Happiness Blog June 10, 2019

Looking at core pain is scary. Letting go of anger is scary. One way to figure out if facing this fear and doing the work is worth it is to analyze how anger impacts your happiness and comfort. Analyzing how having the emotional trigger that creates the anger impacts your happiness and comfort will help as well. Ask yourself how often you feel angry. Does anger ever ruin your day? Are you able to let it go? Does your anger pass quickly? When you think about it, do you feel like your anger is always justified and appropriate? It may be that you answer yes to all of those questions and decide that your anger is not an issue, and that’s ok. If you answered yes but still want to work on being less angry, that’s ok too. If you answered no, it is still up to you decide whether or not to do the work. To help you decide, let’s explore what the work looks like a bit further.

Knowing what drives your anger allows you to reflect on how/if the underlying emotion impacts your life. In my experience, what lies underneath the surface doesn’t stay there forever. Once you have identified what’s driving your anger, you can decide how that trigger impacts your well-being. For most people, hidden emotions create instability and undermine overall joy and happiness. This may not be the case for you, but if it is, being aware of this goes a long way towards changing this. Taking notice of the emotions that are hidden under the surface that are impacting you will allow you to focus on those emotions, explore where they come from, and heal the wounds that created them.

To help cement your decision, it might be helpful to take notice of how often these feelings come up, then notice how often these feelings turn into anger or emotional volatility. By looking at frequency, you can decide if this something you can live with or if it is time to make a change. Set aside time each day to reflect on how you felt throughout the day. Did you feel anger? Did you feel the impact of the emotions underneath the anger? How else is anger impacting your life? Does it ruin your day? Does it result in simple disagreements escalating into full-blown arguments? What other ways does anger impact your happiness and well-being? How else is your peace of mind impacted? Once you have completed this reflection, you will know if it is time for you to tackle the underlying issue and release yourself from core pain and anger.

Posted on Monday: 10 June, 2019