Were you ever so angry that you crossed the line into blind rage? Have you ever found yourself using the childish, yet very emotionally addictive and highly useful manipulation skill of pouting? But why, why do we get angry so easily, why it is so powerful that it takes over and what does it do?

Well anger is a sort of a default reaction to feeling helpless. Look at angry people around you – they are for most part not bad people, they are not mean for sport but feel angry out of fear or a sense they are powerless. The thing is anger comes when something doesn’t go our way and here we step into entitlement. Why should we be entitled to things going your way? Why do you believe that this is the only possible or right way for things to go?

Anger and rage are far less connected to the circumstance that caused them than to our lack of self-control and wise expectations management. We don’t get angry at situations but because we expected them to go a certain way and the expectation was unreasonable to begin with so the antidote to anger is examining the expectation with clarity. We’ll get angry at people, traffic, the news, long lines at the store… as if we expect that, by some magic, people can read our minds and know what we want, as if the roads in a densely populated city were supposed to mysteriously be traffic-free and made only for us although we didn’t leave home on time, as is the news were supposed to only cover stories containing kittens to not disturb you, as if no one else heard of the massive discount in this store… We expect things from the world, our spouses, family, friends and situations without ever communicating our desires and making an effort to break down the skeleton of our expectations and tamper it. We are all fallible and operate within fallible systems created by imperfect beings so it is a miracle they work at all. If not under control anger becomes addictive because it is a high intensity emotion that sears into our brain and it is not that hard to just become an angry person – going around looking for reasons to be angry about – workload, children playing too loudly, the neighbor’s cat sniffing around your orchids…

The next time you feel anger coming, bubbling and festering inside, before the levy of sanity breaks, take a moment to reconsider what you expected here and was it realistic. Take the time to find a better way to express your desires instead of pouting, yelling, accusations and taking cheap shots at someone. Your anger is not the problem of the world, it harms you, it’s your problem. If you feel you might have an issue with it go and do something physical – do some vigorous yoga, go and kick a boxing bag, cycle up the hill until you feel your lungs will burst. Anger is one of the most malleable emotions to be released through movement. It needs some vigor to be fully released from the body’s cell memory. Don’t get angry. Get better at expecting and communicating.