triviality of the issue. But, anger has already stilled such kindly thoughts, which could weaken your resolve to punish your friend. Indifferent to consequences, you lash out. The relentless IDM process responded to anger signals and selected it as the current emotion. The IDM process blinkered your wisdom. Common sense took a back seat. LTP and the unrelenting logic of the IDM process narrowed your vision.

Controlling Anger – New Knowledge Changes The System
To abandon anger, you have to strengthen your common sense signals. Your signal patterns have been developed over millions of years of evolutionary history and firmed up over a lifetime of experiences. If anger has been your habitual response, you carry memories of many successes and failures, managed by your anger. As an infant, angry responses worked. The school yard established your faith in the success of anger. Later in life, anger brought a mixed bag of results. Your attitudes have been set through thousands of interactions with people. Those memories have been coded into your nerve cells. But, your mind can change its viewpoints within an instant.

A single call on a cell phone can change the attitude of a villager. The instant he talks to his son in a distant city, he sees his life differently. His sense of acute loss lessens. He can complain, ask for advice, share decisions. Despair changes to optimism. A single understanding can change your attitude to life. It changes your emotional attitudes. Anger is a problem for you, only because your common sense accepts it as being useful in life. If your mind accepts the futility of anger, controlling anger suddenly becomes possible. It is more difficult for the amygdala to manipulate you into actions opposed by your common sense. Each subsequent victory over anger will also strengthen your common sense.

Once this conviction falls into place, you need a few more steps. First, you have to still your primary anger though an evaluation (The Self Improvement Plan). Second, your residual anger needs to be stilled by consciously observing the symptoms of their onset. Recognition will still the emotion – those events which angered you will appear to be like “seeing a bird in the sky.” Acceptance of life, self awareness and recognition of anger signals are the final keys to controlling anger.

Controlling Anger - The Self Improvement Plan
Hidden anger can explode unexpectedly, or cause hypertension, high blood pressure, or depression. This website offers you a simple routine, which can bring your deepest concerns out into the open. It depends on the capability of your mind to search within and find any information, which you consciously seek. Just as you can sit down and write a shopping list, you can list out the more important things which make you angry. Add to that list the things you can do to change each situation. Consider whether you can accept the situation if you can do nothing about it. The Self Improvement Plan suggests how you can organize these thoughts and come to terms with the most important concerns in your life - in a matter of a couple of hours!

Your conviction that anger will not take you anywhere and application of the Self Improvement Plan can help you to come to terms with life. After you have calmly accepted the limitations of your life, remember that the automatic tendency to anger still remains as LTP circuits in your amygdala. You will need to exorcise those impulses one by one as they occur. Each time your prefrontal common sense recognizes an anger impulse, its power to control your mind will be stilled. Repetitive practice will make the change permanent and you will succeed in controlling anger.

Controlling Anger - Stomach Pumping
A simple exercise can deal with sudden anger. Laughter invariably stills anger, but laughter is not easy in a tense situation. If you can become aware of your anger, pumping your stomach is simple and it has the same physical effect as laughter. Repeatedly expel air by tightening stomach muscles close to the pelvic area. With habit, stomach pumping can be a simple, built in response to sudden tension. The process is aerobic, providing a workout for the diaphragm. The workout reduces the hormones associated with the stress response. A decrease in stress hormones relieves constricted blood vessels. With subdued visceral responses, memories of the original stress stimulus disappear.

Controlling Anger - Recognition Of Anger Signals
You have decided to abandon anger. The Self Improvement Plan has enabled you to identify and remove the pivotal causes of your anger. Stomach pumping can subdue mild attacks of anger. But, your LTP circuits will not give up easily. Most of the time, you will have no awareness that a residual anger burns within you. You have to become conscious of its signals. The Anger Symptoms page in this website describes typical symptoms of subconscious anger. If any of them apply to you, let your common sense identify them and root them out! Gradually, your life will become less complicated and more enjoyable. Recognize anger as the cause of these negative symptoms. Recognition of such behaviors can prevent your LTP circuits from taking control of your actions.




Effectivee Mind Control Link

Anger Management Action
A resource of useful information to deal with the anger in your life. It offers a wide range of solutions in dealing with personal anger, or other people's anger. The hope that you can solve your current problems is often the first step on a journey of recovery.