You can feel it coming. Your face gets hot, your jaw tightens, your voice starts to rise, and some part of you knows exactly where this is heading. You don’t want to say the thing you’ll regret. You just don’t know how to stop the train once it’s already moving.
If that sounds familiar, knowing how to calm down when you’re angry can feel almost impossible in the moment. But there are things that work, and most of them have less to do with willpower than with understanding what’s happening in your body.
What happens in your body when you get angry
When anger takes over, your body goes into fight-or-flight mode. Your heart speeds up, your breathing gets shallow and fast, adrenaline kicks in, and the more thoughtful part of your brain, the part that weighs consequences and chooses words carefully, starts to go offline.
Couples researcher John Gottman calls this flooding. Once you’re flooded, it becomes very hard to listen, think clearly, or say what you mean. That’s why trying to reason your way out of anger in the middle of it rarely works. Your brain isn’t set up for reasoning right then. Your body needs to settle first.
The good news is that the body settles in fairly predictable ways, and you can help it along.
How to calm down when you’re angry, in the moment
Slow your breathing, especially the exhale. A long, slow breath out is one of the quickest ways to tell your nervous system to stand down. Try breathing in for a count of four, hold for a seven and out for a count of eight, and do that for several minutes, ideally 10 (that whole counting to 10 thing is a bunch of hooey but 10 minutes of breathing this way really does work). It feels almost too simple, but it works on your body directly, which is exactly what you need when your thinking isn’t cooperating.
Change your position. Sit down if you’re standing. Lower your voice on purpose. Unclench your hands and your jaw. Your body and your mood are connected in both directions, and softening your posture sends a signal that the threat has passed.
Put some space between you and whatever set you off. Leave the room, step outside, take a walk around the block. If you’re with someone, let them know what you’re doing and that you’ll be back: “I’m too heated right now. I need some time, and then I want to come back and talk about this.”
Give it enough time. Most people come back too soon. Gottman’s research found that it usually takes at least twenty minutes for your body to calm down after being flooded. If you jump back into the conversation after five, you’ll likely be right back where you started. While you wait, try not to spend the time rehearsing your side of the argument. That just keeps the fire going.
Don’t hit send. If what set you off was an email or a text, especially at work, write the reply if you need to, but don’t send it. Look at it again in an hour, or tomorrow. You’ll almost always be glad you waited.
Say what’s happening, out loud or to yourself. “I’m really angry right now.” Naming the feeling can take a surprising amount of the charge out of it. It moves you from being swept up in the anger to noticing it.
What doesn’t help
Some things feel like they should help but tend to make it worse. Venting by yelling into a pillow or hitting something is one of them. It can feel satisfying for a minute, but it tends to keep your body in fight mode rather than calming it down. Alcohol is another. It may take the edge off at first, but it lowers the brakes on what you say and do.
And trying to just push the anger down and pretend it isn’t there usually doesn’t last. It tends to come back later, often bigger.
After you’ve calmed down
Once you’re settled, it’s worth coming back to what happened. What set you off? What were you feeling underneath the anger, hurt, embarrassed, worried, exhausted? Was this really about the thing in front of you, or had something been building for a while?
If you said or did something in the heat of the moment that hurt someone, this is also the time to repair it. A real apology, without a “but” attached, goes a long way.
When calming down isn’t enough
These techniques help a lot, but they work best when anger comes up once in a while. If you find yourself needing them all the time, or if you can’t seem to catch it early enough to use them, that’s usually a sign something bigger is going on. My post When Does Frustration Become an Anger Problem? goes into some of the signs.
If your anger has ever turned physical, or if you’re worried it might, please get help now. And if you’re ever having thoughts of hurting yourself or someone else, call or text 988 or call 911.
Much of my work in anger management therapy in Bethesda is with people who want more control over their anger, and it’s one of the more treatable things I see. If that sounds like you, reach out through my contact page. We can work on what’s driving it, and on what to do before the next time it hits.
