The mechanics: How anger occurs

Understanding the 'mechanics' of your anger is the first step in mastering this mood.  

Anger: The 'Shoulds'

One common way of setting yourself up to become angry is to have a version of how things should be and to continuously compare reality with your version - and then feel angry when reality gets it wrong!

As part of this process you have mental list of triggers against which you test reality and when reality gets it 'wrong' you feel angry. These triggers are situations that cause you to explode - or implode if you tend to suppress your anger. 

Read more about the 'Shoulds' here.

Anger: Mind Reading

This often works alongside the 'should' habit. Not only do we get annoyed with what a person does or does not do - but we also get annoyed with what we perceive to be their intention in acting like they did. 

Read more about Mind Reading here

Anger: "Collecting Straws"

In this way of making ourselves angry we look out for things to get annoyed about - and we then 'link' these so that the emotion accumulates until a quite insignificant event becomes 'the straw that breaks the camels back'. Then we have a tantrum. 

Read more about collecting straws here

Anger: Self Criticism

Where we give ourselves a really hard time - and push ourselves to meet unreasonably high standards. 

Read more about Self Criticism here

What's in 'anger section' of the site:

	The cost of the anger habit
	Anger management programmes - the traditional approach top handling anger
	The Pegasus NLP 'short fuse' workshop
	The mechanics of anger: the first step to dealing with it is to understand how anger develops
	The 'right or happy' question - a fundamental decision in regard to anger
	Action plan for defusing anger - start talking action to feel happier
	Questions & Answers about Anger - queries from visitors to the site and the replies they received
	Articles from the The Pegasus NLP Newsletter: The 'big picture' on anger, Anger & victim-thinking
	Our not-too-serious Anger Poll