Self-help Articles

by Raymond Novaco, Ph.D.

Looking for anger management techniques proven effective by scientific study? You've come to the right place. Let's start by explaining how the body responds to anger, relaxation and tension.

You cannot be angry and relaxed at the same time. Anger is linked with tension. Because anger mobilizes the body's resources, it gets you into high gear. That means your heart beats faster, you breathe quicker, your blood pressure goes up, and your muscles get tight. The reverse is also true: the more tense you are ordinarily, the easier it is to get angry. When you are up-tight, little things seem like big things and you might find yourself having an anger problem before your brain fully grasps what happened.

To counter-act these negative cycles, you can learn a specific type of stress management known as relaxation techniques. Two of the most effective relaxation techniques are deep-muscle relaxation and deep-breathing. These two techniques will train your body to function at lower levels of tension. These procedures can be used at various times throughout the day and have very definite effects in lowering your blood pressure and heart rate. You can also learn ways of relaxing mentally as well as physically so as to deepen the effect of the physical training you give your body.

Deep-muscle relaxation is achieved by systematically tensing and the relaxing muscle groups in a progressive routine. You can start with flexing different muscle groups in your face, neck, shoulders, arms, torso, and move all the way down to your toes. Repeat the sequence, focusing on releasing tension as you exhale with with every breath.

There are a wide variety of deep-breathing procedures, such as slowly inhaling through the nose to a count of five, so as to affect abdominal muscles, and then exhaling slowly through the mouth to a count of ten. At the same time, imagining sensations of heaviness and warmth spreading over your arms and legs can also deepen your sense of relaxation. You can also create in your mind a tranquil imaginary scene (such as seeing yourself resting at the side of a peaceful lake on a beautiful summer day) that you can utilize whenever you want to induce relaxation or lower your level of tension.

Let's discuss how these relaxation techniques work in more detail. There are two purposes to the relaxation part of the treatment. The first is to reduce your overall tension level so that your mental and physical energy is not spent needlessly. The second, and most important, is that you learn that you are able to control how you feel. When you have had a rough day, the relaxation techniques can help settle your nerves – it is like inducing a light sleep that restores your energy and balance. Also, knowing how to take a deep breath and use calming self-statements can be an effective way to cope with a provocation.

The many pressures of life create stress on the body's systems. When the stress is high enough, our internal systems become disordered. Learning techniques of relaxation helps to bring the body back to a state of harmony. When there is no harmony within, we can hardly expect our relationships with others to be harmonious. Relaxation is the achievement of inner peace. As you learn how to relax and that you are able to relax, you acquire a fundamental way of controlling anger.

Regulating your level of arousal and tension can best be achieved if you establish a program of activity that is designed to meet that goal. This might involve routine use of the two relaxation techniques (deep-muscle relaxation and deep-breathing), meditation, aerobic exercise and even humor. It could also simply be taking a period of an hour to enjoy something like music, art, or photography. Ideally, you should put together some combination of these tension reduction activities and monitor the effects that result on your arousal and mood.

Just as relaxation and anger are incompatible, so too with humor. Real laughter is a release. It is a look at the lighter side of things. Anger comes from seriousness and heavy concerns. Humor is an attempt to take some distance from life's aggravations. Have you ever noticed that the content of much of our comedy is exactly about things that otherwise make us mad? Jokes about bosses, spouses, mothers-in-law, politicians, and endless circumstances of frustration are all efforts to convert anger to humor. When we say that someone "can't take a joke" we are usually referring to a reaction of anger instead of a disposition to laugh.

This is not to say that the world should be one big comedy. Life for most of us is serious business. But sometimes we take ourselves too seriously. Humor reflects an ability to take some distance from life's heavier side. It is also a way that can help us to appreciate the positives rather than dwell on the negatives. Anger is often the result of us being too hard on ourselves and others. When we demand perfection, we lose sight of the good things, because our eyes stay glued to shortcomings - - all we tend to see then are weaknesses and disappointments.

Relaxation and appreciation go hand-in-hand. By enhancing appreciation and keeping our sense of humor we can free ourselves of self-imposed burdens and battles that we fight with ourselves. Remember the last time you had a good hardy laugh? Your face was bright, your eyes glistened, and your body and mind was relaxed and at ease. You can recreate such sensations if you give yourself the space and time to do so.

If you have difficulty developing your own stress management, anger control or relaxation the plan or sticking with it through time, you might consider getting the help of a skilled stress management therapist, coach or counselor. In just a few sessions, you can learn a variety of relaxation techniques that can benefit you for a lifetime. A therapist, coach or counselor can also help you identify and change patterns that interfere with your carrying out your plan over time, too.

About the Author

Raymond W. Novaco, Ph.D., pioneered cognitive-behavioral therapy for anger, coining the term “anger management”, and demonstrated the effectiveness of his treatment approach in empirically-based clinical research. He received the Best Contribution Award from the International Society for Research on Aggression (1978), the Distinguished Contributions to Psychology Award from the California Psychological Association (2000), and the Academic Award from the Division of Forensic Psychology of the British Psychological Society (2009). Dr. Novaco is a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine.