Tame Your Temper

Linda Bernstein

How to control feelings of anger

Marissa*, a high school junior from a New Haven, Conn., suburb, compares herself to a "pot of soup." She says, "It's like I feel this flame under me [so that] I'm going to boil over." Marissa says she gets so angry about "everything-my little sister taking my lipstick, my mom [saying] my skirt is too short-that I get stomachaches and headaches," she explains.

Last summer when Raquel, a seventh grader from Port Jefferson, N.Y., was at camp, someone faked her name on a "love" note to a boy. "I was so mad. I couldn't believe one of my friends would be so mean. I felt nervous being so angry," Raquel recalls. "When I'm angry, I feel so sick it's scary," she adds.

Signs of Anger

Everyone gets angry from time to time, says Donald Wertlieb of the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. " [We] react with anger when we don't get what we want," says Wertlieb.

Faster breathing, tense muscles, and turning red can all be signs of anger. Feeling as if you want to break something or hit someone or yelling and screaming, even at people you care about, are all expressions of anger. Some people keep their anger inside. That can lead to headaches or stomachaches.

Not surprisingly, anger can be bad for your health. For example, a researcher at the University of Missouri, Columbia, found that angry people are more likely to get hurt. Another study, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, linked anger to lung problems. Frequent anger can also lead to high blood pressure, which makes the heart work harder.

Managing Anger

Even though anger is a negative emotion that can lead to problems, the emotion does have its good points. It protects us, says Kathy Puskar, a professor of nursing at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. She has studied the emotion in teens. Anger, Puskar says, "can alert you there's trouble in a relationship. It can also help you ... get what you want or need."

The trick, Puskar says, is to learn positive ways of dealing with anger so you don't express it at the worst possible moment or in an unproductive way. Whether you're the type who holds in anger or lets it out with an explosion, anyone can use these tips:

* Think about what is really going on. Anger is a secondary emotion. That means it might come from feeling hurt, frustrated, or disrespected. Once you know why you're mad, you can go to the source of the problem and fix it.

* Distract yourself. Count to 10 so you don't react too quickly, exercise to release tension and divert your mind, listen to music that will help you relax, or talk to a trusted friend or adult.

* Step back. It's helpful to separate "good" anger from anger that can hurt you, according to Puskar. If you feel so angry you can't control it, step away from the situation, and let things calm down before you act on it. The key is to figure out why you're angry and how you can handle it. Then you can try helpful ways to express your feelings, instead of just seeing red.

Learning to Let Go

Marissa is making a real effort to control her anger. "If I'm just all hung up that I got left out [of a social situation], I now know to tell people how I feel so they won't do it again," Marissa says. "When I'm not a 'pot of soup,' I don't get those awful headaches."

Raquel has found that when she is really angry with her friends, the best thing to do is talk about it. And when she's too angry to do that, she gets an adult to help out. "At camp, a counselor spoke with me for a long time about how these kinds of things happen to people and it's not the end of the world; it's just a lot of drama that will stop soon."

Source: Current Health 1. Stamford: Mar 2008. Vol. 31, Iss. 7