How Much Unwanted Anger Do You Have?

How Much Unwanted Anger Do You Have? There is a lot of anger in the world today. There can be lots of anger in our own lives as well.  Some of this anger may be useful at times.  Most often, however, anger can be very destructive.

Definitions of anger and unwanted anger

Let’s start off by distinguishing wanted anger from unwanted anger.

What is anger that we want?  Usually this means anger that serves some useful or positive purpose for us.

For example, anger can sometimes motivate us to stand up for ourselves, speak out against some major injustice, create a new movement or organization, or run for political office to improve things.

Anger can sometimes motivate us to get into action and achieve some goal that we’ve been putting off or have been putting in less effort than is needed.

Anger can get you results in negotiations when taking a calmer approach might be less successful.

And when you are training your children, or managing a group of employees, or leading any type of team, sometimes you need a little anger to keep the troops in line.

So those are some examples of “wanted anger.”

Unwanted anger is all the other types of anger that don’t end up having a positive impact on our lives.  In fact, unwanted anger usually has damaging effects on many areas of our lives.

Unwanted anger can include minor daily annoyances or irritations, heated arguments with our spouse, ex-spouse or kids, unwanted angry feelings at work, road rage, other types of fury, and especially anger that leads to violence and physical damage to others or property.

Family Impacts of unwanted anger

One of the biggest areas where we experience the impacts of unwanted anger in our lives is in our relationships with others.

We all want to have loving, harmonious, high-quality relationships with our spouse, our kids, and many other people in our lives.

Anger often gets in the way of these desires. It frequently produces unhappiness and chronic resentments.  Over time, repeated episodes of anger can lead to separations or divorce.  It can also lead to long-term estrangements from our kids.

Work/Career Impacts of unwanted anger

Unwanted anger can also cause problems for us at work and can negatively impact our career goals.  Getting angry at the wrong time, or at the wrong person at work, can cost you your job.

Frequent bouts of anger at work can cause you to get passed over for a promotion or have coworkers either consciously or unconsciously try to damage your reputation.

Unwanted anger has many other negative consequences, including:

–damage to our physical health and well-being;

–damage to our mental health;

–damage to our self-esteem;

–regrets, self-criticism, self-blame;

–lack of joy and happiness;

–disturbed sleep;

–addictions and substance abuse;

–physical violence and subsequent legal problems;

–retaliations and revenge actions from others.

How much unwanted anger do you really have?  If you look, and if you are honest about it, you’ll probably find you have more than you’d like.

Some people think “I don’t have an anger problem” because they don’t blow up or have wild extremes of anger.  But the little daily annoyances and irritations can mount up and be damaging as well.

And then there are the times when we get angry at ourselves, which for many people is quite common.

So even if you don’t think of yourself as an “angry person,” anger still could be causing big problems in your life. If not now, then possibly in the future.

So my message to you is don’t take anger lightly.  We all have a good bit of it (unless you’ve learned how to eliminate it) and we could all likely benefit from learning how to reduce our anger or even get rid of it entirely.