The Best Four Steps to Reduce Your Own Anger

The Best Four Steps to Reduce Your Own Anger

What if you’re angry? I’ve written before about dealing with angry, bullying or condescending people, but what if you’re the one who’s angry at work?

Accept that difficult people work everywhere: Even on a good day, I’m sure you can name at least one difficult person at work. On a bad day you can probably rattle off four or five without even pausing. Be they slackers, sneaks, liars, tyrants, boors, bullies, wimps, whiners, workaholics, or everyday incompetents, you’ve got your hands full with people who are making it difficult for you to do your job well and stay sane. How do you move from pissed off to powerful?

What Should You Do?

Accept that suppression usually doesn’t work. My favorite Emerson quote is: “who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” People may not know you’re angry but you will feel worse and hurt the relationship. Unless you’re Meryl Streep, your staff or co-workers will know SOMETHING is wrong.

Don’t vent. Communication is good, but research has shown that venting just increases anger. Find a way to distract yourself instead. Listen to your favorite song, solve a crossword puzzle, take a walk and smell the flowers.

Understand that reappraisal does work. What’s reappraisal? Psychologists may call it reframing. Basically, reappraisal involves telling yourself a different story about the situation and giving what happened a different meaning.

If a new staff member missed a deadline, for example, tell yourself that they must have had a good excuse this time and that they will do better in the future as they understand your rules. Tons of research has shown that reappraisal will make you less angry.

For example, in the Handbook of Emotion Regulation:

Experimental studies have shown that reappraisal leads to decreased levels of negative emotion experience and increased positive emotion experience (Gross, 1998a; Feinberg, Willer, Antonenko, & John, 2012; Lieberman, Inagaki, Tabibnia, & Crockett, 2011; Ray, McRae, Ochsner, & Gross, 2010; Szasz, Szentagotai, & Hofmann, 2011; Wolgast, Lundh, & Viborg, 2011), has no impact on or even decreases sympathetic nervous system responses (Gross, 1998a; Kim & Hamann, 2012; Stemmler, 1997; Shiota & Levenson, 2012; Wolgast et al., 2011), and leads to lesser activation in emotion-generative brain regions such as the amygdala (Goldin et al., 2008; Kanske, Heissler, Schonfelder, Bongers, & Wessa, 2011; Ochsner & Gross, 2008; Ochsner et al., 2004) and ventral striatum (Staudinger, Erk, Abler, & Walter, 2009).

4. Try forgiveness. Whether you rely on a religious framework or science, forgiveness can make you happier and less angry.

But don’t accept abuse or poor performance! Of course, none of this means that you should accept poor performance, mistreatment, bullying, discrimination or harassment at work. If you’re involved in any of these situations, you may need to manage someone’s performance, file a complaint or even leave the organization. Yet it’s easy to make the wrong decision about what you should do in a bad situation when you’re angry. Use the steps above to calm down and then decide on the best course of action.