10 Creative Ways to deal with Anger Immediately | Greatcrackers.com
Someone must get hurt, either you or the other party. That’s what happens when one doesn’t apply creative ways to deal with anger.
No doubt, some people get more easily offended than others. Yet everyone at some point has been made to experience the deep negative emotion called Anger.
While that sounds natural, our response matters a lot. When you get angry, you can choose to bottle up your feelings and try to act like a “peace-loving” fellow that our society supports. But the twist is such an action will cause you to hurt yourself in the long run.
On the other hand, you could hurt other people badly if you decide to act out your anger. And that could consequently lead to social isolation.
But the question is, how do you strike a balance in your response? So that you don’t get yourself or others hurt while trying to express your anger.
Below are the steps you take when you’re angry, which are capable of making this statement “I can’t control my anger,” something you hardly would say.
10 Creative Ways to deal with Anger Immediately
1. Set a countdown in your brain
When you’re angry, your default response would be to flare up, rain out insults or attack the other person physically. And that could come as a punch, slap, or throwing objects at them, as the case may be. But with a countdown, you can make your brain work against this auto-response.
Just imagine a colleague or a family member got you pissed up. In such a case, you decided to control the urge to want to act rashly on impulse by telling yourself that you’ll remain still with the aid of a countdown to 200.
You’ll agree that counting from 1 to 200 will take 3 minutes and some seconds, which is a sufficient time to cool the hot emotion of anger.
2. Journal your anger
Journaling our feelings is one of the creative ways through which we take control over our thinking or emotions. In the same way, you can write out your anger with sincerity. By that, I mean you don’t need to fake anything.
Get a pen and a journal or a piece of paper. Tell yourself how angry you are, stating the cause and how you desire to address it with empathy and maturity.
A typical example in a relationship could be something like this:
“I’m feeling angry at what Jones did to me. How could he be unappreciative of my effort to make our relationship work? I’ll sternly ask him if he has something going on between him and Stella, whose body he was looking at the party.”
3. Slow down your heart tempo with a walk
Can you remember the last time you were angry? What were you feeling in your chest? It was as if your heart was going to jump out of your chest, right?
There is no argument that anger as a negative emotion can speed up your breathing rate. But you can dissipate this feeling by deciding to walk away from the scene where you got angry, even as you take a deep breath.
4. Remind yourself of your standard(s) with a chosen mantra
We all have standards that only we can break. For example, the statement below may capture one of your standards:
“I value myself and my peace. I won’t allow anything to steal joy or happiness.”
But someone just got you angry at work, at home, or in your neighborhood. How do you manage the anger which is about to kill your happiness? All you need to do is to keep reminding yourself standard and commit to it with a statement like this:
“(Your name), don’t allow anybody or situation to steal your happiness. You’ll be fine.”
5. Laughter is creative Way to deal with Anger
You’ll agree that you can’t make what is cold hot by adding more cold stuff; instead, you add what is hot. The same applies to the feeling of anger. But you can alter it with a counter-feeling. That’s when you cast out your anger with laughter.
Whenever someone gets you angry, you can make it a duty to look for ways to laugh. It could be watching a comedy video skit, swiping through some funny memes, or even having a good time with your granny, kids, or as the case may be.
Just make sure you kill the strength of the anger through laughter.
6. Sweat out your anger in a dance
One of the productive ways to deal with anger is engaging yourself in a dance while you listen to good songs. Yes, songs; which can distract your mind from the incident that caused the anger in the first instance.
Now you may be asking: what if I don’t know how to dance? You can listen to the music alone, which you hardly will do without moving your body– your head, arm, or legs. You see, you’re already dancing before you realize it.
7. Vent your anger on an imaginary offender
A feeling expressed is better than one bottled up. Yet anger and emotion wrongly expressed could add more fire to whatever inspired your anger. That is why you want to control and deal with it, applying wit and discretion.
Once you discover anger is welling up, you can leave the scene to a quieter place, preferably a place where you’re the only person. Because this will allow you to verbalize your anger to an imaginary offender.
While that may appear to some people as cowardice, it isn’t. You’re only trying to be in control of your emotions– in this case, anger– so that you don’t do or say what you’ll regret.
Creative Ways to deal with Anger during conversation
8. Communicate with a friend
Talking to a reliable friend is another effective yet creative way to control anger emotion. Especially when you have trusted friends you can share things with in confidence, without any fear that they’ll loud it to the world in mockery of you.
The goal is to express your anger or frustration constructively to this friend, who’s an active and unbiased listener. This point will make more sense when you understand the saying, “A problem shared is half-solved.”
9. Put things into perspective in empathy
The truth is that often we don’t see a fuller picture of something or matter when looking at it from one angle. And that’s the reason you should take the whole situation that instigated your anger into perspective.
So without bias and putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, you may want to ask these questions:
- Why did the person act the way he did?
- Could it be that he was already angry? Or is there something horrible eating him up that you don’t know?
- If I was in his shoes, what would I have done differently in the whole matter?
10. You’re ready to talk
If you’ve applied one or more of the strategies discussed before, you must have been able to control your anger immediately. And since you’ve become calm and objective, you’re ready to speak with the person who got upset.
At this point, you can now communicate your anger or frustration at him by opening up about what he did that made your blood boil. Also, you give him a piece of advice on what and how you think he could have acted without making things go sour.
Final thought on Creative Ways to deal with Anger
Has there been any week that passed by without anyone getting you upset? Chances are that there are none– or maybe one or two. But the truth is that people will always make us angry. It could be in our workplace, school, home, or in our neighborhood.
That’s why you should learn and master the 10 Creative ways to deal with anger without any people-pleasing tendency.
You may want to get a copy of my book on People pleasing here.
Having said that, what other ways would you recommend to people who seek to control their anger yet find it hard?
