Don’t Allow Anger to Dominate You

[September 1, 2026]  Anger is something that can easily grip you, and so it’s got a reality that actually transcends you.  The best way to think about anger is that it is a necessary part of your personality.  So, when you are possessed by anger, it changes your perceptions, your emotions, your view of the future and your past.  But it is only a part of you which can take over the whole of you.

There are other forces within you that give you the ability to control it, even if it seems to have an autonomy of its own.  You will realize that it is better to get your emotions and your thoughts aligned the same way.  You don’t have to give into the anger, even though it beckons to you.

If you are dominated by anger, it can make you bitter and resentful and hateful, and that is certainly not a trivial matter.  There is a huge biological circuit behind it, developed as a key human survival mechanism.  What we should want is to have anger on our side, where it doesn’t work against us.

Anger is also an extremely useful emotion.  Anger that is integrated behind you, that becomes part of a motivational system pushing you forward is not actually anger, but determination.  This means that anger is no longer a vice but it’s a hallmark of strength of character.

When confronting your anger, also realize that you should not suppress it and also don’t forget about it.  That is not a successful way of dealing with your anger.  All that will happen is that anger will destroy you slowly from the inside.  Anger is a very toxic emotion and it does cause real physiological damage over time.  It is the only emotion that we know that has been linked to things like cardiovascular risk.

Start building a strategy to bring your anger under your control.  The first thing you need to do is to develop options in your life.  Are there alternatives to your life that you can negotiate; with your family, co-workers (our boss), friends, and community?  Such a strategy starts with making a comprehensive and honest list of what makes you angry, and when and where it happens.

Part of your strategy has to be to recognize when you’re angry and admit to it.  Creating an inventory is beneficial because it allows you to more easily see when you are angry.  You will have to practice this so you become more sophisticated about knowing anger is inside you and do so without judgment; just observation.

If you are going to be able to cope, the key here is to be able to know what is happening within you.  Explore that anger to know under what circumstances that it arises, what solicits it within you; what people, where, when, and what you are doing.  Now you can take that list and ask yourself if you are taking the correct actions.

One common reason that people are angry is they are not assertive  enough and others are taking advantage of them, or they are not putting their own necessities forward with enough force.  These two are hard to distinguish.  The solutions are, however, the same.

Start to envision what you would want to have instead.  We are often afraid to do that because people are afraid to think about what they want.  Doing so makes it more clear when they’re not getting it and that’s painful.  They won’t specify a clear goal to aim at.  And then you must think about the cost of not pursuing it.

This is why it is critical to integrate your anger within your thinking so that when you do come up with a plan to approach your anger, you will be able to deal with the world in a more confident way.

NOTE: Much of this article was taken from several lectures by Prof. Jordan Peterson.

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Please read my books:

1. “55 Rules for a Good Life,” on Amazon (link here).
2. “Our Longest Year in Iraq,” on Amazon (link here).