“Anger is the mind that wishes to harm and hurt. Patience is the mind that holds back from harming or hurting. Anger is the most difficult to deal with; patience is most difficult to develop. Patience is the only thing that defeats anger.” Buddha
Know the three stages of anger
If you can take one small step in understanding your ANGER, you can make a tremendous difference to your life.
The first stage of your anger is a thought in your mind and if you can notice the thought in your mind you can stop the anger while it is invisible to others.
If you don’t notice your thought, you automatically progress into the second stage of your anger, which is your behaviour.
The first stage of your anger was happening at a thought level and therefore it was invisible to others. As you did not pay attention to your thoughts, your anger automatically progressed into the second stage.
The second stage of your anger is your behaviour: people can see you are angry. Because anger makes you tense up, shout, scream, blame each other.
Unmanaged anger automatically throws you out of control. When you are out of control your heart and brain are excessively over stressed and could stay that way for many hours afterwards.
If you can realise at the second stage that you are burning with anger. It would be good for you to force yourself to divert the attention of your mind from the anger to your breathing.
How to calm down the anger
Start Inhaling to calm down the anger:
Firstly, inhale through your nose slowly for four seconds.
Secondly, hold the inhaled air in for four seconds.
Thirdly, exhale the air through your mouth with pursed lips.
Keep repeating this breath cycle until the feeling of anger fades away.
If you don’t learn to control the first and the second stage of your anger you end up with the third stage. The third stage of anger changes into physical effects like tension headache, back pain, chest pain, high blood pressure, insomnia…
If you don’t learn to control the first and the second stage of your anger, you end up with the third stage of anger: shouting, screaming and a fight may ensue, violence is not the way. Co-operation is better than conflict.
