Getting over chronic anger takes effort. When we embark on an anger management program, we need to apply steady work over the long term. When we’re stuck in habitual resentment, irritation, criticalness, etc. we need to exert ourselves if we every hope our emotional state and our quality of life to improve. Anger is powerful in its ability to destroy our life, and unless we do something about it that power will work its destructive magic. Chronic anger is a prison, and nobody from the outside is going to come along and unlock the doors and let us out. We have to do it ourself, and this takes consistent effort over a long period of time.

This is a tricky proposition because too much effort and the wrong type of effort can actually cause more anger. We need to exert ourselves to understand our anger patterns and to to let them go, but if there is aggression in the effort itself then it will only backfire and cause us to be even more wound up and even more angry. So how do we find the right effort?

The kind of effort we should use is determined by the results that our efforts produce. There are countless anger management methods, countless ways to go about improving one’s state of mind, so we need to find the things that actually help us and then work with those. From there we’ll pick up new techniques and make adjustments as we go. But we need to do the work to actually find what helps and then apply ourselves to those techniques over time.

Depending on where you are in your anger management path, you can choose different methods. If you are just starting out, its helpful to spend some time exploring your anger patterns, developing some understanding of how anger plays out in your life. If you’ve already done some of that work then you can perhaps move on to specific anger management techniques. At any stage you can work with relaxation and meditation methods to ease your overall stress levels. And so on.

None of this is possible until you’ve made a heart felt commitment to working with your situation, to putting in the effort on a daily bases over a long period of time. Once you recognize your problems with anger, the first thing you need to do is develop an unshakeable conviction to do something about it, and then to consistently act on that conviction.

By Craig Mollins