Snapping at people

Try to become aware of your emotional state during an anger episode. Know that when you are in this state, your judgement is clouded and you are prone to act out. Take as many deep breaths as it takes to calm down.

This really works..the increased oxygen consumption stabilizes your heart rate and allows more oxygen to reach the pre-frontal cortex of your brain which is where logic-based thinking occurs. It also allows your body to reduce the stress hormones in your blood that have hijacked your brain.

When you have regained control of your thoughts, you'll be able to figure out how to deal with people who get to you (including your "friends") as well as any other frustrating situation.

BTW almost everyone would have been angry in that situation to some degree. The point of turning up the music after you confronted them was to bait you into lashing out. It seems as though they got what they wanted and the joke was on you; i.e. you got bullied. Don't take any s**t but act with maturity (rationality) and you'll gain more respect. Make it clear that you do not accept being bullied. If they really are friends of yours, have some fun with this and pull some friendly pranks to return the favor.

A bully's greatest enemy is a friend.

straughairium wrote:Hi everyone, I really need some advice regarding my anger. I am very easily agitated and angered, and have trying to be more relaxed as I am a 20 year old university student living with other students. As a result, I need to be more relaxed and calmer in my dealings with my housemates. Unfortunately two days ago we had a bit of an argument; I am often unwell with migraines or poor health, and on Tuesday night I was suffering one of these episodes. I went to bed at 10.30pm and was trying to sleep, when a couple of my housemates decided to play their music very loudly, and therefore I found it hard to sleep. I politely asked them to turn it down in our group conversation, and when no response was made or any indication that they would do so, I began to get agitated. I went upstairs and asked them to do so in person, but they seemed to find this funny and laughed at me and didn't seem to listen. I went back to bed, put my earphones in, but the music increased in volume and they decided to jump about as well, in the room above me. Now I got really angry, and I went back upstairs, and asked why they had so little regard for me and called them selfish.

Clearly, this was not a clear-thinking action to take. I need some advice regarding how to stay calm in situations like these, or I risk ruining my friendships. I have since apologised for the way I spoke and for my behaviour, but I am worried more situations like this will arise. This isn't the first time I've been angry with them, but it's the first time I've lashed out and acted rashly. Normally I would remove myself from the situation but I despise not being listened to. When I'm angry, I get these awful palpitations and my blood pressure rises drastically, and so I'm concerned for my own health as well. Anger is one of my biggest flaws, and I really need some help with controlling it, as well.

I understand perfectly what you are dealing with. Individuals, groups, cliques, tribes, gangs, crews, posses, etc, well, when they are not absolutely required to behave in a civilized manner by some very compelling or powerful Authority, well, they tend to behave at what they feel is their maximum capacity for Dominance – that is, in short, they’ll do whatever they think they can get away with. In line with what Deechman said (see previous post ), people and groups of people become ‘bullies’ if there is no larger ‘bully’ (or sense of compelling Authority or binding Morality) to keep them in line. I hear that in Prisons the individual prisoners feel that they have very compelling reasons for joining up with gangs in order to acquire some strength through unity with others, and the opposing gangs tend to keep each other in line (and here we all thought that the Guards were supposed to be doing all that). In High Schools they don’t call them ‘gangs’; they call them cliques, or if that word is too French nowadays, they refer to themselves as crews. There is not much fighting, I suppose, but one attains a certain amount of peace and security by simply staying with one’s clique or crew whenever possible. Strength in numbers. Yes, and I suppose people told you that it would be different in college. Well, it should have been. One of the Problems nowadays is the supreme rise of Science and subsequently the mental habit of applying all Thought and Value Judgment against the measures of Scientific Reasoning. That sounds good on the face of it, but it leads to a stark and unscrupulous disregard for Morality. Yes, Philosophy has tried to give Morality a place in our Modern World of Science, but they have simply not succeeded. We have Ethics in the place of where we used to keep Morality, but Ethics is whatever one can get away with, isn’t it? Morality had been a Belief System, based on some intangible sense for Quality and a Goodness that Philosophy finds hard to define in terms of Quantifiables. With Morality the compulsion for people to behave good and decently came from within, from an undefinable spirituality. But Science has brought in its wake a sense where all actions and decisions have only some Material reference – as a Society we do not really have any coherent morality or spirituality anymore – we live in a vast Materialism, and Society rewards those who are the most consciously and deliberately Materialistic. And that means that people will do whatever they think they can get away with. Look, nowadays they even have Cheating in the Military Academies, as it turns out that there is simply no Material Basis for being Honorable. Mostly it is all about Money or Status. But, in colleges, apparently, some of the Materialists are willing to exercise their vast range and sweep simply for a Laugh. Torturing you must have brought a smile to their faces and a passing tingle of sadistic pleasure. And so isn’t it nice to know that you have found some purpose in Life?

Anyway, reading of your situation, well, good for you that you thought you behaved too angrily. But actually, on the scale of things, you maintained quite a bit of composure. Compared to a lot of us, you behaved quite well. But anger is not always about our overt behavior, but how it tears us up inside, and destroys our peace of mind while it has a hold of us. Under such conditions, it is often good to modify the way we generally think about such situations. I’ve been looking into Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and have been reading a book: – “Cognitive and Dialectical Therapy Unleashed”, by James Ashley. It’s a good little affordable book that tells us how to change our thinking in order to change our behavior. In your case, you are quite the gentleman and need very little behavior modification, but you could use more peace of mind, and for that, well, you have to tweak your mind a little bit and change the way you ‘take’ some things.

Oh, and you already know about Avoidance – if you can’t beat them, then runaway from them. You already found that headphones are good against too much noise. There are various White Noise Generators available on line… I just took a look, and the first one I found was better than the ones I used to use, as it has the capacity to selectively push up certain frequency ranges which you could use to best match your white noise against the noise that you are attempting to drown out. You could also figure out where to go when you must absolutely abandon your room. I used to get a lot of work done in the Library and the lounges. Oh, and I used to find the Coed Dorms quieter and so you might try to befriend some of the Coeds in your classes and have them take you on as a study partner.

Anyway, good luck with it all. Try to figure out ways to mentally cope and feel good about what seems now like a very bad situation. Materialism isn’t going away any time soon and it seems that each new generation has less and less of the residual Morality that had been integral to our Previous Civilization, the one that Science swept away, while laughing at its Old Moralities as so many senseless superstitions. Morality survived only in the form of traditional habits passed down through family custom and behavior modelling. But there is little nowadays to reinforce what is left of Morality and I expect that it is soon to disappear completely. And the only way you can get away from all those loud, brutal, nasty and noisy Materialistic people is to eventually get your own secluded place and isolate yourself from them. But that takes money, and to make money you must keep in school and then join with the flocks of all those Materialists (with whom you will have to compete, and with you being a ‘nice guy’, we can guess how that will work out for you) and you must try to make enough money so you can finally afford to get away from them all. And even then you will only have as much Peace as your own Peace of Mind will allow you. Take care.

Thank you both for the advice. I haven't tried the breathing method, I normally just remove myself from the situation, which I suppose isn't really dealing with it as I'm still angry, just not amongst people. In any case, I thought they were my friends, in first year, but now I'm not so sure. One of them is a bit of a bully and controls the other two, and has tried to control me. Even my friends from home have commented on her personality, when they came up to visit, and the same for my parents. In an attempt to get myself out of here sometimes, I've joined the gym. I have friends on my course but we have such a busy degree, it's difficult to not be studying. Well anyway, hopefully I will be able to deal with my situations more effectively in the future, instead of shaking with anger. Living with people at uni is hard.

Pardon me, but what is keeping you from simply moving out and moving back in somewhere else? your problem seems to be with one person, a leader of clique that you got involved in, who has now become abusive and aggressive toward you. Everybody sees it. Its a 'her', well, an archetypical "mean girl", then. well, Split. Leave. Vamoose. See ya Later. find a new room a few blocks away and all of your problems will be over. what exactly is stopping you, especially if you have your family's support on all of this. you don't have an anger problem. You have a I don't want to deal with an annoying situation problem. well, the answer is to just deal with it. a man has got to do what a man has got to do, and sometimes that just means simply "Get the heck out of Dodge" (a reference to Dodge City Kansas, a notorious gathering place in America's Wild West for all sorts of killers and 'gun slingers', anyway, the Local Wisdom developed this saying, these words of colloquial comprehension of the competing demands of Honor and Dignity, and of appreciating the value of one's own safety and survival. Sometimes its best just to get the heck out of Dodge.

It probably doesn't make much difference, but I am a girl, for reference. And I didn't think I had an anger problem. Sure, I get easily agitated, and my blood pressure goes wild, but I don't lash out at people anymore. I do snap at them though. But I thought I wasn't doing harm, until my flatmates and other people have said I am bad tempered and should be more in control. Therefore, I just wanted some advice. I am moving out though, when the contract on our house ends, in July. I can't get anybody to take over my room, with it being February, there aren't really people looking for rooms. It would be a waste of my loan to go home, when I can easily walk to uni now, whereas at home I would have to fork out more money, which I don't have, to use the metro to get to uni. I have to stick it out until July, which is why I was requesting advice for controlling myself.

Dear Straughairium,

Oh, good. You did indeed think everything through.

and yes, reading your story over, I really didn't see much overtly destructive anger in you, but if people are commenting on your 'bad temper', then it is something that you need to look at.

Above I had recommended “Cognitive and Dialectical Therapy Unleashed”, by James Ashley, as an introduction to the Cognitive Behavioral way of addressing anger, but then there is a good Anger Management book, in and of itself, which I can recommend as on of the better books, and that is " Anger Management" by Peter Favaro. And then there is "Angry All the Time" by Ronald Potter-Efron.

You don't have much of an Anger problem, but after work on what little you have of Anger, then you will definitely become one of the coolest and calmest people you know.

Good luck. I think you will do well.