How Does Anger Affect Your Physical and Mental Health?
Anger can be a positive or negative emotion, depending on how it is expressed. Uncontrolled anger can cause significant harm to one’s mental and physical health. It can cause depression, headache, blood pressure, digestive issues and other long-term health related problems.
How Does Anger Affect Your Brain and Body?
Anger is considered a powerful emotion that can be caused due to annoyance, disappointment, feelings of hurt or frustration. While this feeling can motivate an individual to make positive changes, suppressed anger can result in long-term destructive consequences to the brain and body.
What Are the Effects of Anger on Mental Health?
Anger can adversely affect mental health, and its symptoms include
- Anxiety Irritability
- Frustration
- Irritability
- Stress
- Rage
- Guilt
- Feeling overwhelmed
What Are the Effects of Anger on Physical Health?
Anger can affect different parts of the body, causing various long term health issues. Its signs and symptoms include
- Increased blood pressure
- Increased heart rate
- Tingling sensation
- Muscle tension
- Digestive issues such as constipation, hyperacidity, indigestion, bloating etc.
- Skin disease
- Migraine / headache
- Depression
What Are the Main Causes of Being Angry?
Following are the main causes that can make an individual angry –
- Frustration
- Embarrassment or humiliation
- Guilt or shame
- Jealousy
- Hurt or sadness
- Inability to control a situation
- Feeling threatened or frightened
- Unfair treatment
- Feeling left out or misunderstood.
What Are the Types of Anger?
There are three types of anger that an individual manifest, including
- Inward Anger – Reflects traits like negative self-talk, restricting things that make you happy, harming and isolating yourself.
- Outward Anger –Shouting, cursing, throwing or breaking things, and being abusive physically or verbally towards others are some of its traits.
- Passive Anger –Includes traits like being sarcastic, mocking others, sulking, and giving someone a taste of silent treatment.
What Are the Risk Factors of Getting Angry?
The risk factors of getting angry are as follows
- Long-term Effects –Individuals may suffer from memory loss, stroke and relationship issues. Further, it may affect the entire life of an individual
- Short-term Effects –Immediate anxiety effects include headaches, muscle pain, dizziness, inconsistent breathing, etc. It may cause further difficulties in routine tasks.
Tips for Long-term Anger Management
A short-tempered individual can follow the following tips to manage their anger in the long run
- Understand the signs that trigger anger.
- Try to understand the reasons for getting angry, like bad memories or hurt by someone’s words.
- Opt for counseling, group therapy sessions or anger management classes.
- Take holistic method of medication.
- Neutralise a situation by taking deep breaths, a break, and connecting with nature to calm down body and mind or indulge in physical activities.
- Explore and come up with some solutions to express and resolve anger instead of suppressing the anger.
- Try to reach out to someone trustworthy, who can be a family member or friend or mental health professional.
Benefits of Regular Exercise in Anger Management
Regular exercise can play a huge role in managing anger in day to day life in the following ways
- Aerobic exercises help reduce depression.
- Relaxes muscle tension.
- It reduces stress from body and mind.
- Improves concentration and anger management skills to calm one in crunch situations.
- It increases production of mood regulating neurotransmitters like endorphins and catecholamine’s.
How to Teach Children to Express Anger in a Healthy Manner?
Anger management skills can be developed at a tender age which can have far-reaching positive effects in one’s life. Here are the ways to teach children to express their anger in a learned manner
- Treat the feelings of your child with respect.
- Teach them to develop practical problem solving skills.
- Teach them about anger as a natural emotion and to express it appropriately.
- Encourage open communication at home.
- Teach them ways to express their anger & give them example so that they can learn how to express their anger.
- Make them understand the difference between aggression and anger.
- Teach methods to calm and soothe the mind and body when a child gets angry.
