This article was written by a Kooth worker and contains the following themes: anger, dealing with difficult emotions.

What is anger?

Anger is a perfectly natural emotion that everyone feels from time to time. Like all emotions, it can affect how we think, feel, and behave.

As we are all different, the way we experience anger is unique to us. Anger is often thought about as a BIG emotion that is obvious to others.

But that really depends on the person.

Some people might get louder when they are angry, which might look a bit like this:

• Shouting
• Saying things they wouldn’t usually
• Hurting others or themselves

But some people get quieter when they are angry, which might look a bit like this:

• Not wanting to talk or be around others
• Not enjoying things they usually would
• Keeping anger inside by thinking about it a lot but not expressing it

For more information on the science behind anger and how it can affect different parts of our body, take a look at our article on the science of anger.

What makes us angry?

Sometimes, it can feel like there’s a lot of anger in the air. This might be due to things you see on the news or on social media, situations in your local area, or experiences that are personal to you – right now or from the past.

Whatever you feel angry about, we want to validate those feelings here.

Despite anger being something we all experience, it has a pretty bad reputation for being negative. It can be associated with destruction, aggression, and even violence – but there’s more to anger than that.

Anger is neither a “good” nor a “bad” emotion. It can be a healthy and helpful response to many situations. It’s therefore important to know when your anger is helping you, and when it’s hurting you.

Let’s take a closer look

It might be useful to think about anger in two different ways: helpful anger and unhelpful anger.

Unhelpful anger

This is the anger that affects your relationships, your school, home, and social life in a way that hurts you and generally gets in the way of feeling other everyday emotions such as excitement, happiness, and joy.

If the cause of your anger is traumatic, it might feel necessary to make healthy changes. For example, you may need to rethink relationships or distance yourself from people who have caused you pain.

Unhelpful anger might feel overwhelming and, in some cases, also lead to aggression and violence directed at others or even yourself.

This is what unhelpful anger might look like:

• Having physical fights
• Shouting or using inappropriate language with people you care about
• Throwing or hitting objects
• Being alone with your anger and feeling unable to express it

Please note that unhelpful anger isn’t just the loud kind; it can also be the quiet sort that we talked about earlier.

It’s also helpful to remember that expressing anger loudly is not such a bad thing as long as it doesn’t hurt you or others. In fact it can be really useful and can be a healthy way to discharge that energy. More on this later!

Helpful anger

It might be difficult to think about anger as being helpful. However, when used appropriately and in moderation, anger can be a really useful tool.

Here’s how:

• It can make us aware of injustice and motivate us to speak up. Examples include: going to a peaceful protest, speaking up about something that is important to us, signing a petition, or defending someone or something we care about if it’s safe to do so.

• It can help us recognise when we haven’t been treated fairly or in a way that really isn’t okay. The feeling of anger can help us make sense of what happened, acknowledge that we didn’t deserve to be treated that way and even reduce any other difficult feelings attached to what happened such as guilt or shame. This is especially helpful if we blame ourselves for something that wasn’t our fault. Anger is that useful voice that says, “hang on a minute, this is not okay and that wasn’t my fault.”

• It can help us to feel hopeful. For example: when our anger about something leads us to decide that we are not putting up with it anymore, it can motivate us to work towards change. For example, if we are sick of always being the social organiser in our friendship group, we might decide to calmly express our thoughts and gently ask for others to take responsibility too in order to make a change.

Appropriate anger can allow us to feel that change is possible, rather than accepting things staying the same and being unhappy about it.

• Expressing anger appropriately and without hurting ourselves or others can help us to feel calmer. For example: when we allow ourselves to be angry instead of holding it all in, we can release all that tension in our body, which then allows us to eventually feel calmer.

How to deal with feelings of anger

With all this in mind, we thought it might be useful to think about how to deal with feelings of anger to help

• motivate and encourage you
• calm you down
• find solutions
• stay in control

We are all unique, so if some of these tips don’t work for you, that’s okay – as always, do what feels right for you.