Feeling Angry - Write It Out

What do you do when you get really angry? When you are totally frustrated and almost shivering with rage inside?

All of us experience this at some point or the other in our lives.

Its one of the things that have a green-chilli effect on life….On its own it’s disastrous but mixed up with the other spices in the right proportions it makes life more tastier or can we say enjoyable?

There are some places where you cant do much about the source of your anger…Say if the reason is your boss and his volatile outbursts what can you do about it?...Of course, when it goes beyond your tolerance limits you ought to do something like switching jobs or speaking out your mind to him so that he sees your side of things…. And there are instances when you can actually avoid it but you rarely attempt to do so…If its an argument with your spouse or irritation with misbehavior from the kids, how many of us try to keep our composure?

Being very tolerant and unaffected is also not always helpful. There is a thin line between being patient and being exploited.

You are repeatedly taunted about something upto a point where you are just being used as a source of entertainment its time to straighten your back, look at people in the eye and ask them to mind their own business.

There is a saying in Tamil ‘Saadhu mirandaal naadu thaangathu’ which roughly translates to ‘The land would not be able to tolerate when a timid person gets wild’. True – If a person suppresses all his anger inside of him without any vent the internal pressure rises so much that any outburst would be extremely dangerous – something advocated by stress management tutorials.

As I write this I get reminded of a scene from the Tamil movie Punnagai Mannan. A lady (enacted by late actress Srividya) would come across her gentleman friend(KamalHassan) hanging upside down from a tree and a boy smiling nearby. On inquiring her friend would come down and immediately the boy would break into an outburst of tears. The gentleman would say ‘He keeps crying if I get down ‘ and go upside down again. The lady would remark, ’Shall I show you how to stop him?’ and she would give the kid one sharp slap and the kid would stop immediately.

I am definitely not quoting this example to advocate beating or hitting to control kids. Just a figurative example.

One of the things I do when I get extremely angry is take out my journal and pour out all that I feel in writing. On and on …I would keep writing what all comes to my mind…exactly the way they come…in some occasions swear…sometimes curse…sometimes just fling a whole lot of questions…

Gradually my handwriting would transform from furious scribbling to my usual calm neater writing and I start feeling better.


Its like talking to a friend. Just that in this case the friend happens to be a sheet of paper who wont talk back or advise. You can be one hundred percent honest about what you write as its just a vent for your feelings.

If its something you don’t want to keep, for fear of others coming across it later you could just do on a paper and shred it once your anger ebbs away.

It is definitely very effective especially in cases when you cant do much about what caused your anger - like a dispute in the family.

I usually feel kind of exhausted but peaceful after this whole exercise and I start thinking about the whole situation in a calm and composed manner without letting the anger take control.

I have read somewhere ‘Anger is good if you are in control and bad if it controls you’

That’s one way I have found to keep mine under control :)