Why Am I Always Angry? 5 Ways to Overcome Anger

“Why am I always angry?” If you’ve ever asked yourself this question, this article is for you. We’ll be looking at five practical ways for you to overcome the anger in your life.

Introduction to Anger

When it comes to emotions, anger tends to get a bad reputation. For many people, anger is associated with being out of control, mean, or vengeful. While this may be the case for some people, some of the time, it’s not an accurate portrayal of anger.

Anger, like all emotions, is not inherently “good” or “bad.” Anger is simply a mental state in response to a prompt. The prompt may be a thought, feeling, behavior, an interpretation of one of these, or a combination of these. It is not wrong or bad to experience anger; it’s part of the human experience.

Edmund J. Bourne, author of The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook, states an important caveat in his discussion on anger: “If you tend to withhold your anger, even when you are being taken advantage of or abused, then learning to be more in touch with your angry feelings can be empowering.

“If you have difficulty standing up for yourself in the face of manipulation or when your boundaries are violated, then appropriate, assertive communication of your anger is something that you will certainly want to learn” (p. 224).

However, some people may find that they experience anger at a frequency or intensity that leads to decisions they regret or causes distress in their lives.

For individuals who fall into this category, it can be helpful to learn skills and techniques to effectively manage or overcome anger. This article will recommend a variety of ways to do this. First, it is helpful to begin by understanding why we experience anger and why it can be useful.

Usefulness of Anger

Marsha Linehan, the developer of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, provides a wealth of emotion regulation skills in her book, DBT Skills Training Manual and in the accompanying DBT Skills Training Handouts And Worksheets.

It is important to note that this article is a brief overview of some of the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy skills, along with other skills, that may be useful for dealing with anger. This is not a comprehensive guide to Dialectical Behavioral Therapy or to emotion regulation skills, but rather an introduction.

In her books, handouts, and worksheets, Linehan outlines specific emotions, things that prompt them, and our natural responses to them. She also provides a number of evidence based skills to use to effectively respond to and regulate our emotions.

Linehan notes that a variety of prompts may produce an anger response. These include times when an important goal is blocked; you or someone you care about is attacked or threatened; you lose power, status, or respect; things are not going as expected; or you are in physical or emotional pain.

In these situations, anger can be useful for a variety of reasons. It can help alert us that something is wrong, it can spur us into action, and it can give us physical or emotional strength to respond to a threat. This, of course, is not a complete list of situations that prompt anger, but it provides a basis for understanding when anger might be justified and useful.

Introduction to Emotion Regulation

In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, one of the core skills modules is emotion regulation. The goals of emotion regulation skills are to understand your emotions, reduce emotional vulnerability, and decrease emotional suffering.

It is important to emphasize that using emotion regulation skills does not imply that your emotions are wrong or that you shouldn’t feel them. Your emotions are valid.

Emotion regulation skills are useful because some people find that the frequency or intensity of their emotions get in the way of living the life they want or cause them distress. In these situations, emotion regulation skills are incredibly helpful to empower people to effectively manage their unwanted emotions.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is a specific form of behavior therapy that includes a variety of components such as individual therapy and skills training. In order to properly and effectively use Dialectical Behavioral Therapy skills, it is helpful to receive DBT therapy from a trained team of providers. The descriptions of DBT skills below do not replace this, but simply provide an introduction to DBT skills.

Naming and Describing Your Emotions

In order to effectively regulate emotions, it is crucial to be able to accurately name and describe your emotions. There are a number of skills used to help people do this, including mindfulness skills that help us to focus on the present moment and describe our sensations, thoughts, and emotions.

This is important because it can be challenging to name the correct emotion (or emotions) that we are feeling, and identifying the accurate emotion is the first step in determining how to effectively respond to it.

Steps to Regulating Your Emotions

There are several clues to help us determine whether we are specifically experiencing anger. Biologically, our muscles may tighten, our hands may clench, and we may feel hot. We might have the urge to cry, lash out, hit something, or “explode.”

Anger looks different for different people, so part of effective emotion regulation is paying attention to your own anger responses and learning to recognize the signs of anger.

1. Check the Facts

Once you have identified what emotion you are experiencing, checking the facts can help to regulate your emotion. In order to effectively check the facts, it is helpful to use the thorough steps outlined on Linehan’s “Checking the Facts” worksheet from her DBT Skills Training Handouts And Worksheets book.

Essentially, checking the facts is a guide to determining whether your emotion (and the intensity of the emotion) fit the facts of the situation. In the world of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, when an emotion fits the facts, it is referred to as being justified by the facts.

To reiterate an earlier point, if an emotion is not justified by the facts, it does not mean the emotion isn’t valid. Your emotions are real, and are there for a reason. However, recognizing that an emotion isn’t justified by the facts can empower us to decrease an unwanted emotion that we may be experiencing.

The steps in checking the facts include describing what happened that led up to the experience of the emotion and then carefully examining this description to look for things that aren’t strictly factual, such as added assumptions, generalizations, black-and-white thinking, interpretations, and catastrophizing.

By separating the objective facts from our added interpretations and thought processes, we can confirm whether our emotion (for example, anger) is a response to what actually happened or to our interpretation of what happened.

For example, imagine you are at work and you walk by a group of co-workers talking and laughing in hushed tones. Your automatic response might be to assume that they are talking about you and making fun of you. You may start to feel angry, and your anger may fuel this belief.

However, if you take time to stop and check the facts, you may realize that your anger is based off of added assumptions and interpretations (that your co-workers are making fun of you) not of the objective facts (that your co-workers are talking to each other and you can’t hear what they’re saying).

Maybe one of them is telling an embarrassing story about themselves, which is why they’re laughing and speaking quietly; the point is, you don’t know what they’re talking about, so assuming they’re talking about you is adding your own interpretation.

For some people who report being “always” angry, checking the facts is immensely helpful to recognize that a great deal of their anger stems from adding interpretations to events, rather than the events themselves.

Sometimes checking the facts in itself helps us to change our emotional response to a situation. Other times, checking the facts is the first step to help us determine what other emotion regulation skill to use: opposite action or problem solving.

2. Opposite Action

Opposite action is used after you check the facts, if you determine that your emotion or its intensity is not justified by the facts, or if you determine that acting on your emotion wouldn’t be effective.

As with checking the facts, Linehan has “Opposite Action” worksheets that are helpful to properly engage this skill. The idea with opposite action is that in order to change an unwanted or unjustified emotion, we can act opposite to the action urge of the emotion.

The specific opposite action will vary by person and situation, but some examples of opposite action for anger are to gently avoid or to be nice. In the example above, maybe your action urge when you believe your co-workers are making fun of you is to clench your fists and storm off to your office.

The opposite action to this urge might be to calmly walk up to your co-workers and say something kind. Engaging in opposite action can help to decrease your anger; and if anger is justified by a situation but you decide it wouldn’t be effective to act on your anger, opposite action can help you avoid making a situation worse.

3. Problem Solving

Problem solving is used when your emotion is justified by the situation and you want to change your emotion by changing the situation. Again, Linehan has specific worksheets geared toward “Problem Solving,” but the key steps in problem solving are identifying what your goal is, brainstorming ways to achieve your goal, choosing a solution, and breaking your solution down into reasonable action steps.

In the example above, let’s imagine that you run into your co-workers again, and this time you overhear them and discover they really are making fun of you. If this is the case, anger may be justified by the facts, and problem solving might be most effective.

Maybe you problem solve by talking to your co-workers and asking them to stop making fun of you, or you find other co-workers who treat you with respect to be your support system, or you follow office protocol for interpersonal conflict situations. As with opposite action, the solution to a problem will vary greatly depending on the person and the situation.

4. Introduction to Distress Tolerance

In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, distress tolerance skills are used when we experience an emotion so intensely that we are outside our “window of tolerance” and aren’t able to engage in our emotion regulation skills.
For example, when you feel so angry that you can’t think straight, it might not be possible to check the facts. First, you need to calm yourself down by using distress tolerance skills.

Distress Tolerance is an entire skills module in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, so there are a number of skills to use. Some examples of distress tolerance include mindfulness exercises, such as counting breaths while you breathe deeply into your diaphragm or factually describing the environment and the various objects that you see around you.
Distraction can also be an effective distress tolerance skill, when used appropriately and sparingly. Distraction is essentially any activity that helps to get your mind off the intense emotion, such as washing dishes, watching a funny television show, or going for a run.

Another example of a distress tolerance skill is self-soothing. Self-soothing is a way to calm emotions by attending to your senses. For example, you may engage in self-soothing by drinking a hot cup of tea, putting on your favorite smelling lotion, looking out the window at the trees, petting your dog, or listening to your favorite music.

5. Additional Tools

The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook by Edmund J. Bourne includes a section on anger and offers additional practical suggestions for managing distressing anger. One suggestion is to communicate assertively instead of aggressively.
It is certainly possible to communicate and acknowledge your anger while maintaining respect for others. One way to do this is to use “I statements.” For example, instead of saying, “You always come home late!” you can say, “I feel hurt and angry when you arrive home later than you promised.”

By communicating your anger effectively, you may be able to work through issues that elicit anger and avoid continuously running into the same situation. Bourne offers another helpful reminder: “Other people don’t make you angry. You react angrily to your own interpretation of the significance of another person’s behavior. Something they say or do goes against your standards of what is acceptable or just, and so you feel angry” (p. 223).

This seemingly simple perspective switch can have a significant impact on the way we process our anger. If we operate from the lens that people or situations make us angry, we might feel powerless, out of control, or at the mercy of our circumstances.

This can make our experience of anger feel more distressing, and can even lead to us feeling more intense anger. By reminding ourselves that we have tools and skills to regulate our emotions and people can’t make us feel a certain way, we can reclaim some sense of ownership over our own emotions.

Closing Thoughts

If you feel like anger controls you or you are distressed by your experiences of anger, help is available. There are a number of skills, techniques, and resources geared toward empowering you to experience your emotions effectively. I invite you to reach out to myself or another counselor; we are here to support you.

Bourne, Edmund J. (1990). The anxiety & phobia workbook. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications,

Linehan, M. (2015). DBT skills training handouts and worksheets. New York: The Guilford Press.

Linehan, M. (2015). DBT skills training manual. New York: The Guilford Press.