Why do I feel angry all the time?

“Why and I so angry all the time?” is a question that comes up a lot during my work as a life change coach. How they react to certain situations is often one of the thing clients want to change, and, as anger is often perceived as a “bad” emotion, it is high on the list of things people want to change.

There is no such thing as a “bad” emotion

To brand emotions as “good” and “bad” is doing ourselves a real disservice. Experiencing emotions, and the feelings around those emotions, is all part of the human experience. If you want to know more about emotions and feelings look at my previous blog post on this subject (click here for previous post).

Your emotions tell you how the inner you (your soul, your spirit or whatever idea works for you) is experiencing the world and gives you so much information. If you experience joy, you get to feel that and also know that whatever it was that brought you joy is something for the memory bank to revisit when you need more joy. Just the memory of feeling that joy is something for the memory bank to remind you what joy feels like.

Anger is a secondary emotion. It’s called a secondary emotion as there is always something else under the anger – usually fear or sadness. I’ll look at this further below. For now, I want you to see anger as a sign that something has made you feel a big feeling and you are being signposted to look at this deeper.

All emotions are signals and we can learn a lot from leaning in and looking at what is going on.

Making change the priority by-passes the opportunity to learn

When we feel uncomfortable about something it is our natural instinct to want to change it. No-one wants to feel uncomfortable. Everywhere we look, we see quotes encouraging us to think positive, “Positive vibes only”, smile through everything. The less popular quotes are those that encourage us to look deep within and learn from the situation.

Why do we get angry?

All emotions arise because of how we interpret and react to situations. It’s a personal thing. Something that makes one person angry might not make another person angry. No one reaction is “right” or “wrong” and it’s important to remember that.

When you have a reaction to a situation it can be referred to as a “trigger”. It’s the thing that makes you react as you do.  When it comes to anger, some common triggers are feelings of threat or attack, frustration or powerless, being invalidated or treated unfairly, lack of respect for our feelings or possessions. 

It’s important to know that the reaction is not actually about what has been done or said to you, it is all about how you feel about it and those feelings are informed by your childhood, past experiences and your current circumstances. Understanding why you react as you do can help you find appropriate strategies to cope. 

Understanding the root of the anger is the priority

The problem with flipping the “negative” feeling to positive is that we don’t feel the discomfort and work through it. Instead we suppress it, push it down and pretend it isn’t there.

The more we do that, the bigger the pile of pushed-down emotions and our body can only hold onto suppressed emotions for so long. Eventually (and this may take years) they will blow and that is when we see big angry outbursts. I’m not talking about a momentary flash of anger, instead I’m talking about the big displays of anger that seemingly come out of nowhere and are often a bigger reaction than seems appropriate to the situation. I used to have them and I know I’m not alone.

So when my clients ask me how to not be so angry, we first look at what emotions are being suppressed.

As an example, let’s talk about fear. We feel fear but if our experience tells us that it isn’t safe to feel our fear, we suppress the fear. For example, someone says something to you that you think is unkind. You are upset but you fear that others may see you as weak for being upset. Weakness is not something that was accepted in your family and you learned to cover it up. Instead of showing you are upset, you get angry and make a scene.

We can often make the whole thing worse and draw more attention to ourselves by being angry and it rarely ends well.

Change comes after understanding

Instead of suppressing the feeling of upset and the fear of appearing weak, if we are aware of the reason why we are feeling upset, we can instead excuse ourselves from the situation, do what we need to do to make us feel better (and there are many tools that can help – ask me if you want some help with this) and once we are not so reactive we can tell the person who said the unkind things how it makes us feel. If they apologise, then we will feel better. If they don’t care that is telling us that perhaps we could consider not spending time with that person anymore. I know I make this sound easy, and I totally accept that it takes work to get to this stage, but I want you to know it’s possible.

Taking time to slow down, to understand ourselves better and understand how we react in situations will really help us be brighter, calmer and a lot less angry.

If you’re interested in having life coaching so that you can begin to understand your emotions and feel less angry, click the button below to arrange an informal chat. Who knows what might change?!