Mindfulness for Anger and Other Negative Emotions

Mindfulness for Anger Becoming aware of our emotions is the first step. The next step is to develop the ability to manage them. Anger is one of most challenging emotions and can be destructive to our wellbeing, our relationships with others, and even our bodies. Anger builds in intensity the longer we hold onto it, so the key to managing anger is to defuse it before it builds and leads to negative consequences.

Often, anger comes on rather quickly due to a trigger and the resulting impulsive response. By practicing mindfulness with your anger, you can learn to lengthen the space between the trigger and the response. All emotions are felt physically, but anger is especially distinct and easy to identify in the body, making it an ideal emotion to practice emotional awareness with.

This activity will help you practice identifying emotions in your body and then using mindfulness to reduce the emotional response to the trigger.

Let’s begin:

• Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes and become aware of how your body feels in the chair. Then bring your attention to your bodily sensations.

• Take several deep breaths, when doing this make sure that you are completely filling up your lungs and quickly exhaling.

• Now, remember a time where you experienced mild anger or frustration. Allow yourself to feel that anger for a few seconds.

• Now focus on how your body experiences this emotion.

Are there any parts of your body where you tension? Heat?

What sensations do you feel in your chest?

Hands? Abdomen?

What facial expression do you have?

Is your heart rate impacted?

How are you breathing?

• Everyone experiences anger differently, but there are many common physiological responses, like a furrowed brow, grinding teeth, clenched hands, rapid heart rate, rapid breathing, and tension in various parts of the body.

• Remind yourself that anger is a natural emotion that everyone feels from time to time.

• place your hand over your heart and be compassionate with yourself. Remind yourself that even though you have a completely valid reason for being upset that you do not have to suffer with this emotion of anger.

• • Then release your anger. Imagine the tension in your body releasing. Relax the muscles and clear out the other physical sensations. Allow the anger to leave your body, as if you’re letting it float away in a river. Imagine waving goodbye to it.

  • Bring your attention to your breath and consciously slow your breathing, gently watching it move in through your nose and out through your mouth. Watch as your body calms down and the sensations diminish.

  • After this practice exercise, reflect on the experience. What sensations did you experience end how did they change through the process? How did bringing compassion to your anger impact your experience?

  • Once you have practiced this several times and you can clearly observe that the process of releasing the anger is working, you can move from mild forms of frustration or anger to more intense anger.

• Every time you practice this you will exercise your emotional control muscle and your ability to defuse anger, or other emotions will continue to improve.

  • You can also practice this using other emotions, like anxiety, sadness, guilt, etc. Not only will you become more mindful of how your emotions react in your body, you will more quickly be able to identify the emotions when they occur in everyday life and release the sensations that hold them in your body. With time you will be able to prevent them from escalating and will experience a sense of greater emotional control and wellbeing.

• MEDITATION: Willing Hands

  When the mind is having a hard time accepting something, emotionally we tend to feel frustration or anger and the body reacts by tensing up.

• Because of the connection between the physiological reaction in the body and the underlying thoughts and emotions, if we change the state our body is in we can impact the emotion. During times of resistance or anger, we tend to clench our hands. By unclenching and deliberately relaxing our hands, which we refer to as willing hands, we signal to our minds that we want to accept reality.

• Even if the situation is something you are not okay with, it does not help you to remain in a state of tension and resistance. By releasing the tension and being in an accepting state, you will feel better and think more clearly about the situation, which is the only way you will be able to effectively deal with it.

  • You can practice now by remembering a conflict you had with someone recently that made you angry. Clench your hands in anger as you remember how this situation felt. Hold this for a few moments until you can really feel it. Then, release the grasp, relax your fingers, and fully open your palms as if you are releasing the anger and tension and accepting the situation.

  • If you’re standing, with your elbows bent, open your hands turning them palms up.

  • If you’re sitting, place your hands on your thighs with palms up.

  • If you’re lying, place your arms by your side with palms up. By practicing these willing hands position you are signaling to your mind that you’re not longer resisting this. As your acceptance increases your anger will decrease. Practice this several times using different situations that have made you angry.

• Then, as you go about your daily life, the next time you feel tension, resistance, or anger, remember to unclench your hands and then open them into the willing hands position to help lower your resistance and release your anger.

• Intentionally Creating Desired Emotions Putting off our happiness to some future moment that may never come can lead to massive disappointment. But even more importantly, it gives away our power.

• By saying “I’ll be happy when” we’re ultimately saying that we cannot have the emotional experience we want until this, that, or the other thing happen. If you want to feel better, to feel good, to be happy, you can practice the feelings you want to experience with these simple exercises. And the great news is that when you practice feeling positive emotions your brain releases the endorphins into your body that make you feel good. And the more feel-good chemicals in your body, the more receptors your new cells create that are capable of absorbing those feel-good chemicals. You can literally train your body to feel better!

• Method 1: Imagining the Desired Outcome Think of a dream or desire that you have for your future. This would be some condition you want because, ultimately, you believe it will make you feel a certain way. Once you identify what this dream is, ask yourself what emotion you expect to experience when this dream happens. It’s important to notice that the REAL reason you want this dream is because of how you will FEEL about the outcome. Anyway, once you identify how you want to FEEL you can give yourself a shortcut to the experience.

• You can imagine yourself living your dream NOW, including feeling all of the emotional benefits. You see, your brain doesn’t know the difference between imagination and real life. All you have to do to experience that glorious emotion you want to experience is to IMAGINE yourself living this dream.

• Close your eyes and imagine yourself acting it out in real life.

• What would it look like?

• What would you be doing?

• What are you wearing?

• Who is there with you?

• Are there smells in the air?

• Sensations in your body?

• Go there now.

• How would you feel?

• Make it as real as possible.

• Imagine yourself feeling that emotion you desire.

• How good does it feel that this is happening?

• You’ll find you can feel the emotion just by pretending it’s happening.

• And now you do not have to use the fact that your dream has not come true yet as an excuse to feel bad or put off being happy.

• Method 2: The Cultivation Circle

  Just like you cultivate a garden by planting the seeds you want and feeding them what they need (light, nutrient rich soil, water and your attention), you can cultivate emotions. In the last method, you were thinking about a dream that you have that you want to enjoy. The visualization works because when you think about this dream it makes you feel good. But, sometimes the emotion you want to feel is actually because you are wanting to STOP feeling bad about something. This topic is not like the dream.

• When you think about it, it doesn’t make you feel good. For example, if you were worried about an upcoming family gathering when you were going to have to spend time with your mom, whom you have a really rocky relationship with, thinking about the upcoming event would probably make you anxious. Sure, you could try to remind yourself of the positive experiences you have had with her. You could focus on all of the other people who will be there that you will enjoy being around. You could even strategize ways to make the experience with her better by avoiding the topics that tend to trigger your arguments. All of those things would help you feel a little better, but they won’t make you feel the way you really want.

• How you WANT to feel is confident going to the family gathering. You want to feel at peace with yourself, centered, and confident knowing you can maintain your own calm and enjoy yourself even if your mom tries to bring you down. And so, why not take it BEYOND just trying to find a way to feel better ABOUT the upcoming situation. Why not stop thinking about the topic entirely! Why not just focus on feeling the way you WANT—confident and peaceful?

  The Cultivation Circle

• Draw a small circle in the center of a piece of paper and write the emotion you would like to cultivate in the center of it.

• Now, around the circle you will write as many things as you can think of that make you feel that way. At least 10. For instance, if you want to feel happy and carefree, you could put down: playing with my cat. Watching the sun set.

• That time I went on a road trip with my best friend. The way I felt the other day when I found a $20 bill on the sidewalk. The point is to identify ANYTHING that makes you feel that way, even if it is small. The easier it is to think about these things and feel good the better. Notice that the topics you are using to cultivate the emotion do not have to have ANYTHING to do with the reason you want to feel that way. For instance, with the example about wanting to feel confident and peaceful about the upcoming family gathering, you do NOT put “confident and peaceful about mom” in the center of your cultivation circle, you simply put “confident and peaceful”.

• And, when you’re doing the activity, you do not want to include anything directly related to the upcoming event. Just put things in general that make you feel confident or peaceful.

• You simply want to practice feeling those emotions. In the case of practicing the emotion you want to feel to counteract a negative feeling, like in the family gathering example, after you have done 3 to 5 cultivation circles practicing the desired emotion itself, you can hold onto that feeling and then practice the imagination exercise.

• Imagine yourself feeling confident and at peace arriving at the event, greeting family members, and giving your mom a hug. Imagine feeling confident, knowing that you have now practiced this desired feeling and can find your way back to it easily.

• Feel at peace knowing she does not have the ability to force you to feel bad and that you can always take a moment to re-focus yourself and make a cultivation circle in the bathroom if you need to.

  The Half-Smile Technique

• Now let’s look at an uplifting mindfulness exercise called the Half-Smile Technique The mind doesn’t know the difference between what we’re thinking and what is happening in real life, and so it responds by creating an emotional response to our thoughts. The same thing happens with our bodies.

• When we move our bodies in certain ways, such as smiling, the brain interprets our movements and responds. In this case, when we smile, our brain thinks we must be happy, and so it literally produces happy chemicals. This is called facial feedback. It’s so effective, in fact, that call centers have put mirrors up for their operators to seek while they’re on the phone, an they’re asked to smile at themselves because it has been proven that doing so increases customer service ratings, as well as telemarketing sales.

• This simple activity takes advantage of this ability to trick our brains into feeling good—or at least feeling better—and it has been used to treat a number of mood disorders—in fact studies have found it is even more effective than antidepressants! (That being said, keep in mind that depression is a medical condition. Techniques such as the ones discussed in this book may be effective for feelings of sadness, however depression is more than an emotion. Never stop taking antidepressants or other medications you have been prescribed by a doctor without guidance from your doctor.) Because the facial muscles are so responsive to our emotional states, when we change our facial expressions we can alter our emotions. This can be useful if you’re in a negative emotional state.

• By relaxing your forehead, eyes, cheeks and mouth you can reduce your negative emotion. Then by adding in a half-smile, you can help increase positive emotions.

• You can also use this technique any time you want a quick boost!

  • First, let’s practice adjusting our facial muscles. Try to make your face completely neutral with no expression.

• Relax your forehead, eyes, cheeks and mouth. Notice how this feels.

  • Now, begin to smile by lifting the corners of your lips, but stop just when you start to notice a little tension at the corners of your mouth. If someone was watching you, they probably wouldn't even notice that you’re smiling. It’s subtle but you can feel it.

• There is no added benefit smiling really big, and in fact it can make your face get sore during the exercise.

  • Now, hold your smile for 5 to 10 minutes.

  • You can enhance the benefits by smiling with your eyes too, focusing on the feeling of happiness, or even doing your mindfulness meditation while holding the smile.

  • The best thing about this exercise is that you can do it anywhere, anytime, without anyone noticing, so give it a try the next time you’re sitting in traffic or waiting in line.

  • Fake smiling is powerful and tricks your brain into thinking you’re happy, but real smiling is even better! Do this quick experiment.

  • Imagine you’re at a party that you do not want to be at. Put on a fake grin to make everyone think you’re enjoying yourself. Notice how your face and emotions feel. Now think about something that genuinely makes you small or laugh, like your pet, a laughing baby, or your favorite funny movie.

• Evoke a genuine smile and notice the difference in how your face and emotions feel. Even the fake smile is helpful, but as often as possible give yourself a super boost by thinking about something that will bring you a genuine smile or laugh.

• Why do you think funny cat videos are so popular on YouTube!? They make people smile.

  The Power of Gratitude

• Gratitude has been shown through research to be a powerful tool to decrease negative emotions such as anxiety and stress among others. We can not be in a state of gratitude and be angry, anxious, or depressed.

• Therefore, taking the time to focus our attention to what we are grateful for in our life we can shift our state. One of the best ways to shift our day is to start our day in a state of gratitude. There are simple ways to be more mindful of the things you have in your life to be grateful for.

• For example, in the morning you can take 5 minutes to make a list of things that you are grateful for. Or, throughout your day keep a notebook and write things that you are grateful for as they come to you. It is important to remember that gratitude is not about being grateful for just the good things in your life, but it is also about being thankful for everything in your life.

• For example, it is also being grateful for situations and experiences that may initially seem bad, but with time they prove to be a blessing and an opportunity to learn and grow.

• There are many different places you can look for something to be grateful for.

  • Call in one big thing: A big change that transformed your life in some way or a challenge you overcame.

  • People in your life: It can be a person that has made a big impact in your life or someone that did something minor like smiled at you that shifted your energy.

  • Something simple: Such as the sunshine, your ability to walk or see, your coffee, that you have a job. These are easy to take for granted. Keep in mind that these are just an example of things that you can be grateful for, but you may think of many more.

• MEDITATION: Gratitude Meditation To begin, find a quiet place where you know you will not be disturbed.

  • Sit upright in a comfortable, stable position where you feel fully supported, and your back, neck, and head are straight. Or lie down on your back in a comfortable place

  • Allow your eyes to gently close.

  • Take a slow, deep breath to bring yourself to the present moment and begin the process of feeling more peaceful and centered. Breathe into the belly so it expands as you breathe in and gets smaller as you breathe out.

  • Now, mentally scan your body for any areas where there is tightness, tension, or soreness and breathe your warm, oxygen-filled breath into that area; as you breathe out, let the tension release, breathing it out.

  • If you notice any thoughts or emotions, allow them to flow out as you breathe out.

  • As we start the gratitude process, start by acknowledging that if you are listening to this meditation you have marvelous gifts. The gift of hearing that allows you to hear these words, listen to beautiful music, and hear the voices of those you love, the song of a bird, the notes of a band or orchestra, the songs of singing and voices, the sound of your own breath flowing in and flowing out. The gift of life itself, including your heart that beats and gives life to your body, the food that nourishes you, and the energy that you are.

  • Now, think about all the things we have in your modern lives today that make our lives more comfortable and convenient than they for our great grandparents’ generation.

  • We flip a switch, and light appears.

  • We turn a tap and clean, drinkable water flows. • We adjust a thermostat, and a room grows warmer or cooler.

  • We have a roof to keep us dry when it rains, walls to keep out the cold wind, windows to let in the light, screens to keep out insects.

  • We enter a vehicle and it takes us where we want to go.

  • We have access to machines that wash our clothes. And we have clothes to wear, places to store them.

  • There are machines that store our food at just the right temperature and help us cook it without us having to gather wood.

  • We have indoor plumbing.

  • We have public schools that can teach us to read and write, skills that were available to only the very few just a few hundred years ago.

  • We have connectivity and access to all of the knowledge that has ever existed in the history of the world through our smart devices. Now, take a moment to reflect on all the thousands of people who have worked hard, most without knowing you at all, to make your life easier or more pleasant.

  • Those who plant, grow, and harvest your food. • Those who transport that food to market.

  • Those who take the time to design the store, the shelves, the packaging that keeps the food safe and allows you to find what you need.

  • The postal workers who sort and deliver the mail. • Those who maintain the servers that allow the internet to be available to us anywhere and anytime.

  • Those who design operations and systems for gathering, sorting, and disposing of trash and recycling.

  • Those who gather news stories and photos, and those who create the many mechanisms by which the news of the events of the world can reach you.

  • All those who play sports, create art or music, or films to entertain and uplift you. Now, consider the people and pets you know who enrich your life, those who smile at you and cheer you on, those family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and peers, those ancestors who worked so you could live well, those friends who support you when you need a shoulder or a hand.

• Now, take a moment to reflect on your own reasons for feeling grateful in this moment. Choose one memory you are grateful for. One current life situation you are grateful for. And one future possibility you are grateful for. There is so much to feel grateful for in this moment now. Gratitude fills our hearts and minds, uplifting our spirit.

• Rest quietly for several minutes, noticing how you feel throughout your body, emotions, and thoughts compared with before you started. No judging, just noticing. Now gently stretch your hands and arms, feet and legs. And open your eyes.

• With practice, you can find yourself feeling grateful easily, wherever you are. Remember that gratitude doesn’t have to be for dramatic life changing circumstances, it can be simple appreciation for the often-overlooked miracles of life.

• Explore this and other meditation scripts at Greater Good in Action https://ggia.berkeley.edu/.