You’ve probably been angry — it’s part of humanity. Anger is a normal, healthy emotion.
There are many different reasons why people are angry. You may feel angry because you were treated badly or unfairly by someone else. Your anger may also be a reaction to difficult experiences in everyday life, your past, or the world around you. Or it may be a way of dealing with other emotions. For example, you may feel angry along with feelings of attack, helplessness, embarrassment, or fear.
You may not know why you are feeling angry, and that’s okay. We don’t always need to justify or explain why we feel a particular way.
Sometimes anger can be a useful emotion. However, sometimes this is difficult to manage and makes your life more difficult.
Learning how to recognize, express and manage anger can make a huge difference to your mental health.
Physical Effects of Anger
Anger triggers the body’s fight or flight response. Other emotions that trigger this response include fear, joy and anxiety. The adrenal glands flood the body with stress hormones, like adrenaline and cortisol. The brain diverts blood from the gut to the muscles, in preparation for physical activity. Heart rate, blood pressure and respiration increase, body temperature rises and the skin sweats. Mind becomes sharp and focused.
How Anger Can Help?
Feeling angry can be beneficial sometimes. For example, feelings of anger about something can:
- Help you identify issues
- Help protect you from things that are detrimental to you
- Help you to challenge and oppose injustice or discrimination
- Help you feel more energy or focus on a task
- Motivate you to encourage change in the world or help others who are being treated badly
- Helps you stay safe and defend yourself in dangerous situations by giving you a burst of energy as part of your body’s natural response to threats.
How Can Anger be Unhelpful?
Anger can be a difficult emotion to deal with. And you certainly have times where you might struggle with anger. Sometimes, anger can:
- Makes you say or do things you regret
- Distract yourself from what you need to do
- Makes it difficult to express yourself clearly or calmly
- Make people judge you
- Causing arguments or conflicts with other people
- Impacts your self-esteem
- Make you feel guilty and ashamed
- Stop you from recognizing or handling other emotions
- Makes it difficult for you to take care of yourself
- Has an effect on your body, for example affecting your sleep
Health Issues with Anger
The constant flood of stress chemicals and related metabolic changes that occur along with uncontrolled anger can eventually cause damage to many of your body’s systems.
Some of the short and long-term health problems that have been linked to unmanaged anger include: high blood pressure, headache
digestion problems, such as abdominal pain, depression, insomnia,
increased anxiety, skin problems such as eczema, heart attack, stroke.
