Interesting thing about anger is that when we get angry, we often act like idiots. Poor "anger control" causes stupid behavior -- behavior that we later regret.
Over the past few years I was able to learn how to detect that I am angry. Yeah, I had to learn it - I know that it's natural and obvious for some people, but for me it took therapy, books and practice to be able to do something as basic as realize "Oh, I think I'm getting really angry right now!"
Some typical situations for me are when someone beats me in a competitive game after a mistake I made (so it's my fault, but I still get angry with the other person!) or when someone violates traffic rules when I'm driving, causing a dangerous situation on the road with me as a potential "victim". I have done a lot of work to get angry less frequently and to be able to control anger better when it occurs - both with good results.
Now, let's get to the "acting like an idiot" part.
For example, when playing online strategy games (one of my main hobbies) - I tend to blame the other players for my defeat. The other players may be allies who made a mistake, or opponents who did something clever to win; you may have seen the word "noob" being written in an in-game chat... that's typical of people who get angry at others. Immature, but very frequent.
Another situation: you get angry at someone in their presence, you raise your voice, tone of your voice is changed. It gets unpleasant for that person, and I think sometimes even more unpleasant and awkward for the other people around.
After you calm down, you refret what you said - how immature you behaved. I know I was often ashamed how foolishly I behaved while at the mercy of anger. I decided it's time to stop this, and began to work towards better anger control. Good news is: you can improve at this!
A very interesting phenomenon is called refractory period (described in detail in "Emotions revealed" by Paul Ekman, and there's a brief description of refractory period in here).
Refractory period is a mental state that causes your mind to ignore (filter out) all signals that contradict the emotion you are feeling. It doesn't just work with anger, but I think it's most apparent with anger because many people are poor at controlling it, and others try to talk to them to calm them down - to no avail of course.
Basically, when someone gets angry, they will often hear others say "calm down" or "hey, nothing happened" or even "I'm sorry". Or they will keep having their own thoughts like "hmm, I'm angry, I should calm down" or whatever else. But then funny thing happens - they decide that they are right to be angry; that feel that their anger is just and warranted by the situation; that the offender was way out of line!
To me this struggle between "I should stop being angry" and "keep going, I am right to be angry!" is really funny - I can feel my own mind wanting to stay in the angry state.
I can see how it is important from evolutionary perspective for emotions to be "resistant" in this way - it if was easy to make others stop feeling angry or happy, we would be prone to manipulation. Imagine someone slaps you in the face, then smiles, and this smile causes you to forgive and stop being angry - that wouldn't work out well for people, would it? So perhaps refractory period is actually useful... but I think more often than not it causes us to act silly, make others want to leave us alone when we're angry, and it delays solving the actual issue that caused the anger in the first place.
Funny thing, anger.
(Photograph by Ryan Hyde)
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