How to Not Be Angry All The Time

Best Two Techniques For a Peaceful 2024

Related: New post on untamed advice called: “How to Stop Being Angry All The Time.“

When Rage Strikes

Anger. It's an emotion I know all too well. It has hit me hard in the past, and my subsequent actions were not so great.

When we get emotional, we can easily make mistakes. I know I have. Anger has led to a lot of mistakes in my past.

You are always more powerful when you're calm.

Anger is natural. It's crucial to remember that anger is an emotional response to danger, injustice, or an obstacle within our path; it is not a reason to mistreat yourself or give up.

My Relationship to Rage

My relationship with rage is as long as I can remember. It is a profound relief not to repress or overindulge in anger anymore.

I experience frustration now, like the doorway to problem-solving. Anger now drives me to understand and transform challenges into productive output.

When I crash-landed in the wilderness, everything was physically gruelling. The winter is the most challenging.

One example of this was carrying water over uneven ground. I often found myself racing against the setting sun while heavy rain saturated the floor beneath me. As uneven as the ground was, the extra liquid made slipping and losing the water highly likely.

Pure, seething wrath would explode each time it happened, like a volcano erupting aggressively each time I lost water.

Despite the wilderness hardships, my problems changed. In the city, my triggers revolved around people, work, and social groups. It was all about survival here; I wouldn't change that for the world.

Rage Responsibility

What I see now is anger is the ability to respond. People often misunderstand the 'ability to respond', also known as responsibility.

Many see it as a ball and chain hanging around our necks. My perspective is a stark contrast now.

Wilderness survival has taught me that responsibility is a superpower.

When we take responsibility for ourselves, we act better than we should or would have previously.

Responsibility with discipline is essential for resourcefulness. Survival is hard if you're not resourceful.

You can transform seemingly desperate situations into practical action. Responsibility is far more helpful than a lot of people wish to admit. I can understand because I may have seen life the same way as a teenager.

Feel The Burn, Stay Peaceful Anyway

When it comes to anger, rage hurts when it starts to catch fire. For me, it pours through my body like hot lava, and as I fume, it can take painful turns.

In the past, I found myself smashing stuff from lampshades to beautiful ornamental urns.

Now I still feel all the emotions, only I'm not breaking my furniture. Peace is the release of angry moments now. Not the destruction of your drywall.

Looking back in compassion, it's evident that each outburst was a lesson. It's never apparent when you're amid rage.

Hindsight is an annoying yet illuminating experience.

What The Wilderness Taught Me About Rage

Rolling around and screaming isn't a helpful solution when your life depends on your performance.

Instead, it's crucial first to pause and take a step back. Allow your thoughts and emotions to rest.

The ancients call this process 'resting in awareness.'

Practically, that means that you stop focusing on your thoughts and emotions for a brief moment. Then you relax your attention. In doing so, your awareness opens up, and you become aware of being aware.

It pivots your focus from a painful identity (being at the whim of the situation and the unfairness of what you may be going through) to being present in the moment. The problem doesn't constrain this presence, giving you space from being engulfed by frustration.

This pivot is the first step to mental freedom. Mental freedom starts in the mind by being free from what you feel while you feel it. In counselling and psychological science, we call this process meta-cognition.

I love helping clients achieve this process of freedom during untamed advice sessions. It's humbling to see people transform through realising they can be free, even when they don't feel okay.

Meta-cognition, resting as awareness, or instinctive recognition—however you want to call it, is a massive step towards personal responsibility. You take responsibility by choosing who you are at that moment.

You respond to uncomfortable emotions but don't react. This first step was so helpful when it seemed everything around me wasn't working, and danger was painfully present.

Taking responsibility within you gives you the power to act and direct yourself most favourably.

Challenging Trauma For Better Anger Outcomes

Once you have that initial space to breathe, the next step is to challenge your perspective on the situation.

What I saw in myself is that I would overlay past trauma on the present moment. My life has been a rich tapestry of wild adventure. Adventure puts you in all kinds of situations. Some are incredible, while others can be traumatic.

When we overlay past trauma, it's as if we have tinted glasses, colouring our experience and exaggerating the situation.

Cognitive reappraisal is a valuable technique in anger management to challenge our assumptions around a situation and work towards a better evaluation.

Once you have that initial momentary freedom from what you feel, you can then look at the situation without trauma bias.

For me, my past would be screaming and cursing. While that happened, I would seek to look at more than one angle.

This expanded view gave me better insight into how to manoeuvre through the circumstances.

The outcome was far better. I found that challenging my description of the moment helpful. A few questions I asked myself were:

• Is my reaction equal to the circumstance?

• Am I exaggerating anything here?

• Is this something that usually triggers me?

• Is there a solution that helps?

• Is there something I can let go of?

• If I didn't take this personally, would it be that bad?

• Is there another explanation for what is happening?

• Is there a better way to do things?

• Is this a sign of personal growth, and if so, how can I learn from this?

• How can I take responsibility for what is happening right now?

Try it out yourself. First, pause, take a step back, and open your perspective. Relax your body and mind, and allow your sympathetic nervous system to unwind.

Then, ask yourself some clear-headed questions and see if you can move forward peacefully.

Remember, It's your time to thrive.

You can be free, you can be Untamed.

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In case you don't yet know, 'cognitive reappraisal' is a psychological technique that involves changing the way you think about a situation to alter your emotional response.

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