It’s a gnawing, burning feeling. Deep within your chest, a vice grip has taken hold. It just gets harder and harder to breathe. And then, without warning, you burst—and the damage is done.
Anger has always been a crippling emotion. Just a spark of that heat and it destroys your entire day, week, month, year, or even your whole life. We can never escape the resentment we feel when we react to getting hurt, but anger is just that—it’s a reaction. You can always choose how to react when you rise and take control of your emotions. And anger, no matter how powerful it may seem, can be extinguished. Only when you refuse to let it control you can you begin to think and act rationally and solve whatever it is that made you angry in the first place.
Letting go can be daunting, especially when the pain sears inside you like an open wound. But a simple change in mindset can help you let go, and you’ll see that it’s not as difficult as it seems after all.
1.Cry.
When a plate breaks, it crashes and reverberates throughout the house. But when the heart breaks, it shatters into a million pieces and it’s the most painful experience nobody else can understand—and it doesn’t even make a sound. The pain in your heart ignited by your anger can consume you, especially when you have no way of letting it out. But remember how babies and little kids deal with their pain? They cry. They cry and let it all out—and then it’s over, and it’s as simple as that.
So cry. Have a good, healthy cry. Imagine that each teardrop is a heavy chunk of your pain, and when it rolls down your cheek, it dries up and goes away. And when you’re done, your chest will feel better, lighter. You’ll be ready to move on.
2.Read a book.
The sad truth about this mobile age is that people everywhere are bent over tablets and smartphones. But you should never underestimate the power of a good book. It takes you to places you can only dream of, and makes you see the bigger picture of the world around you that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to appreciate when hunched over your little gadgets.
Instead of focusing on your anger, flip open the pages of a book to see the grander scheme of things. You’ll see that anger alienates you, leaving you alone, shriveled, empty. Like the protagonist from Haruki Murakami’s “A Wild Sheep Chase”, you’ll be left with “A non-month. Unfocused and unfelt, a lukewarm protoplasm of a month…. It was as if I’d been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone.” He realized that in his anger, all he had left now were memories, and cells, displacing themselves every day. “Was it all biology?”
Holden Caulfield from Catcher In The Rye also thought his anger at the world was all he needed, and that he could live without anyone else. But ironically, the whole novel talks about his relationships with people, and when asked what he wanted to do in life, he replied that he would “have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”
Man is nothing without his relationships with other people, and your anger burns those bridges and leaves you an empty shell. Reading books will help you see that you don’t want to become alone and miserable, and that you need to let go to heal.
3.Listen to music.
Not the trashy kind of music, but the good kind, the ones that actually have substance. They say music soothes the savage beast, and that it saves the soul. Let the melodies calm you. You’ll realize that your anger is such a heavy burden.
A band called Stars once sang, “I can’t live forever, I can’t always be. The pages keep turning. I’ll mark off each day with a cross and I’ll laugh about all that we’ve lost.” In your deathbed, do you really want to look back and see all the effort and time you’ve wasted just because you were angry?
4.Watch the sunset.
Why are sunsets so surreal and beautiful? The hues blending so perfectly across the sky tell us of our finite being, and how each day ends and a new one begins. It moves us and lets us know that the earth keeps spinning despite the aches in our hearts. At the end of the day, does our anger really matter? A year or two from now, will we even remember what we were so mad about?
In the comic book “Secret Identity”, Superman says that “the world is changing…but the world always changes. It changes us. Sunsets are endings, but a little ways to the east and it starts all over again.” While Clark Kent may be a fictional character, what he says rings true. We are given the opportunity to creatively begin anew each day. Don’t waste it in anger. Let go…and live.
