What Is Anger
Sometimes people ask the question, what is anger? Anger is a natural human emotion, just like sadness or joy. Everyone experiences anger. Anger can come about from seeing a social injustice or be more personal, such as when it is experienced after being physically attacked or when someone lies about us or steals from us.
Some people get angry very quickly while with others it takes a lot to make them angry. Experts on anger management say that a person may normally get angry anywhere from one to fifteen times a day. But even though anger is very common and we feel it frequently, some people cannot recognize their own anger.
How well a person is able to deal with anger or not deal with anger will affect both the mental and physical aspects of life. Anger raises the blood pressure. You can even see it on the faces of some people when their skin starts to turn red and you can almost see their blood pressure rising. This is very stressful on our physical bodies. Repressing anger is even worse as many experts believe it can lead to such conditions as heart disease or cancer. Our physical bodies are affected by our mental state and that is very noticeable with anger.
If you express anger inappropriately such as by sudden outrages or hitting people, you run the risk of alienating yourself from your own family, friends or co-workers. Often, the way we express our anger is based on what we have learned in the past by our own experience or from other people. There also varying degrees of anger, such as something that might just be a minor annoyance or something that throws us into a rage. We can turn what is anger into something big or something small.
People sometimes use drugs or alcohol to try and escape their anger. Some people actually become angry when they drink a lot. Sometimes other emotions come into play and what is anger on the outside can actually be the way we express other emotions, such as hurt, shame, guilt or fear. People who have a fear of not being love or of being abandoned act angry on the outside.
Sometimes anger might be our way of dealing with being hurt. If we are rejected or told we are unimportant, that kind of hurt might present itself as anger. Sometimes when we ask “what is anger?” the answer might be frustration taken to the extreme. Being totally powerless over a circumstance in our life can make us angry.
The thing about anger is that there are positive ways to use it and negative ones as well. If you are angry all the time, or if anger is affecting your relationships with family or friends, it might be time to see a counselor or therapist to find ways of dealing with your anger in a more constructive way. It may not be easy but you can change the way you think about or display anger.