Why be angry?

Updated: 28 Aug 2025

Anger is a natural human emotion characterized by feelings of annoyance, displeasure, or antagonism. It can range from mild irritation to intense rage and is often triggered by perceived provocations, threats, or feelings of being wronged. While anger is a normal human experience, it can become problematic when it's excessive or expressed in harmful ways. You have the right to feel angry but you do not have the right to impose your anger onto someone else. The anger is yours and yours alone, to deal with.

Anger is a physiological response to what we perceive as danger and activates our fight, flight or freeze stress response. We all know the uncomfortable sensations in our bodies when we are triggered by something happening in our environment that we don’t like or are fearful of.

It is important to understand the notion of perceptions. Everyone perceives things differently based on our past experience and what we believe about that event, and we behave accordingly. For example, based on our beliefs about people and things, some people might be offended, and other people might be amused, by the same event. Therefore, some people will feel anger and others feel joy.

There is always something much deeper driving our anger response called a “trigger”. Triggers are numerous but very often the trigger is not about the event that you are feeling angry about. For example, you feel annoyed when someone doesn’t respond to a text message you sent them, quickly enough. The trigger here is likely a belief that you’re being ignored or that you’re not worth the other person’s time. This is often based on past experiences of being ignored by the significant people in your life. But in reality, it might be that the other person has lost their phone or has their phone in airplane mode and has no idea that you have sent them a text message. Or your belief that everybody should answer their texts messages quickly is not shared by the person you are messaging. Therefore, you have a clash of beliefs.

So, keep a watch out for thoughts that have words like should or must in them. That is your belief system talking. Not everybody has the same beliefs as you and their beliefs are just as valid as yours are. You are unlikely to change their beliefs by being angry with them. Talk to them when you are calm and see if the issue can be resolved amicably.

A very useful YouTube video on the topic by Mel Robbins of never getting angry is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbAuh7if4_Q&t=1138s