Anger Management Therapy

Be Self-Aware

You must learn to identify which situations trigger your anger. You do this by listening to your body and becoming attuned to your natural reactions. Pay attention to whether you notice a pattern or specific triggers. Can you identify where the anger begins in your body? Is anger a way to deal with embarrassment, hurt, or shame? Talk to someone you trust or an anger management specialist who can help you collect your thoughts to better deal with the difficulties in life. If you don’t know why you are angry or what is triggering you, or if you find yourself blaming everyone else for your emotions, it’s challenging to learn how to cope better when anger kicks in.

Slow Down

Notice when you start to get angry: do you get a knot in your stomach, a headache, or tense shoulders? Slowing down and implementing ways to relax, like deep breathing and peaceful imagery, can help ease some of the physical symptoms of anger. It’s helpful to practice slowing down when you are not feeling upset. Meditating is one way to learn to slow down and relax your mind. Research supports this: a 2025 review found that more mindful people tend to feel less anger, and that mindfulness training lowered both anger and aggression (O’Dean et al., 2025). Learning to slow down and talk yourself down before and during the heat of the moment is helpful. Calming activities also work better than “letting it out.” A review of 154 studies found that activities that lower the body’s arousal, such as deep breathing, meditation, and slow-flow yoga, reduced anger, while activities that raise arousal, like hitting a punching bag or going for a run, did little to help and sometimes made anger worse (Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024).

Change Your Way of Thinking

Our way of thinking about a situation can intensify or reduce our anger. When you start getting upset about something, take a moment to check in with your way of thinking. Ask yourself, “Is getting upset going to fix anything?” Or, “Is this worth ruining my day?” Try to look at the situation more rationally and objectively. If someone cuts you off in traffic, instead of thinking, “They meant to cut me off; they saw me,” replace that thinking with, “They probably are in a rush and didn’t see me.”

Dig Deeper

Sometimes our anger and frustration are created by something in our past or a situation going wrong in our lives. Dig a little deeper if you notice yourself getting angry about the small stuff. Ask yourself, “What is so wrong in my life that I feel so angry, and what do I need to do to change the situation?” “Is something that happened in my past triggering how I currently feel?” When anger is tied to past trauma, treating the trauma itself can help: trauma-focused therapies for PTSD have been shown to reduce anger (Wells et al., 2025). By digging deeper into your angry feelings, you may discover a root cause for the anger. Anger is often a secondary emotion that covers feelings like hurt, fear, or shame, and it may be a sign that you need to work on something deeper that is bothering you. Anger can also motivate positive change and personal growth. However, it is important to recognize situations you can’t control or change. In those cases, you may need to work on changing how you see the situation.

Make It Humorous

Have you ever gotten angry about something, and a few months later, you laughed about it? What made it funny just a few months later? Your more objective perspective of it! When it comes to managing our anger, the ability to find humor in a situation is a priceless asset and an effective coping strategy. When used to address a frustrating situation, humor can help you achieve a more balanced perspective. With the proper insight into the everyday frustrations of life, we can sometimes laugh about the absurdity of it all. However, humor should not be used to mask anger or as a way to be sarcastic because then it becomes another unhealthy expression of anger.

Take a Moment

If your anger seems to be building, remove yourself from the situation for a few minutes and do something else: take a walk, listen to some relaxing music, or meditate. Your chances of productively resolving the problem greatly increase when you approach it with a clear and rational mind. Taking a well-timed break can be an excellent coping strategy and help you choose a healthier way to express anger.

Make Changes

While you can’t control most things in life, you can take steps to avoid unnecessary stress. Look at your daily schedule and identify activities, times of day, people, places, or situations that are a source of frustration and anger. Then make some changes. Find an alternate route to work; shut the door to your child’s messy room; set up a time when you’re not too tired or hungry to talk about important matters with your partner; and, most of all, make sure you have some time to yourself daily.

Acknowledge the Gains of Anger

Anger often brings short-term benefits. These can include getting attention, getting our way, feeling respected or powerful, and releasing tension. Most of the time, we don’t continue unhealthy behaviors unless they benefit us somehow. It’s important to realize that even though we gain something from getting angry, expressing anger in hurtful ways isn’t helping us in the long run. Therefore, by letting go of those short-term benefits and keeping our eyes on the bigger picture, we can live a more balanced life with happier relationships. Keeping your loved ones in mind when you feel overwhelmed with anger may help you choose healthy ways of expressing your feelings.

How Anger Affects Your Health

Anger in the short term is normal and can even be useful, but over the long term, uncontrolled anger can affect your health, including increased risk of hypertension, worse pain management, increased anxiety, a weakened immune system, and headaches (University of Alabama at Birmingham [UAB], 2021).

Anger tells us that something isn’t right. Perhaps our safety is being threatened, injustice is happening, or some action is being required of us. Aggressive behavior and bottling up anger are connected to hypertension and coronary artery disease (UAB, 2021). A 2024 study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that just eight minutes of recalling an angry memory temporarily reduced the blood vessels’ ability to widen, an early step toward heart disease. Anxiety and sadness did not have the same effect (Shimbo et al., 2024). As a reminder, the emotion of anger is not destructive, as it signals to us that something is wrong that needs to be addressed. At the same time, constantly suppressing anger can lead to the “pressure cooker effect,” resentment, and outbursts. Instead of aggression or suppression, practice expressing anger healthily through assertive communication techniques to articulate your feelings, needs, and desires.

If you are worried you might hurt someone, or someone is hurting you, call 911 in an emergency. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (800-799-7233) supports people experiencing abuse and people concerned about their own behavior. If you’re in crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988 (US and Canada). You can also see our crisis helplines.

Finding Help with Anger Management

If you or someone you know struggles with anger issues, you are not alone. There is help available. Support from an anger management counselor or group therapy sessions can go a long way in helping anyone improve their quality of life.

Search the TherapyTribe therapist directory and find an anger management therapist or counselor who is right for you.

Important Medical Disclaimer

This article is for general information and is not a substitute for medical or mental health care. Anger that feels hard to control can sometimes be linked to other conditions, such as depression, anxiety, trauma, substance use, or a medical issue. If you have chest pain, a severe headache, or other sudden physical symptoms during or after intense anger, seek medical care right away.

References

American Psychological Association. (2019, December 30). Understanding anger: How psychologists help with anger problems. https://www.apa.org/topics/anger/understanding

American Psychological Association. (2023, November 3). Control anger before it controls you. https://www.apa.org/topics/anger/control

Kjærvik, S. L., & Bushman, B. J. (2024). A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage? Clinical Psychology Review, 109, 102414. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102414

O’Dean, S. M., Summerell, E., Harmon-Jones, E., Creswell, J. D., & Denson, T. F. (2025). The associations and effects of mindfulness on anger and aggression: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 118, 102584. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2025.102584

Shimbo, D., Cohen, M. T., McGoldrick, M., Ensari, I., Diaz, K. M., Fu, J., Duran, A. T., Zhao, S., Suls, J. M., Burg, M. M., & Chaplin, W. F. (2024). Translational research of the acute effects of negative emotions on vascular endothelial health: Findings from a randomized controlled study. Journal of the American Heart Association, 13, e032698. https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.123.032698

University of Alabama at Birmingham. (2021, September 30). Feeling COVID rage? Five strategies for managing pandemic anger. UAB News. https://www.uab.edu/news/youcanuse/item/12313-feeling-covid-rage-five-strategies-for-managing-pandemic-anger

Wells, S. Y., Patel, T. A., Halverson, T. F., LoSavio, S. T., Morland, L., Wachsman, T., Ponzini, G. T., Kelton, K., Mackintosh, M.-A., Powell, A., Kaplan, S., & Dillon, K. H. (2025). The impact of trauma-focused psychotherapies on anger: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 17(5), 1140–1152. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0001697