According to the Enneagram, everyone is prone to negative emotions and anger, but certain personality types are more inclined to degenerate. The techniques for anger control and grounding exercises for anger management are practical life skills. It’s something everyone can do. Are you ready to learn?
We learn ways to cope with emotions in our families. If your family has healthy coping skills, you are ahead of most people. Finding a family unit with healthy emotional management skills that accommodates everyone is difficult.
We are designed to experience the full range of our emotions. It is part of everyday life. We look forward to positive feelings of love and joy. However, experiencing the full range of emotions also includes the negative emotions of pain and loss. So, dealing with intense negative emotions is necessary to maintain emotional equilibrium.
Controlling Emotional Triggers
Our feelings create a host of hormones that affect our bodies and minds, which are part of our survival system. One of the primary triggers is our fight, flight or freeze reaction (F3 response). This system triggers emotional states like fear, shock, and anger. When powerful hormones associated with anger and fear are released, the mind reacts to protect the higher thinking areas of the cortical cortex.
In the modern world, we are surrounded by stimuli that can spark anger, disappointment, fear, frustration, stress, and resentment. The key to controlling emotional triggers is knowing what they are and implementing tactics to manage them as soon as possible.
Once we are degenerating into anger, it becomes harder to stop the emotional chain reaction. The sooner we act, the less likely we will get caught up in negative feelings. You can “know” what is needed but fail to implement them when you are too far along.
When we are in control of our emotions, we are grounded, which means we are stable and in control of our emotional reactions. This mindset helps us make better decisions. Here’s our formula.
1. Be Mindful
2. Recognizing Personal Emotional Triggers
3. Avoidance
4. Techniques for Anger Control and Grounding
Grounding Exercises for Anger Management
“Let today be the day you control your emotions. Don’t let them get the best of you. Whatever you are feeling right now should not be overwhelming. Don’t allow others to dampen your spirit. You are entitled to enjoy peace.” — Amaka Imani Nkosazana
To deal with our feelings, we must be aware of them before they are too intense to control. There are specific tactics we can use to maintain emotional equilibrium. Will you always be successful? Perhaps not, but the more you practice these techniques, the more often you will succeed.
1. Be Mindful
Preparing to face the challenges and trials of the day is important. We need to be centered and grounded. Being present and mindful is the key to being grounded. This enables us to be self-aware so that we can observe the inner and outer worlds. We can observe our thoughts without judgment and be mindful of our surroundings.
How do you establish this state of mental preparedness?
Learn to meditate. Start with the two-step method and progress to seated, and then moving mindfulness meditation. These tools will help you stay present.
When you become aware of your thought life, you will be more in touch with your feelings. When you are more in touch with your feelings, you live from the heart. This perspective makes you aware of the chain reaction. When you contact the source of your emotions, they are easier to control. It’s easy to do with a bit of practice, and you’ll be a mindfulness expert. Integration of body, mind, and spirit is the ultimate preparation for the battle against emotional triggers.
Practice Body, Mind, and Spirit Integration
The best way to integrate is to become “grounded.” Grounding is a measurable connection between objects. We want to connect body, mind, and spirit. When we accomplish this, we are in tune with our intuition, thoughts, and emotions.
When we are in balance, none of the elements of the Ego dominate. So, as we become more in harmony, we are less likely to be influenced by negative emotions. This doesn’t mean you stop feeling them; it means you can feel them without losing control.
Many grounding exercises for anger management are easy to use. They will help you maintain emotional equilibrium. Here are our recommendations:
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- Beginning Meditation
- Mindfulness Meditation
- Forest Bathing
- Tree Grounding Exercise
- Self-Care Techniques
- Automatic Writing
- Martial Arts Like Tai Key or Tai Chi
2. Recognizing Personal Emotional Triggers
Knowing your emotional triggers gives you a distinct advantage in the world. Some people use media that is primed with these common triggers. They use these to prompt fear and anger and get you to do something. So, you need to know your triggers to avoid being manipulated.
You’ll discover cues that point to the source of our feelings. Knowing what situations, people, or things trigger reactions will give you the power to keep them from spiraling out of control.
“When you remain angry with another person, you give away your emotional control to that person each time you think of him or her. You allow him or her to control your emotions at long distances. By not forgiving, you allow that person to run your emotional life, exactly as if he or she were right there with you and the situation was occurring all over again.” — Brian Tracy
How do you discover these triggers ahead of time? One of the best techniques for anger control and grounding is a simple journal. Sit down and write about your feelings. Ask yourself, how do I feel? How do I feel about today, and what’s going on? Make recognizing personal emotional triggers a scavenger hunt. Find as many as you can.
Another more direct process is the Repetitive Question Exercise. Here, you ask the same question, something like, tell me something that frustrates you and makes you angry. Keep asking the same question, and you dig down into the subconscious to uncover the things that push your buttons. When you discover them, write them down.
Most of my anger triggers are related to our modern technologies. All the password security systems and verification systems are a real stumbling block to using the technology. Automated answering services are now standard as well. Most of these are time wasters. By the time I talk to someone, I am already frustrated and stressed out.
3. Avoidance
Avoidance is safer than resistance or management. If you can avoid the trigger, then you don’t have to manage your emotions while handling the situation. However, avoidance isn’t always possible.
Unfortunately, you can’t avoid the system verification processes that make the digital experience a negative one. You can’t always avoid traffic or standing in lines at the airport. However, recognizing personal emotional triggers helps to keep you from being swept away in anger at the most inappropriate moments.
4. Techniques for Anger Control and Grounding
We can learn to control our emotions through breath, ocular focus, and body awareness. Knowing these techniques will save us a lot of anger, anxiety, frustration, and stress. The answer to managing our emotional response is in our breath, eyes, and body.
Activities that promote integration make us more aware of our thoughts, lives, and emotions. When the body, mind, and spirit are balanced, we are more in control of our thoughts and feelings. When you practice these tactics, you will minimize the effects of harmful negative emotions. Here’s how.
Managing the Breath
The moment you discover you are reacting, take slow, deep breaths, in and out through the nose, counting silently to 3 or 4. Focus your attention on breathing. Monitor your emotional state. If this happens during a conversation, say something like, give me a second to think about this. Focus on your breath.
This simple activity will calm your active mind, moving you back to emotional equilibrium. In about 3 or 4 breaths, begin to regain control of your emotions. If not, keep up this breathing rhythm until you control your feelings.
Breathing is the first primary tactic for controlling the release of hormones that allow our feelings to take control. Learning to control our breath is the first of the techniques for anger control and grounding. Breathing has the most immediate effect on our emotions.
Manage Visual Input
Another way to gain control is through your eyes. If you can close your eyes, that will help. Shutting off external stimuli enables you to focus on breathing. However, sometimes it’s impractical to close your eyes. Don’t close your eyes while driving a vehicle or operating equipment. It’s also difficult to implement while engaging in conversation.
If you can’t close your eyes, the next best thing is shifting your gaze into peripheral vision. If you cannot shut your eyes or change into peripheral vision, look down if possible. The last option is to blink your eyes. Be sure to keep breathing with any of these optical control methods.
The eyes are the windows of the soul. They are also valuable devices that we can use to control our sympathetic nervous system. We can use peripheral vision to suspend our transition from the parasympathetic nervous system to the sympathetic nervous system.
The latter is the primitive emergency system that kicks in a host of hormones, like adrenaline, to boost our physical capabilities and shut off pain stimuli. However, many of these hormones aren’t healthy for the brain’s higher thinking centers. In response, the brain cuts off blood flow to these areas of thinking. So, although we can react quickly with strength, we are doing so without the help of the higher thinking functions necessary to assess a rapidly changing situation.
That’s why martial artists train to maintain control of their higher brain functions. It’s an internal battle against the fear of conflict. Those who win the internal conflict are more likely to win the external struggle. You can combine the breathing technique with ocular control. This is one of the techniques for anger control and grounding that is used in Silat training.
Bringing Awareness to the body
The third tactic is to bring your attention to your posture. This tactic also helps move our awareness away from the feelings causing the pain. A self-hug is another good way to intervene. Wrap both your arms around yourself. Use your arms to feel your breath.
If you are standing, shifting your weight to one foot can help. Focusing on balancing also helps the mind breathe through the emotional chain reaction.
If the source of your feelings is a stimulus you can remove, then do so. Simple as it seems, it’s often hard to do. If you are in a conversation with someone, you can always ask to take a 5-minute break or continue your discussion later.
We can often remove the stimulus, like something we see on TV or the internet, but we can continue down the slope of negativity. The mind fixates on issues, holding us hostage to negative emotions. That’s when you need to employ the tactics of breath, ocular control, and bringing attention to the body.
Practicing the grounding exercises for anger management outlined above will help ground us no matter which emotional roller-coaster you are on. Some emotions creep up on us, while others come on immediately. Anger and fear are often almost simultaneous to the stimulus. So, if you aren’t in a state of mindfulness, it’s easy to lose control and spiral out of control.
Emotions like depression build up gradually. If you aren’t mindful, you may not recognize that you are in an unhealthy mindset. You experience the effects but don’t connect them with the underlying issues.
Grounding helps us gain the perspective we need to deal with the issues. Unfortunately, some physicians medicate people for long periods, numbing them to negative and positive emotions. So, grounding exercises may not be the complete answer to anger, anxiety, and depression, but it is a tool you can use with proper counsel and medication.
Practicing grounding exercises for anger management is one way to develop a daily mindfulness practice that provides a basis for addressing underlying issues. Let’s dissect a popular form of mindfulness called Tai Chi. When you practice this technique, you’ll need to focus on the body and breath while engaging in peripheral vision.
Tai Chi incorporates all three tactics for handling our emotions. You can use this same strategy to create your own form of moving meditation. Practicing Tai Chi is a way of dealing with intense negative emotions.
When you encounter ideas that conflict with your belief system, you may also experience fear or anger. The stimulus is an idea that conflicts with your worldview. This kind of collision happens when we explore.
One way to explore our inner world is through comparative analysis. It’s a structured method of comparative religious study based on the scientific model. We learned early on that this kind of research can trigger the 3F response. When this happens, accurate analysis is impossible. So, we integrate regular “emotional checks” to ensure everyone involved with research isn’t suffering from adverse emotional reactions.
In Conclusion
Our emotions hold an incredible strength that compels us to act. Learning about them helps us to control their impact on our decision-making. Find the specific things that trigger your fear and anger. If you can recognize the triggers, then you can control the 3F response.