Apply These 3 Secret Techniques To Improve Your Anger Management

Anger Management and Molding Clay

All my life I’ve had an explosive temper with a hair trigger.

Can anyone suggest a way – any way to keep it under wraps and on a tight leash?

Anonymous, Wrong Planet

I love the picture in this article.

I picked it because I think of learning to manage anger as a skill much like creating a pot out of clay.

Our anger is an emotion – raw, untamed, unfamiliar.

If we’ve never created pottery, we’ll make a mess out of the lump of clay, which represents anger.

But if we learn pottery making skills from a skilled craftsman, we can learn to make progressively better creations out of the clay.

In the same way, you and I can become progressively better at managing anger by applying techniques from those who have learned to manage their anger.

Unmanaged Anger Costs Us

As I shared in the last episode, unmanaged anger costs us!

Unmanaged anger (yelling, throwing things, even hitting people or ourselves):

* Destroys our personal relationships

* Destroys our school or work relationships

* Very often makes bad situations worse

* Anger often leads to aggression (either verbal or physical)

“So What Can We Do To Improve Our Anger Management?”

Here are 3 anger management techniques I gathered via a combination of reading up on autistics and Aspergians stories and also from the general research literature.

Apply these three techniques with a growth mindset and I promise you you’ll see better results with your anger management.

Anger Management Technique 1 –  Self Awareness 

Self-awareness is the first key technique to help us manage our anger.

Self-awareness, according to Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, defines self-awareness as “knowing one’s internal states, preference, resources, and intuitions.” (Source, Why Self-Awareness Matters, and How You Can Be More Self-Aware).

According to researchers David. R. Vago and David A. Silbersweig, from the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA,

“through training in FA, OM, and EE styles of meditation, a sustainable healthy mind is proposed to be supported—reducing maladaptive emotions and cognitions common to most ordinary experience, such as lustful desire, greed, anger, hatred, worry, etc., increasing pro-social dispositions (e.g., compassion, empathy, and forgiveness) toward self and other, reducing attachments to thoughts and feelings, and removing biases inherent in habitual forms of cognition.” (source, article, Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness).

Bottom line: As we improve our self-awareness, we’re able to reduce “knee-jerk” unhealthy reactions to ange...