Anger is a harmful negative emotion. It is injurious to both personal life and work life.

How can it be…

Question

Anger is a harmful negative emotion. It is injurious to both personal life and work life.

How can it be managed and controlled ?

Ghissu Editorial · Accepted Answer

Anger can be managed by understanding what lies beneath it, pausing before responding, reframing provocations, training the mind and removing workplace stressors. Gandhi showed the ideal, turning his 1893 eviction at Pietermaritzburg into satyagraha by channelling anger rather than suppressing it.

**Introduction**

The Bhagavad Gita (2.62-63) warns that anger breeds delusion and destroys reason. It harms relationships at home and judgment at work, so it must be understood and channelled rather than suppressed.

**Managing Anger at the Personal Level**

SKETCH: iceberg | The Anger Iceberg
visible: shouting, sarcasm, aggression
hidden: hurt, fear, fatigue, unmet expectations

1. **Look beneath the surface**: Anger usually masks hurt or exhaustion, and Lieberman's UCLA study (2007) showed that naming a feeling calms the brain's alarm centre.
2. **Pause before replying**: Lincoln wrote angry "hot letters", such as one to General Meade in 1863, and never sent them.
3. **Refuse the provocation**: In the Akkosa Sutta, the Buddha says an insult not accepted stays with the giver.
4. **Train body and mind**: Yoga and Vipassana build calm by habit; Vipassana courses in Tihar Jail from 1993 were credited with reducing violence.

**Controlling Anger in the Workplace**

1. **Assertion, not aggression**: Address the problem and its effect, never the person, so a dispute stays professional.
2. **Remove the stressors**: The WHO's ICD-11 (2019) treats burnout as an occupational phenomenon, so fair workloads and working grievance channels stop anger from building.
3. **Empathy for the citizen**: Reading an angry complainant's fear of losing land or rations lets an officer calm, not escalate, the room.
4. **Transmute just anger**: Gandhi turned his eviction at Pietermaritzburg (1893) into satyagraha, holding that anger conserved, like heat, becomes energy.

**Conclusion**

Anger is managed when it is understood, delayed and redirected. Aristotle called anger at the right person, to the right degree and for the right purpose a virtue; the Gita's *sthitaprajna*, free of fear and anger, is the civil servant's ideal.

Anger is a harmful negative emotion. It is injurious to both personal life and work life. How can it be managed and controlled ?

Model answer

Practise this question

Emotional intelligence — Concepts7 questions

Ghissu