By Elizabeth Herman|Posted:  January 30, 2020

All of us become aggravated and frustrated, but not everyone loses their temper, says harsh words they soon regret, flares up in anger at others, and makes life worse for themselves as a result. Learning the skill of focusing and re-directing your emotional energy can help you prevent blow-ups that can exacerbate any troubling situation.

Distracting your thinking away from your anger is one way to de-escalate interactions with other people. Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says that five things: love, greed, fear, dispassion, and breathing can focus your mind. If you can use all of these things together, you can gain the power to avoid emotional upsets, which only induce harmful speech and subsequent relationship difficulties.

How to take a step back

It might be that you receive so much criticism from others that you’re at a loss about what to do with your frustration. But pleasing others all the time isn’t possible for anyone. Since we aren’t perfect, we will inevitably receive some criticism at some point in time. Gurudev also states, “Our ability to accept and look through the criticism indicates how much we have grown.”

To accept criticism, it helps to be able to see it from the other person’s point of view. Breathing, dispassion, and love, used together, can help you shift your perspective. Maybe the person criticizing you has some insecurity of his or her own. Maybe they are revealing their own sense of inadequacy when they criticize you. Rather than blowing up at them in an angry way, it could help to look closely at what they may really want underneath the surface appearance of their words. 

Eventually, if you realize that you have something that they don’t have, you can begin to feel more compassion for them, and win them over to your side by taking them into your heart with love. Dr. Carmen Harra concurs with this process, advising her readers to delay reactions, request help from a higher power, release strong emotion constructively, understand an ultimate purpose behind everything, think positive thoughts, and forgive whoever seems to hurt you. 

How to manage anger constructively

Once you begin to realize the severe consequences of blowing up in anger, the fear of negative results can help to prevent temper tantrums. In addition, the greed for more positive results can motivate you to manage your anger in a way that brings you closer to success. You can get what you want faster, and avoid harming your own goals and aspirations, by teaching yourself to manage anger in a unique way that works for you as an individual. 

A journal can help you keep track of the reasons you have this goal, documenting what works and what doesn’t as you start to try out different emotional strategies. In other words, invent your own solution to this problem, one that will work for your own particular case.

Not every method will work for everyone, but if you patiently go through the process of devising a plan that works, you’ll be much better off in the end, satisfying your own self-interest and alleviating your fear. For instance, Perry Manzano tells a very personal story of how he developed a method for his own problem of impatience and frustration in his family life. To prevent passing on his anger issues to the next generation, he devised a process (similar to the one Dr. Hanna recommends) that culminates in accepting criticism.

How to become calm

A peaceful state of mind may take time to appear, but once it takes hold, it can be there to provide you with happiness for the rest of your life. If you’ve learned some bad ways of reacting to criticism and conflict, it requires a conscious effort to change them. After applying your own reflective skills, you can work to use certain emotions, breathing techniques, and ultimate visions for your life to keep the good reactions and dispense with the unhelpful ones. You can also voice your own opinions calmly and defend your own point of view without losing control, and people will listen more readily when you do.

Through breathing and meditation, you can begin to see yourself as capable of solving any anger problem that may be arising in your heart. Using techniques offered in Gurudev’s Happiness Program and Sahaj Samadhi meditation course, a whole new world of love, dispassion, objectivity, and emotional intelligence awaits you. Find one at an Art of Living Center near you!

Elizabeth Herman writes, offers writing support to clients, teaches, and volunteers for a better world. She has a PhD in Rhetoric, Composition and Literature. Find her on Facebook or Twitter.