There is nobody who does not know what anger is. It is an emotion which each one of us has felt at some time or the other. Why must we look at anger? How does it affect your life?
The number one killer in this world is anger. On a death certificate, it gets translated as heart disease or cancer.

How to deal with the Anger

1. Effective communication: This means that we should get our message across to the other person and be able to express our feelings and thoughts in a direct honest manner without violating the rights of the other. There are three kinds of behaviour passive, aggressive and assertive. Many times we find it difficult to say no and we land in situations, not to our liking. we might fret and fume about it but we have to go along with it because of our inability to be firm honest and direct. This is called passive behavior.

In aggressive behavior we express our thoughts and feelings but in a very offending dishonest manner. There is usually a lot blaming, threatening and fighting.

Whereas Assertiveness means respecting yourself, expressing your needs and defending your rights. It also means respecting the needs of the feelings and rights of others. Assertiveness gives you more confidence, and even though you might not win, you increase the chances of good compromise as the relationship has not been harmed.

2. Understanding your feelings : feelings are not caused by events, they depend upon your state of mind (mood) at that particular moment, independent of the event,e.g after the maths exam the teacher went and announced in the class that the authorities have decided to repeat the maths exam after a week because it was noticed that there was mass cheating, statement was same for all the students, but they displayed different feelings according to their internal state of mind. Student’s who cheated felt guilty and scared, the students who did well felt angry and the one’s who had not done well were happy to get another opportunity. Here, the event for all the students was the same but different feelings were generated by each individual student.

There are three components of all emotions (called ABC of emotion)

• Activating event
• Belief
• Communication of feelings 

3. Beliefs and Attitudes: most beliefs and rules are formed in response to our needs and our past experiences. Though these attitudes and beliefs have nothing to do with reality, they are so powerful that they become like unbendable rules e.g. of irrational beliefs.    

• You should never quarrel with my spouse
• You must never raise my voice on my children
• You must not make mistakes
• You should be generous and unselfish

These beliefs, if they are very rigid, lead to self criticism, guilt and doubt. To be free to these beliefs there is a bill of rights which states

• You have a right to refuse to say no
• You have a right to change your mind
• You have a right to make mistakes
• You have a right to put yourself first before others, without feeling guilty.
• You have a right to ask for help etc.

As beliefs cause the feelings we experience, we should be able to change our feelings or emotion by changing our beliefs. False and irrational beliefs may cause harmful self-defeating and unnecessary feelings.    

4. Relaxation techniques: Relaxation techniques are an important means of controlling anger. There are certain relaxation techniques which help in reducing anger like deep breathing (where you take a breathe and hold it for 5-10 seconds then slowly exhales), the countdown method, (here you count backward from 10 to 1 and simply say I am calm and in control), visualization (where you visualize or imagine the anger stimulating event or person in a comic or hilarious situation, e.g. when your boss reprimands you for no particular reason, just visualize him wearing a brief diaper with two large safety pins and walking in a shopping mall. This will definitely bring a smile on your face).

Definite steps to dissolve your anger-

When faced with an anger-provoking situation follow these ten steps:

• KEEP QUIET, and don’t utter a single word.

• Acknowledge that ‘I am getting angry’.

• Understand that ‘this feeling is within me’,.

• Remember that its an indication of my limitations.

• Decide whether you ‘want to become a victim of anger or victorious’.

• Think about how can I deal with this situation/person more effectively.

• Relax and say ‘I am calm and in control’.

• Rationalize and change the feelings.

• Remove yourself from the situation, if nothing works.

• Reward yourself for success and even if you don’t succeed then don’t worry, remember that a child didn’t learn walking in one day.