6 Healthy Ways to Deal With Anger

One of the easiest things about experiencing anger is finding a colorful word or phrase to describe it: Steaming. Fuming and fired up and furious. Pissed off. Ready to flip your lid. Livid. Such an extensive lexicon speaks to the universality of anger, one of the most primitive emotions humans experience—and in some ways one of the most complex. “People don’t like to feel angry, and most people who do feel angry want to get rid of the anger,” says Brad Bushman, a professor of communication at Ohio State University who studies the causes, consequences, and solutions to human aggression and violence. “But it also makes people feel powerful.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] That can be channeled into a positive force; consider that anger has fueled many social and political movements, Bushman says, from women’s suffrage to Black Lives Matter. The feeling can signal that something we’re experiencing or observing is misaligned with our values or how we want others to treat us or our fellow humans. Unfortunately, experts say, most of us don’t know how to deal with anger in a healthy way. “It’s the negative emotion that people have the most difficulty regulating,” Bushman notes. “This isn’t something that comes easy. That’s why courts send people to anger-management classes—if it were easy, they wouldn’t have to do that.” More from TIME [video id=5hrQlp7s autosta...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Mental Health Source Type: news