Posts Tagged ‘anger and stress’

Anger Intervention Schemes

ANGER INTERVENTION SCHEMES

“How can I avoid getting angry?” asked one mother. “These kids in our neighborhood are getting on my nerves.”
Usually anger expressed either outwardly or inwardly. Psychotherapists traditionally recommend the outward ventilation of anger considering it to be the “healthy” means. If you keep it inside you would feel “sick.”

It is true that internalized anger would ultimately corrode your inner self and health—-mental, spiritual and physical. However, if you let yourself go expressing your anger freely, people will soon regard you as loony. Friendship is broken; other human relationships suffer in view uncontrolled rage. People would either avoid you totally or keep themselves at a distance from you and be cautious as they interact with you.

Sublimation. It is proper to sublimate anger ventilating it through acceptable, worthwhile activities such as gardening, jogging, tennis, house cleaning, crying, playing a musical instrument, singing, or even shouting provided nobody can hear you. You can even think of making some projects as your pastime or outlet whenever you feel upset. It is much better to burn up excess hormones by means of these activities rather than allowing them to corrode the internal system.

People who resort to drugs, alcohol, gambling, eating, and other vices whenever they are angry are compounding their problems. These are false crutches! Such vices are not only detrimental to the body and mind, but also weaken the internal control mechanism. The person’s threshold toward stress becomes shorter. He gets more stresses, and easily blows his top.

Cognitive system. Burns recommends the “cognitive” solution which transcends the outward or inward directions of anger. The third option: Stop creating your anger. You don’t have to choose between holding it in or letting it out because it won’t exist. Should you choose this option, you can (by God’s grace) control your feelings. As you gradually cease to be plagued by excessive irritability and frustration that sour your life easy and enjoyable.

Anger, like all emotions, is created by your cognitions. Before you can feel irritated by any event you must first become aware of what is occurring and have your own interpretation of it. Your feelings result from the meaning you give to the event, not from the event itself. It is illustrated as follows:

In his Rational-emotive view point, one professional believes that man’s emotional problems lie in his illogical thinking. Emotion is caused and controlled by thinking. He said: “One’s thinking often becomes one’s emotion; and emoting, under some circumstances, becomes one’s thought.”

Burns cited five kinds of distortions which occur most often when one is angry. First is labeling—seeing the other person in a totally negative way. Your anger is directed toward what the person “is”. Second is mind reading —you invent motives that explain to your satisfaction why the other person did what he did.

Stress and Anger

Why do we get stress? Life is filled with responsibilities. Each one has to its reason to survive. The basic animal needs are all the same. Food, shelter and companionship while humans have the need for clothing. But the set of needs are more or less the same and the resources are limited. Therefor, a person has to work hard in life to get all that he needs. And then there is all those additional items which a person desires, but doesn’t really need. Such as jewelries, cellphones and fancy cars. The need and desire for all this is just fine. But when a person doesn’t get these, he gets stressed.

An outburst stress may be termed as anger. A person gets angry when Read more…