Guide to Letting Go of Anger
Anger can be a lot to deal with. Although it’s a natural emotion that serves a purpose, effectively processing and managing it can feel like a struggle without the right tool. Without ways to handle our anger we can feel like it robs us of joy and overwhelms us.
This guide to letting go of anger is designed to help you release that anger, find better ways to deal with difficult emotions and ultimately find the inner peace you deserve. You can do this by preventing anger from rising in the first place, mitigating its effects while it’s there, and easing your way through anger to the other side faster.
Understanding Anger and Letting Go
The most important thing to grasp about anger is that it’s a natural feeling and is often there to protect us. Although anger is not always the appropriate response (sometimes popping up when we least expect or need it) it tells us that something is wrong or off-balance. It’s human nature to become angry when we feel slighted, scared, or hurt. The challenge lies in managing and processing anger healthily and not becoming consumed.
Take the time to understand your anger, specifically where it’s coming from. Anger frequently masks other emotions like fear, anxiety, or sadness. When faced with an emotional trigger, following that feeling through to the source can help you accept and process them. Suppressing your feelings instead can lead to a dangerous cycle of ignoring what’s hurting you, which makes your anger worse, hurts more, and creates more anger, and so on.
Taking a step back to examine where anger is coming from can help lead us away from harmful behaviors and beliefs. Self-reflection is critical to process the emotion and let go. Gaining greater insight into our emotions and triggers can give us healthier coping strategies and more constructive tools to deal with anger and lead happier lives.
The Importance of Self-Talk for Positive Motivation
While the saying goes “You are what you eat”, you are also what you think. Self-talk’s the way you communicate with yourself and what you believe and your perception of the world around you. Awareness of our thoughts is the first step to engaging in positive self-talk that can help counterbalance emotional ups and downs.
Self-talk allows us to accept what is and is not in our control, notice and direct our thoughts and feelings, and take ownership of our emotions. A crucial aspect of self-talk is to keep it positive and refrain from extreme self-criticism or overly punitive talk.
Proper positive self-talk focuses on affirming your power, reminding you that you are in charge of your own life while shaping the narrative with which you respond to events and challenges.
Developing healthy self-talk habits moves you forward, empowered by realistic optimism. Determination and practice can build positive self-talk from a foundational tool to confidence that empowers strong statement affirmations. This will further equip your ability to let go of anger and handle challenges with inner peace.
How to Release Uncomfortable Feelings
Acknowledge the Underlying Feeling
Anger is frequently a smoke screen emotion. We feel anger as a way of coping with an underlying emotion. By identifying that trigger emotion and allowing ourselves to feel that feeling, you can dissipate the need for anger. Take the time to understand your emotional experience fully, and anger will leave; it’s a job as a signal that something is wrong.
Mindfulness
This is the practice of having awareness of the real world around you. You can practice mindfulness of your body, mind, and emotion by focusing on the sensations and physical changes you experience when feeling anger. You remove the labels from your feelings by shifting your attention away from the internal monologue and instead onto reality. Entering this non-judgemental space gives you perspective and can help loosen the grip of anger.
Physical Activity
Exercise has long been associated with releasing negative emotions. It’s been scientifically proven to have a slew of emotional benefits as well as physical benefits. Not only does it relieve the stress hormone cortisol, but it also releases pent-up energy that may lead to increased anger.
Honesty and Acceptance as Tools
Acceptance is a crucial tool when it comes to releasing negative emotions like anger. Getting hung up on how we think things should be can lead to increased irritation as we struggle through a world that might not fit what we envision.
We can use honesty and acceptance as tools to see and welcome the truth so that we can work with it instead of struggling against it. Honesty involves identifying things for what they are rather than what we wish they were. Acceptance is recognizing feelings that cause discomfort and allowing them in without judgment or criticism.
Reframing Inner Dialogues for Peaceful Thinking
Reframing internal thoughts through a mixture of mindfulness, honesty, acceptance, and affirmations can help you head anger off at the past before it spirals out of control. Even when you catch anger later, reframing inner dialogues can let you let go of anger.
To do this, become aware of the words and phrases you’re thinking. What’s the internal story you’re telling yourself about what you’re experiencing? This is where honesty and acceptance play a role, as they help us recognize the truth versus the story we’re telling ourselves.
Now, replace those words and stories with positive statements. Reframing the inner dialogue and story in this way can calm you down and leave you feeling better equipped to deal with the situation and negative emotions that arise.
Reframing your inner dialogue is a powerful tool for setting a calmer tone for all your experiences. It can take much of the harsh sting out of your interactions by changing them from a negative to a neutral or positive experience.
Practicing Forgiving Meditation
Forgiveness meditations can help trigger your mind and body’s natural healing response to help reduce physical and mental pain. This can lower stress hormones for greater physical and psychological health.
Forgiving meditations help connect to your feelings and let go of hurts and offences from the past that may be grounding us in anger. This opens up new possibilities for self-love, acceptance and compassion for yourself and others. Practicing forgiveness can also help break the habit of being judgemental. Allowing yourself to slip into a forgiving space can create inner peace that eases anger from the inside out.
Create Statement Affirmations
Affirmations are short, positive statements focusing on what’s good in our lives and creating more confidence and stability in what is possible. Positive affirmations allow us to reframe our beliefs and experiences. As a result, we can reframe and restructure our brains to be more supportive of what we want, including letting go of anger.
Affirmations are the next step in positive self-talk. They are the positive assertion of what you want to achieve and that you can achieve it. This actively creates your daily intentions to help you stay focused on your goals through the minutiae of day-to-day activities. Affirmations give clarity and direction to your journey to inner peace and fall into two main categories.
“I Am” Statements
These statements, such as “I am in control of my emotions,” work best when working on an area of the self that needs to be bolstered. Improved or strengthened. This works for many emotional goals, from self-esteem to anger. This method is particularly helpful for anger management because it touches on honesty and acceptance while getting more in touch with inner peace and confidence.
“I Will” Statements
When working towards a specific goal, statements like, “I will push myself to take risks,” will help provide motivation and focus on a positive outcome rather than simply striving for overall improvement.
Focus on Positive Words
Letting go of anger and creating inner peace is made much easier by focusing on positive words. This changes your perspective to a more supportive and realistically optimistic one, creating and enforcing a more constructive state of mind. Consciously concentrating on positive words helps to eliminate negative ones and increase happiness and contentedness.
It’s important to remember that only employing positive words is not enough. The words you say to yourself and use in your life act as a foundation, a framework that you build the rest of your life around using actions. Your actions must match your positive words and focus on creating the happy and peaceful inner life you’re looking for. Positive terms and affirmations work as reinforcement to help remind us of our goals and power so that we can move forward toward achieving those things.
Other Techniques to Help Let Go of Anger
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
This helps your awareness of thoughts and feelings from an objective perspective. It’s a mix of breathing exercises, meditation and mindful thinking and by doing this you can become more finely tuned to yourself and calmer.
Yoga and Physical Exercise
All physical exercise is good for dealing with difficult emotions, but yoga is specifically designed to be a mind and body experience to bring inner peace.
Examples of Affirmations to Let Go of Anger
1. I can choose to respond differently and calmly in all situations.
2. I’m in control of my emotions.
3. I can let go of what I cannot have power over.
4. Today, I will take time for myself and practice mindfulness.
5. I accept what is and focus on what I can change.
6. I choose peace over anger.
7. I forgive and move on from my anger.
8. I take deep breaths and let go of my anger.
