No good can ever come from allowing anger to take over your mind. Remember that this distorted and one-sided view of a situation has only arisen in the mind, and our angry reaction has no substance in reality. Put simply’ anger is the result of our inability to control our minds and manage our thoughts. Anger and rage seriously affect your ability to deal with a situation and certainly prevent you from seeing both sides and why the other party perceives it differently. Not only is anger bad for your health, when I see an angry person I know that he or she is not a happy person. They may be angry because they are unhappy, or unhappy because they allow themselves to get angry!
You should try to develop what I think of as an ‘early warning system’ – self awareness about how your thoughts develop and emerge so that you can immediately identify an angry thought as it arises, and stop it in its tracks. Observe and notice your thoughts one at a time, watching how they emerge and evolve and learn to allow them to be released and dissolve away rather than allowing them to grow and take over your mind. Try to see issues in perspective. Watch closely for conditioned and repetitive aversions which become more prevalent as you get older and are a source of anger. A prime example is inbuilt prejudice towards those who are different especially from different races and cultures.
When someone or a group of people are making you angry ask yourself why it bothers you so much. What is it that is really annoying you?
Blaming others and holding them responsible for things we do not like about our own life is a sure way to an unhappy life.
Often when you have got angry you will remember that you got angry, or perhaps that you had an argument, but will not remember what it was that you were angry about. The negative energy that you banked and damage caused by anger lives on long after the issue ceases to matter. So ask yourself will the issue that is making you angry matter in a year’s time or possibly even next week? Will you even remember the detail of why you were angry?
People who carry a lot of anger tend to give off negative energy which arouses and attracts anger in others, and find that others are frequently angry with them in their day to day lives.