Some signs that you might be on the verge of flipping your lid include feeling hot or flushing, a pounding heart, or raising your voice. Does your pulse quicken? Does your jaw tighten? Do you cry? The next time you feel angry, stop and take stock of how that feels in your body to help you build awareness. “Since we often believe that anger is a bad thing that we should dismiss or avoid completely, we start to ignore the symptoms of it.” Red Flags When You’re Seeing Redįirst, you have to know what anger feels like in your body to begin with before you can evaluate it as constructive or destructive, Hicks says. It may also delay wound healing and increase the risk for certain cancers.įor these reasons, it’s smart to learn to manage and diffuse this beast in healthy ways.

When you feel it all the time, it can raise your risk for high blood pressure, stroke, ulcers, and intestinal diseases. Research shows that anger is a risk factor for heart disease. Occasional stress is necessary, but constant stress, which includes anger, can be harmful to your health. True, anger is an important emotion that tells you, “something is wrong, off balance, or unfair, and that it needs to change,” Hicks says.īut when your body is in fight-or-flight mode, you are under stress. It prompts the body to respond in a bad situation, whether that response is to fight back or run away. This survival mechanism may have helped keep the earliest humans alive in the face of threats. “But not all expressions of anger or the behaviors that we pair with anger are useful.” What’s Anger For?Īnger is a biological reaction - part of the “fight-or-flight” response. Bullett, PhD, director of the Psychological Services Clinic at the University of Missouri.

“Anger tends to get a bad rap as an emotion that we want to avoid when in reality it’s a very valid and important emotion,” says Erin S. But the way you express your angry feelings can be more harmful than whatever it was that made you angry in the first place.

What do you do next? Do you take a beat? Do you unleash your wrath, or do you push all your hard feelings down?Īnger itself is a perfectly healthy and even useful emotion. Your pulse quickens, your face flushes, you want to scream. But when you get home, your partner looks up, claps a hand over their mouth, and gasps, “Your dry cleaning!” The dry cleaner will be closed by the time you leave the office, so your partner has graciously agreed to pick the clothes up for you. You have an important dinner to attend tonight after work and the clothes you need are at the cleaners.

Good and mad