There are a few things you’ll encounter as toxic as perpetual anger. It is a rampage of destruction on all planes all the way down to the physical levels. After it had tarnished and broken everything else it will also cause heart, muscle and skeletal damage over time. Anger is the only emotion that is proven to lead to cardio vascular degeneration because it puts you in a constant state of high alert and slow burning festering negativity. It’s a very specific feeling because on the most primal levels it is telling you to run away and attack at the same time. Staying like this for a longer time period heightens the physiological demand on your body so much that the aging process of tissue degeneration doubles in speed.

Anger damages you, people around you and leaves a damp toxic stamp in all you do because your intention is just off – coming from a place of revenge hungry destruction, nihilism and despair laced with rage and impotent feeling of being done wrong. If left to grow, these feelings become a monster which will literally kill you. The passage of time most certainly will as well, but anger will do the job far quicker. Unexamined anger will make you lose the only thing you truly have as your own – control over yourself and your reactions and it will tear all the relationships in your life to shreds and fragments, blocking real exchange as people will start walking on eggshells around you because they never know when the pit of anger will spill over again and when they’ll find themselves knee deep in it

You don’t have to be timid, tame and docile (that is actually the best way to get to angry Ville by an express route). There are times when it is completely justifiable and a proper response to get angry at injustice and do something about it, but it is an event – isolated thing that is not allowed to permeate the whole being because all the rest of you is needed to deal with the situation intelligently and with an aim to solve or ameliorate, not just cause mayhem and more damage for temporary relief in perceived revenge in some personal anarchy you’re conducting. If it cannot be ameliorated and if the same situations keeps happening again and again and again with no progress, change the approach if the fight is worth it or remove yourselves from the situation if it is not. Don’t stay due to all you believe you invested in it – and you will believe you invested something if you gave it attention by anger – where attention goes, energy goes as well.

Forgiveness heals you on an inter and intrapersonal levels, it’s freeing and it feels like finally exhaling after holding your breath for so long that your face turned blue and you expected your lungs to explode. A way to not get angry like this ever again is to build yourself into a person that can be aggressive and less agreeable. The fact that you are able to be aggressive will in most cases mean you won’t need to be and will shape a world in which you believe you have a say in what happens to you, because this was what anger was in its core – a feeling of not getting what you thought you were entitled to, feeling that things just happened to you without you having any say in the process. The best antidotes to anger are compassion, empathy, kindness, positive action and learning to say no and forgiving in order to move on.