How to Find Peace and Overcome Anger

Anger is a normal human emotion, and feeling it doesn't make you a bad person. The trouble starts when it stops being an occasional reaction and begins bleeding into your relationships, your work, your sleep. When that happens, it's worth doing something deliberate about it. You can learn to manage anger so it doesn't run the show. Just know going in that this is slow work. Nobody flips a switch overnight. Be patient with yourself. What follows are a handful of approaches you can begin using today to move toward steadier emotions and some actual quiet in your head.

The single idea to hold onto is that you are the one in control. That sounds obvious until you're in the grip of it, at which point it feels like anything but true. Still, remind yourself: how much power your anger holds is something you decide, and so is how much outside noise gets to touch your mood and your thinking. A useful side effect of this mindset is that you start paying attention to your own triggers. Notice what sets you off, and the next time it shows up, you're no longer caught flat-footed.

You've seen the breathing-and-counting-to-ten bit in a hundred movies. Media flattens it into a cliché, but underneath the cliché is something real: the technique works because it drags your attention away from whatever lit the fuse and onto your own body. So next time your blood is up, step out of your head and take ten slow breaths. Count each one. Pour your focus into the breathing, and the thing that angered you has to wait in the back seat while you come back to yourself.

Almost everyone has that one person who knows exactly which buttons to push. Part of the work is deciding, flatly, that you're done handing them that much influence over your state of mind. This takes repetition. The payoff is being able to stay in charge of your own reactions, especially around the people most skilled at knocking you off balance.

There's also a case for regularly tallying up the good. Sit with your life clearly and the things worth being glad about usually outnumber the things worth being furious about by a wide margin. A few minutes in the morning spent on that sets a calmer tone for the hours ahead, so the small irritations have a harder time landing. Do it again before bed and the day closes on a better note than it might have otherwise.

A lot of people assume an emotion is simply the automatic output of a trigger, full stop. That's only half the story. The feeling may arrive on its own, but the response is yours to pick. Something angers you, and you can choose to walk off and breathe rather than detonate. Repeat that enough and it stops being a choice you have to make and becomes the thing you just do, stepping away instead of staying put and letting the whole situation unravel.

A few smaller moves help too, and none of them are complicated. Drink a glass of water; it has a genuinely settling effect. Try to take things less seriously across the board. Keep up positive thinking even when, especially when, the moment is stressful. Give other people's opinions room, however far they land from your own. And keep stretching your patience, with people and with circumstances both.

Don't let the length of this list rattle you. Each piece is simple and well within anyone's reach. The trick is to pick one, get comfortable with it, and only then fold in the next. The point of all of it is peace, so that when anger does come, and it will, you're the one holding the reins. You'll still feel it. That's fine, that's human. What changes is that you've got ways to keep it from taking over the way it used to.

Rosemary Kitchen