Controlling Our Anger
There are actionable ways we can manage our anger and reframe our thinking to avoid getting angry.
What I watched: “How To Never Get Angry Or Bothered By Anyone” by Jamie Social. Posted June 19, 2025.
We all get angry. It is part of the human condition. But some people have the ability to better control and regulate their bouts of anger.
Recently, my partner sent me this video by Jamie Social and I immediately felt compelled to write about it.
You know that feeling when someone says something that ruins your entire day? What if I told you that feeling only lasts 90 seconds unless you keep feeding it? Here’s the truth. Anger is a choice. Neurologically, the stress chemicals that create anger naturally flush from your system in exactly 90 seconds, but we keep the anger alive by replaying the story, rehearsing our comeback.
Anger being a choice likely falls on unreceptive ears because many of us, me included, at least at times rely on our anger as a coping mechanism. That said, when I catch myself doing that, upon reflection I inevitably realize the anger was a bad choice.
More than once I have become angry and outraged and spewed forth that anger at someone. It has rarely been a useful emotion. It nearly always results in me feeling riled up and emotionally exhausted. My anger outbursts usually hurt me more than the person to whom they are directed.
I do not want to give the impression I am often that angry. I am not. I control my anger relatively well and cannot recall a recent incident of anger on that level. One of my own effective strategies is what I call my “72-hour rule.”
In “Responding Thoughtfully,” I wrote about my rule concerning responding to social media post drama but the “waiting” aspect aligns generally with Social’s strategy too.
When something highly contentious pops into my social media feed, or I hear it in real time, that is based on facts or circumstances that haven’t been adequately verified and sourced, or is just high school style drama that every community and group experiences, I try to wait 72 hours before responding.
The result? My rule has never failed to serve me well. Often, the issue and drama I would have commented about has already subsided or been corrected within those 72 hours. If I do respond, my comment is founded upon more current and better information than I would have had if I had fired off a response in the moment. Or as happens more frequently these days, I might simply decide to say nothing, either because my comment wouldn’t do much but kowtow to my own need to vent or because I’ve determined no comment is the best thing to do rather than stir up unnecessary anger or disagreement.
72 hours is far longer than Social’s suggestion that we wait for at least 90 seconds to allow the anger chemicals flushing through our body to subside, but the concept is the same. Do not respond immediately. Wait. Wait as long as is necessary to not allow the cyclic anger story we create in our heads to manifest and result in a less than useful response.
The video is chunked into short chapters. Each chapter addresses a certain aspect of squelching or managing our anger in a healthy manner. The video is only 15 minutes long and is worth watching in its entirety. I do not know a single person this video would not help. It offers some universally useful advice. While I outline some of the highlights of the video, the video offers lots of great illustrative examples to the points made that make the information more understandable.
In the first chapter, Social mentions a common refrain many of us have said, “They know how to push my buttons.” Social contends this is a myth and that the “buttons” we say others know how to push are actually “unhealed wounds or values violations” from our past.
When someone pushes your buttons, they’re showing you exactly where you still need healing.
An example from my own life is that I do not respond well to someone screaming at me. I grew up with a screaming and often out-of-control birth mother. Over time as a child, I learned to just shut down and go silent. To this day, that remains my usual response when someone screams at me. I shut down and go silent.
In at least one case in my life, the person screaming at me decided my shutting down was somehow a response worthy of yet more of their anger. But it is what it is. Part of healing is knowing what needs to be healed. My sometimes horrific upbringing with my birth mother elicited many lifelong emotional patterns and this is one, but it is something that I am aware of and that serves me well most of the time since anger answered with anger rarely does anyone any good.
In chapter two, Social suggests that anger is not really anger but rather an emotional security guard. Its purpose is to protect our feelings like hurt, fear, or shame.
When someone criticizes you and you get angry, you’re not really angry. You’re hurt that they don’t see your value. Anger feels safer than vulnerability, so it volunteers to be the spokesperson.
In chapter three, Social talks about the choice point discovery, noticing a choice point between a trigger and our response. Yet again, the concept of waiting to respond comes up phrased differently. Finding that choice point between trigger and response gives us the power to be the authors of our own experience.
Along with my 72-hour rule, I also practice the “wait a minute” strategy. I recall coaching an employee when I was still working in corporate life. Her tendency was to sometimes fire off angry or curt response to a coworker’s email. I coached her to implement a waiting period for a response. She did and tensions between her and other team members subsided considerably. Waiting has never proven to be a bad decision for me.
Social asks us in the video to think about people in our lives who never get rattled. They have mastered the space between trigger and response. But another thing I have noticed is that such people tend to end up elevated to be more admired and respected than people who spout anger. Calm is a superpower. Handling situations with calm and a lack of anger tends to endear people to others within their intimate, social, or work spheres.
In chapter four, Social suggests stepping outside of our self and attempting to calmly observe our emotions when anger arises. This again feels related to the “waiting” concept but from a different vantage point. Observing an emotion as dispassionately as possible gives us some emotional immunity from which to make better decisions because the anger is not controlling us.
Chapter five discusses using difficult people as emotional trainers. Phew, this is a tough one for me. The idea is that difficult people are not obstacles. They are instead “personal trainers for our emotional fitness.”
In my own life, I have done some of this in a sense. When I encounter a difficult person, I analyze what I can about them to try to determine what I should not be doing in my own life. I assume that if a person appears difficult to me, it is likely they are perceived that way by other people and I would do well to not demonstrate the same qualities of the difficult person.
Social suggests difficult people are showing us exactly where we need to grow. Hm, maybe. If growth means where to grow to better respond to anger or difficult people, then yes. But I do not think every difficult person is an avenue to learning something deep within us that needs to heal or grow. Sometimes we just need to figure out how to better manage and respond to difficult people.
That said, Social contends that difficult people can be used to develop our resilience and boundary setting skills. I agree with that. Leveraging difficult people to engage in emotional strength training is good advice.
When difficult people become trainers, you stop being a victim and become a student. Every interaction becomes an opportunity to level up emotionally.
Chapter 6 discusses boundaries and how to use them to protect your own peace. Social says boundaries are not walls to keep people out but rather they are gates for which you are the gatekeeper. They can protect your energy and emotional health without becoming an impenetrable fortress.
Admission. I am not always great at erecting my own boundaries. This is something I have struggled with for much of my life. A symptom of this fault is that for years it was difficult to say no to something even when inside of myself I knew no was the correct response. As a result, I allowed myself to agree to do certain things I regretted committing to do. Thankfully, I have learned that “No” is a complete sentence and I utter it with increasing frequency. It has led to more peace of mind and calm. I highly recommend fostering your ability to say no to things you really don’t want to do.
Chapter seven mentions a timeout protocol. I again think this is aligned with the “waiting” concept. It is framed as a strategic retreat rather than running away from the situation. Whether you are removing yourself from a triggering situation or simply honoring a gap in time before responding, it still boils down to waiting before responding as a good habit to develop.
Five minutes of space can save hours of cleanup conversations.
Chapter eight talks about the trigger map method which is about knowing your emotional landmines and figuring out how to walk around them and not step on them. Finding the patterns that point out our emotional landmines can save us from emotional turmoil in the future.
I mentioned my birth mother and the ramifications of her less than stellar upbringing of me as one of the emotional landmines of which I am quite aware. There are plenty of others I have identified over time. Knowing them ahead of time can bring you so much peace that I cannot recommend enough mapping your own landmines.
Social suggests you keep a journal for one week to better identify people or situations that trigger you. The journal can expose recurring patterns. I might do this. I find those kinds of exercises difficult to do for some reason, but it is not a bad idea.
Chapter nine is about compassionate distance, the ability to care about someone without carrying their emotions.
You can love someone without living their drama.
Establishing a healthy distance can foster compassion without drowning you in their emotional turmoil. Burned out helpers help no one. This is also why we all need breaks from anything that riles us up like big social ills or political chaos. Healthy breaks keep us better able to help others.
Finally, chapter 10 explains that we often are not experiencing reality but rather the story we have created in our own minds. The idea is to change the story that is repeating in our head which changes our emotional experience.
Many of our reactions to our lived experience are our interpretations, not based on facts. I have seen this play out so many times. I have a certain emotional reaction to someone’s comments or behavior, taking it personally, then later learn that the source of their comment or behavior was something internal to them and not related to me at all.
When you become conscious of your stories, you stop being a victim of your interpretations. You become the conscious creator of your experience.
In this chapter section, the narrator said the following which is now going to become one of my favorite quotes.
Knowledge without practice is just entertainment.
I am deviating from the topic a bit here, but this quote really rang true for me. Think about all the people you know who consume self-help content nonstop, yet they do not put into practice what they learn. Self-help becomes entertainment and entirely not useful.
The same can be said when we learn things about ourselves but do not practice the changes in thinking or behavior we know would lead to a better life.
No matter what we learn that might improve our lives in some way, we have to integrate that into our regular thinking processes or they will not stick. We have to practice. That practice can get easier, but it never stops, because we hopefully do not stop trying to be better people and live better lives.
Let me again recommend you watch the video. Send it to friends. Consider following Jamie Social’s channel for some excellent video content.
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