Anger may be defined as "sudden, keen displeasure aroused by real or assumed injury or injustice and usually accompanied by the desire to punish."  Indignation is intense anger awakened by anything unworthy, as cruelty or meanness; Rage is a vehement expression of anger; and Fury is an excess of rage.

During fits of anger, every function of the body operates in an extravagant fashion, and all bodily work is performed in a most wasteful manner.  All the muscles become tense and contracted.  This tenseness pervades even the sympathetic nervous system.  As a result, sympathetic discharge creates pronounced circulatory changes.  The heart beats more rapidly and with greater amplitude.  The smaller blood vessels contract in spasmodic fashion.  This constriction of the arteries, together with increased heart action, produces a higher blood pressure and more effective circulation through the organs involved in bodily action.  Thus the heart is overworked; the circulation, digestion, and elimination are interfered with; and breathing becomes deeper and more rapid.   The entire physical body becomes disoriented.

Anger can be caused by both the situations that you are personally involved with as well as your own thoughts about yourself. You could be angry at a specific person or group of people, such as a family member or members, friends, coworkers or supervisor.  Or you could become angry due to a situation that you find yourself in such as a traffic mishap, frustration at a sports team or event, a delayed or cancelled flight or you could simply be worrying or brooding about your personal problems. The real cause of anger is our misperception of a situation based upon the memories of our "little life" and 95% of those situations are caused by FEAR.  For instance, somebody threatens your life by cutting you off on the highway and you react with fear as your life might have been in jeopardy.  You perceived that someone was either stupid or intentionally performed an act "against you" and you got angry.  Would you have felt the same way if you knew that person was having an emergency and was on the way to the hospital?  Of course not.

You become angry because someone insulted you in some way.  Your anger is based on a "fear" of being less worthy (worthless).  You become angry because someone looked admiringly on your mate. In this instance you "feared" someone was going to take something from you and your response is anger.  All of these situations are problems of "perception".

The way we express anger is based upon our personality and our "little life" learnings.   Most of the time anger is a natural, adaptive response to threats; it inspires powerful, often aggressive, feelings and behaviors, which allow us to fight and to defend ourselves when we are attacked. This is called the "flight or fight" response.  In some cases it may be necessary for our survival.  But, in the majority of the cases it is not necessary for our survival.  We express it because we do not know any other way to handle it, again our "little life" experiences.  You see most of us are simply 8 year old children running around in adult bodies. Re-acting the same way we did when we were eight years old.  Our responses are simply a non-think happening.  There are many ways that people express anger based upon their experiences.  They might: kick everybody in sight; complain to the whole world; criticize and condemn the object of their anger; take it out on anybody and everybody; yell and scream; get quiet and clam up.  There are as many ways to express anger as there are situations and people.  The problem is that most people let anger control them as opposed to the person controlling the anger.

On the other hand, we can't physically lash out at every person or object that irritates or annoys us; civil laws, society, and common sense place limits on the way that we are allowed to express our anger.

The goal of anger management is to reduce both your emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that anger causes.  The question is not, Should I or should I not express anger?  But rather, How can I express anger and what will be the results?  Ask yourself, why the other person is really acting in that manner; what is going on in their life to cause them to react that way?

There are four ways to "cool out" angry thoughts at the moment of anger.  Most people practice either the "beating me up thoughts" or the "beating you up thoughts". 

• 1st way is to simply say, "This one is not worth it; take a few breaths and calm down." 
• 2nd way is to use "problem solving thoughts" such as: "this is not the end of the world, I can get through this, it is just a problem to solve; what is the worst thing that can happen?" 
• 3rd way is to adopt control and escape thoughts: "I�m in control and I can always walk away; I don�t need to blow up; I can take time out; I can leave here, etc."
• 4th way is to establish self-rewarding thoughts: "Good, I�m hanging in there; I haven�t killed anyone yet! I�m coping and not yelling."

There is only one true way of really controlling your anger and that is to get to the root cause of your anger.  Why are your really mad?  If we are true to ourselves and ask that question, most of the time we will find that we are really just mad at ourselves for getting into the situation that culminated in our feelings of anger.  We need to begin to understand why the emotions of fear, worry, jealousy, greed, prejudice, hypocrisy, fault-finding, envy, selfishness, vanity and hatred run rampant through our consciousness and come back to haunt us at the most inopportune moments.  The only way to do that is to understand where those emotions play a part in our lives and that can only be accomplished by an inward study of ourselves.