ANGER

Anger is part of the body’s natural fight or flight response, designed to protect us in times of threat or danger. In some situations, anger helps us to keep ourselves safe or to make necessary changes in our lives.

Though anger is a normal emotion, it doesn’t mean it is easy to deal with and you might find it difficult to talk about. It can become a problem when your angry feelings negatively impacting your life or relationships.  

You could be turning anger in on yourself, such as by being overly critical about things you do or through self harm. You may also become angry with others, such as shouting, hurting others or destroying things around you. Bottling up anger could also result  in a big outburst of feelings, a bit like opening a bottle of coke that’s been shaken up several times. 

For some people  anger is present almost all the time, always just beneath the surface ready to explode. Because of this, they very easily get themselves into conflict situations, which reinforces these negative thoughts. People who feel constantly angry can feel highly stressed and over time could face physical and mental health problems.

It is not having angry feelings that can cause problems, but what you do about it and how you express it. 

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Irritability and a short temper can be symptoms that mask depression. Sometimes when we feel depressed, we feel angry that things are going so wrong for us. We may have been discouraged from showing the vulnerable sides of ourselves when we were younger, but we still need to express how we feel.

Anger often feels a more acceptable way to us of expressing emotional pain than crying, or asking directly for help. 

The problem is that by appearing angry it can sometimes drive people away and put them off wanting to try to understand the problems we may be facing. We are then left feeling isolated, which increases our angry feelings and deepens our depression.

If you think that you may be in a cycle like this, it is important to realise that being angry is not a helpful strategy for beating depression and that you need to find someone you can talk to. 

If you lose your temper or get violent and angry easily, it’s important to get help to manage these feelings. It’s not always wrong to get angry but it is wrong to take out your anger on others.