Anger Management Tips

Most lists of anger management tips are assembled from other lists of anger management tips. Some of the advice on them is sound, some has never been tested, and a few items have been tested and found to make anger worse.

We are Richard and Helena Boyd and we have practised in Perth since 2005. This page sorts fifteen tips by how quickly they work, and it tells you which ones the research actually supports. If you want the underlying explanation rather than the toolkit, our articles on how to control anger and how to deal with anger cover that.

One thing before the list. If your anger involves frightening, controlling or hurting a partner or family member, the section near the end of this page is the one to read first.

What Anger Management Actually Means

Anger management is not learning to stop being angry. It is learning what to do in the gap between feeling and acting.

Everyone will experience anger, most of us several times a week. It is a completely normal human emotion and a natural response to being blocked, threatened or treated unfairly. Like pain, it is a healthy emotion because it carries information, and treating a normal emotion as a defect is where a lot of people start going wrong. The problem is never that you feel anger, it is what happens next. Anger issues are not about how often it arrives, they are about what the angry feelings turn into.

So the goal of every technique below is the same. Widen the gap, lower the arousal, and give yourself back the choice, so that anger gets expressed in a healthy way rather than acted out.

The One Rule Behind Every Tip That Works

A 2024 meta-analysis sorted the entire field by one variable, and it explains almost everything.

Kjaervik and Bushman pooled 154 studies covering more than ten thousand people and split anger management activities into two groups: those that turn physiological arousal down and those that turn it up. Arousal-decreasing activities, meaning deep breathing, relaxation, mindfulness and meditation, reduced both angry feelings and aggressive behaviour with a moderate to large effect. Arousal-increasing activities did essentially nothing overall, and jogging actually increased anger.

That is the rule. Anything that lowers your heart rate and breathing helps. Anything that keeps you revved does not, however satisfying it feels.

Tips For The Next Ninety Seconds

These are for the moment you notice the physical sensations arriving. Use them before you speak.

1. Make Your Exhale Longer Than Your Inhale

This is the highest-value thing on the page and it takes twenty seconds.

Breathe in for four and out for six or eight. Deep breaths taken quickly do nothing, so the ratio matters more than the depth. The out-breath is what engages the calming branch of your nervous system, and research measuring vagal activity found it rises specifically when exhalation is longer than inhalation. Slow breaths at around six per minute are the best-supported rate.

Note that box breathing, the four by four pattern you see everywhere, gives up that advantage by making the exhale equal to the inhale. It is fine. Longer out-breaths are better.

2. Drop Your Volume Before You Drop Your Point

Volume and arousal are a loop, and you can cut it from either end.

Speaking louder raises your own arousal, not just theirs. Deliberately halving your volume and slowing your speech pulls both of you down. You can make exactly the same point at half the amplitude, and it usually lands harder.

3. Name What Is Happening To Yourself

Say it internally and specifically. This is anger, it is about eight out of ten, and it is about being interrupted again.

Naming an emotional state reduces its intensity, and being specific about the trigger stops the vague global version taking over. It also buys you a few moments, which is most of the battle.

4. Change What Your Eyes Are Doing

Locked eye contact during conflict is read by the body as a perceived threat and keeps arousal climbing.

Look away, look at the floor, or look at something further off for five seconds. Widening your visual field takes you out of the narrow tunnel that intense anger produces. It sounds trivial, and if you are feeling tense across the face and neck it measurably shifts your physical state.

Tips For The Next Ten Minutes

Once the first surge has peaked, these stop it rebuilding.

5. Take A Timeout And Say When You Are Coming Back

A timeout only works if it is announced and time limited.

Say what you are doing and when you will return. Twenty minutes is the usual guidance, because that is roughly how long it takes stress hormones to clear. Leaving without a word is not a timeout, it is the silent treatment, and it does more damage to personal relationships than the argument would have.

6. Move, But Do Not Chase The Adrenaline

Movement helps if it settles you and hurts if it revs you.

A walk, some stretching or physical work with your hands will release tension without adding arousal. Sprinting off a rage does not work, which is what the jogging finding above is about. Regular exercise is excellent for your mental and physical health over time. It is just not the tool for the ten minutes after an incident.

7. Test The Story Before You Act On It

Anger runs on an interpretation, and the interpretation is often wrong.

Ask one question: what else could this mean? He did not reply because he is ignoring me, or because his phone is flat. You are not talking yourself out of the feeling, you are checking whether the version driving it holds up. This is the core move in cognitive behavioural therapy for anger, which has a medium to large effect across the treatment research.

8. Make One Request Instead Of One Accusation

Most angry responses fail because they describe the other person rather than the problem.

Use one sentence with three parts: what happened, what it did to you, and what you want instead. Then stop and listen for the other person’s point of view rather than preparing your next line. Good communication skills are not about being nicer, they are about being specific enough to be actionable.

Tips For This Week

These change how much anger arrives in the first place, which beats managing it after the fact. At this timescale, learning to manage stress and learning to manage anger are the same project.

9. Protect Your Sleep Before Anything Else

This is the most underrated item here and the evidence is experimental rather than correlational.

In a controlled study, people restricted to about four and a half hours a night became substantially angrier, and lost the normal ability to adapt to frustrating situations over time. If you are sleeping badly, everything else on this page is working uphill. Seven to nine hours is the target.

10. Move The Alcohol, Not Just The Amount

Alcohol narrows attention onto whatever is most immediate, which in a conflict is the provocation.

The effect is not that alcohol creates anger, it is that it removes the distant considerations that would normally hold you back, including consequences and the other person’s position. If your worst incidents cluster after drinking, the timing matters more than the total.

11. Keep A Short Anger Log For Seven Days

Four columns is enough: time, situation, intensity out of ten, and what you did.

A week of this will show you patterns you would never have guessed. Most people discover their spikes cluster in two or three predictable slots, and that at least one of them is really about being hungry, late or tired rather than about the person in front of them.

12. Fix The Two Most Predictable Triggers

Once the log shows you what tends to trigger anger, treat the top two as logistics rather than character.

If the evening handover is where it happens, change the handover. If a particular meeting does it, eat beforehand and leave a buffer either side. Removing predictable stressful situations is easier than becoming a calmer person inside them, and it will reduce stress across your whole week.

Tips For The Longer Term

These are the ones that change the pattern rather than the episode.

13. Practise Relaxation Techniques When You Are Not Angry

Techniques you have only read about will not be available when you need them.

Practise relaxation techniques daily for a fortnight when nothing is wrong. Slow breathing, progressive muscle relaxation where you tense and release each muscle group, or ten minutes of quiet time without a screen. This matters because the meta-analytic evidence for these methods is much stronger in unprovoked conditions than mid-confrontation, which tells you they need to be well-practised to survive a real provocation.

14. Learn To Repair Properly

Repair is a skill and most people do a version that makes things worse.

Own the specific behaviour rather than apologising for the feeling. Say what you will do differently and be concrete. Do it when you are genuinely settled rather than while still hot. Repeated apologies that change nothing teach everyone around you that the apology is part of the cycle.

15. Find Out What The Anger Is Protecting

Chronic or intense anger is usually sitting on top of something else.

Underneath frequent outbursts we most often find feeling powerless, feeling unsafe, grief or old humiliation. Anger is the emotion that gets you moving when other emotions leave you exposed, so it arrives first and covers them. Working out what it is covering is what will genuinely reduce anger, rather than managing problem anger more efficiently forever.

Anger Management Tips That Do Not Work

Some widely repeated advice has been tested and failed, and it is worth knowing which.

Venting is the big one. The idea that expressing anger physically discharges it has no experimental support, and in the classic study people who hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who provoked them ended up angrier and more aggressive than people who simply sat quietly for two minutes.

Counting to ten is more complicated than it looks. A forced pause reduced aggression when there were consequences to consider, but increased it when there were none, because an empty pause is just time to stew. The pause only helps if you are doing something calming inside it.

What About Rage Rooms And Punching Bags?

This comes up often enough to deserve a direct answer.

There is no published research on rage rooms at all, so nobody can tell you they work or that they do not. What we can say is that the mechanism they rely on, catharsis, is the one idea in this area that has been tested repeatedly and has not held up.

Hitting things is not automatically harmful. In the meta-analysis, punching or kicking an object came out neutral. What is harmful is doing it while rehearsing the grievance, and that is exactly what a rage room is designed for.

Do Wellbeing Apps Help?

Partly, and less than the marketing suggests.

No meta-analysis has tested apps for anger specifically. For depression and anxiety, a pooled analysis of 176 randomised trials found small but genuine benefits, roughly one person in twelve improving. Only six per cent of those trials met all quality criteria and drop-out is high.

Used as a way to practise breathing daily, an app is a reasonable prompt. Used as the whole plan for unhealthy anger, it is not enough.

What Uncontrolled Anger Does To Your Body

Anger is a whole-body event and repeated episodes leave a mark.

In the two hours after an anger outburst, the risk of a heart attack rises sharply, with one meta-analysis putting it near five times baseline. The absolute numbers are small for most people, roughly one to four extra events per ten thousand people per year, so the point is cumulative rather than immediate. A 2024 randomised study of 280 healthy adults also found that recalling an anger memory measurably impaired blood vessel function for about forty minutes.

The link between long-running anger and high blood pressure is real in direction but much weaker and less consistent than the wellness press implies. Elevated blood pressure has many causes and temperament is a modest one.

When Anger Management Is The Wrong Service

This section matters more than the fifteen tips above it.

If your anger involves frightening, controlling, intimidating or hurting a partner, ex-partner, child or other family member, anger management is not the right service, and on its own it can make things less safe. Australian family violence guidance is explicit about this. Generic anger management programs can reinforce the idea that the problem is an emotion rather than a set of beliefs about entitlement and control.

The reasoning is straightforward. Violent behaviour in the home is usually patterned rather than uncontrolled, most people who use it can choose where and against whom, and a great deal of family violence involves no visible anger at all.

The right referral is a Men’s Behaviour Change Program.

Call the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491, or in Western Australia the Men’s Domestic Violence Helpline on 1800 000 599. If anyone is in danger, call 000.

When To Seek Professional Help

Tips are for ordinary anger. Some situations need more than a list.

Speak to a health professional if you have angry outbursts weekly, if anyone is afraid of you, if you have difficulty controlling what you do rather than only what you feel, if you cannot settle within half an hour, or if there has been any physical aggression, including damaged property or the urge to physically lash out. Frequent anger outbursts are worth taking seriously even when nobody has been hurt. Anger problems also travel with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse, and other mental health conditions are worth screening for.

Start with your GP if you want a referral pathway. Structured work on anger, whether cognitive behavioural therapy or body based approaches, has a solid evidence base.

How We Work With Anger

Our approach is Integrative Body Mind Psychotherapy, and with anger that changes the emphasis.

Most people we see already know the techniques. What defeats them is that by the time the thought arrives, the body has already gone, and no strategy survives that. So we work on the earlier signal, the physical tension in the jaw and shoulders and the change in breathing that shows up thirty seconds before the thought does. That is where the choice still exists.

The other half of the work is what the anger is carrying. Our anger management sessions spend as much time on that as on emotional regulation skills.

What This Looks Like In Practice

These are composite examples drawn from our clinical work, with identifying details changed.

A man in his forties had a full toolkit and used none of it. He could describe every technique and had never once used one mid-argument, because he did not notice anything until he was already shouting. Six weeks of tracking early physical sensations changed that before we touched a single strategy.

A woman in her thirties had been told for years to go for a run when she got angry. It reliably left her more wound up, which she had read as a personal failure rather than as the predictable result of adding adrenaline to adrenaline.

A man in his fifties apologised beautifully after every incident and changed nothing. His family had stopped believing the apologies long before he noticed, and the work was not about controlling anger at all. It was about follow through.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions people ask us most often, and our honest answers.

What Is The Fastest Way To Calm Down When You Feel Angry?

Lengthen your exhale and lower your voice. Both take seconds and both act directly on arousal rather than on your thinking, which is the part that goes offline first. Reduce feelings of pressure by stepping back and giving yourself some personal space if you can.

Does Suppressing Anger Cause Health Problems?

Suppression is one of the least effective ways to handle anger, and it is associated with more anger rather than less. Expressing anger badly is not the alternative though. What works is naming it, regulating the arousal, and then saying the thing clearly.

How Long Does It Take For Anger Management Techniques To Work?

In the moment, breathing changes your state within a minute or two. Changing the pattern takes longer. Most structured anger programs run six to twelve sessions, and people usually notice a difference in frequency before they notice a difference in intensity.

Is It Ever Healthy To Feel Anger?

Yes. Anger is a natural emotion that tells you a limit has been crossed, and people who cannot access it tend to be poor at protecting themselves. The aim is a balanced perspective, where you can feel anger fully and still choose the response.

Where To Go From Here

Sort the anger management strategies you have been given by one question: does it turn the volume down or up? Longer exhales, lower voice, announced timeouts, better sleep and daily practice all turn it down. Venting, stewing during a pause, and going hard at the gym mid-episode do not.

Work on the physical layer first, because you cannot think your way through a body that has already committed. Then look at what the anger is protecting, since that is what changes the pattern rather than the episode. Learning to control your anger in daily life is a set of small habits, not a personality transplant.

If the tips are not holding, or the negative consequences are already showing up at home or at work, that is worth taking to someone. We see people individually and as couples at our Inglewood rooms and online,