How to Overcome Fear And Control Your Anger

 

I, for most of the time, keep on contemplating whether there exists a way for the readers, who read my blog, to become so strong and fierce from the inside that they themselves can overcome Fear and control their Anger, that too in just seconds.

Let’s face it, Fear and Anger are pervasive problems in today’s world. I am sure we all go through these problems. Sometimes we express anger through our bodies, sometimes through our wordings, or sometimes we keep it within ourselves as thoughts. The same goes for fear as well.

I don’t know how many of you are aware, but emotions like fear and anger are pretty deteriorating for our health, as claimed by numerous scientific studies around the world. These emotions can ruin your relationships as it destroys the very foundation of it. The fear of losing the relationship or expressing anger on trivial things is a one-way ticket to end any kind of relationship you have.

Showing anger to the wrong person at the wrong time at the wrong place in the wrong situation can shake up your entire life. So let’s just go to the root cause of this and discover some practical solutions to overcome fear and control your anger, not just temporarily but permanently.

 

Control Your Anger Tiger

Let’s attack the first ghost: ‘Anger’.

The most important thing to understand here in order to overcome your anger is that you don’t get angry, you intentionally, deliberately, purposefully, knowingly, wilfully, and consciously DO anger!

Unless you accept this fact, you can never get rid of this ghost. The more you keep on thinking that “I unintentionally become angry” or “I am not in control when I get angry”, “I lose my head totally and all I am able to see is red, and I can’t help it” the more control it’s taking away from you.

Anger is not some nature’s call that comes periodically or something that you have no control on, it is a conscious choice you make. Anger is like Dance or any other activity that you are wilfully getting yourself into. You can dance all day or don’t dance at all, the choice is yours. Similar is the thing with anger too. 

Let me give you a real-life example to explain what I am saying.

People who have a job or work under someone can relate to it very well. So often you must have gone through the experience of your boss thrashing you for no good reason in front of the whole company, insulting and belittling you.

Ask yourself, at that particular point, do you get all fast and furious and start fighting with your boss, or do you become red with anger and point your finger towards your boss, warning him that this shouldn’t be repeated again?

Probably not, right? Unless you want it to be your last day in that company, you either listen to him without uttering a single word, or you keep your cool and try to comprehend the reason why you just got rebuked, and ultimately shake it off.

Now let’s take another situation. Say you are at home after a long day, and your kid starts pestering you or he made a small mistake and what do we do? We release all our anger and frustration on that little kid who might not be wrong after all. Sadly, this is the reality for so many families today.

If you analyze the two situations then you will get a better understanding of my point of view. 

In the first situation, you are feeling angry from the inside, but you resist and subdue it because you know very well that if you did anything even remotely stupid then it’s gonna be your loss.

In the other scenario, you know it very well too that the kid has nowhere else to go and you will probably get away with the whole thing by apologizing so you willingly and consciously let all your anger gush out.

To put it all in a nutshell, we express all the anger where we think we are in control, and interestingly we automatically control our anger where we are not in control.

Stop Fighting Something That Doesn’t Exist

It has become a habit, and yeah I know, “Old habits die hard”, but if you are serious about controlling your anger, then the first step to break free of this whole ‘anger thing’ is to accept and take full responsibility that “Yes, I choose to get angry”, “Yes, I have the power to decide whether to get angry or not”.

The minute you start saying that “Yes, I choose to portray anger”, “Yes, I let fear overpower me”, then you suddenly have a controller that can make you switch this habit just like that. If you have the power to choose to be angry, then you also have the power to not choose to be angry. Similarly, you also have the control to let ‘fear’ overpower you or not. 

Sometimes for our own fun, we scare ourselves. Because getting ‘scared’ intentionally is indeed a lot of fun, otherwise, why would so many people watch horror movies? Emotions like Fear and Anger have a certain degree of thrill, excitement, and a specific kind of power that you experience; which is precisely why you intentionally choose to indulge in these kinds of emotions. 

The more you try to fight to overcome your fear, the stronger your fear will become. You can’t fight something which doesn’t exist in reality. Fear and Anger are like ghosts, which are just a figment of our own imagination. The more attention and importance you give it, the more real and haunting and deteriorating it would become for you. 

These ghosts take your powers away from you. If you try to run away from it, its existence will simply become more threatening. So, what do you have to do? The next time, these ghosts of ‘Fear’ and ‘Anger’ try to scare or overpower you, you just have to look them in the eye (or I should say “in your mind”) and say “Bring it on, I am ready for you!”.

 

Why do we get angry?

We just talked about situations where you intentionally get angry and how you could have controlled it. But what if we make it so that we don’t even find ourselves in situations where there even is a possibility of us getting angry?

Why do such situations come up anyway? Strong beliefs.

Whenever we hold onto something really strongly and give it more importance in our head than it actually deserves, that’s where all the problem begins. We identifying ourselves with our beliefs become the breeding ground for getting angry.

The reason is simple. With a population of a staggering 7b+, it’s natural that different people with different backgrounds and different experiences are gonna have different belief systems. And when two people with different belief systems, who have pretty strongly held onto their beliefs, face each other, what ensues is nothing less than a miniature version of world war III. 

Such people feel the need to defend their beliefs because they have associated themselves with their beliefs and an attack on their beliefs is an attack on themselves. And why do they get so attached to their beliefs? 

Because they are hollow from the inside. They feel incomplete with themselves and to fill that void within they attach themselves to different religions, different perceptions, different cultures, different backgrounds, and so on.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to understand who we truly are from deep within. When you see it for a fact that you yourself are complete, that you don’t need anyone or anything else to fill you up or anything, you stop getting bothered when someone doesn’t conform with your beliefs.

Because only a limited entity feels threatened when you snatch something from it, but someone who’s already infinite, it doesn’t matter what you add or subtract, or even how much you add or subtract, it’s gonna remain infinite only.

 

The Silver Lining of Fear and Anger

Having said that, there’s some positive side to fear and anger as well.

Sometimes you gotta take a stand for what’s right and what’s not. And at situations like these, Anger can work as a catalyst in events like these to help make a valid point. Then at times when you gotta right a wrong, fixate a dent, help fight the war of ‘truth over lie’ and ‘right over wrong’, or simply doing something for the greater good—anger can come in handy.

Similar is the case with ‘fear. The fear of hurting someone because of your actions is a good type of fear. This is called compassion and one doesn’t have to fight this or be ashamed of it. Some people who always do what they want to do, without comprehending the impact it can have on society are really dangerous, both for society and themselves.

Let’s say you are driving a car and you see children crossing the street. So most people will drive carefully because of the fear of hurting the children, which is a good type of fear. 

The other kind of fear which is good for you is the fear of hurting yourself physically. If you are on the roof of a building, and you look down at the ground, then the fear of falling down is what will make you careful not to trip down. It will activate your body’s natural defense mechanism, which is ultimately essential for your survival.

So, these are real fears, where the liabilities are real and tangible, which helps us to preserve our lives better. But the fears which are based on reality, only account for 1% or less, the other 99% of fears are psychological and based on our imaginations. 

 

Don’t Underestimate the Power of ‘Space’

Viktor Frankly said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

This space is our superpower. The shorter the ‘space’, the more irrational your response is likely to be, because you are gonna react only on the basis of your memories or your old pattern instead of analyzing the present moment.

The wider this space is, the more room you will have to think outside the box and your actions are gonna be more rational than before. That’s the goal, to widen the gap, to stretch that space as much as you can. Make a promise to yourself, the next time any particular stimulus which invokes the feeling of anger or fear, you won’t react instantly, but instead, take a deep breath and will try to grasp the situation first.

This space makes you do one of the three things.

The first is to act without thinking, which is the dumbest of all. The second is to act after analyzing and working out all the options you have. The third is to do nothing at all, and just observe the things calmly and patiently.

One can harness infinite possibilities through this space. To overcome fear and control your anger are just two of the millions of possibilities you can excel at if you have control over this space.

The root cause of all our problems is that we act without thinking because our mind keeps on running in every direction and is anything but calm. And the best way to make your mind quiet is through harnessing intelligence from the space I just talked about. You can also call this space the portal to intelligence, and intelligence is what makes us different from the other animals.

 

You Can Be Intelligent Too

Animals are stuck at the level of mind only, humans on the other hand have the potential to rise above the mind, aka Intelligence; but unfortunately, the majority of us are stuck at the level of mind only. We are putting our intelligence in all kinds of wrong places which is why our minds control our lives.

This space is what differentiates a successful and an unsuccessful person. Successful people are aware of how to use this space to their advantage while unsuccessful people aren’t. If you want to harness this kind of intelligence, then you have to be in this ‘space’ for as long as you can. Start slow, even 1 sec is a great start.

Only you have the power to create this gap or space, and no one else is gonna swing a magic wand and miraculously get you what you wanted. This has got to be your commitment to choose, your decision to take, your life to make.

No feelings or ghosts of any kind can overpower you when you are the one who created them in the first place and not the other way round. You created this mind, the mind didn’t create you. Awaken yourselves to the infinite possibilities you have and make use of it to overcome fear and control your anger and a lot more.

To understand the reality you need to take a pause and let intelligence take over your mind and analyze the situation instead of passing judgments without thinking, solely on the basis of your memories.

Think about it, if someone knows your weak and vulnerable points, then he can literally puppet you according to his whims because you don’t have any control over yourself whatsoever. He can easily make you angry whenever he wants to and jeopardize your whole career or relationship just like that. You will become prey to his new scam because he knows you are greedy and you stop thinking when you see green. He can scare and haunt you and make you do things you don’t want to and you wouldn’t even know how you are being controlled.

Why? Because you are not utilizing that ‘space’ and acting without thinking, letting the mind take over you. 

You don’t have to fight or control your mind, just have to patiently observe the ghosts you forged yourself. Just looking at the ghost, and understanding that it is something created by your own mind is enough to scare the shit out of the ghost.

 

Don’t Let Fear and Anger Disturb the Peace Within

So, take a pledge, make a commitment, do a pinky promise, or whatever you believe in, that you won’t let these ghosts overpower you no matter what. The second thing to do is to look inside yourself and see all the ghosts that are living inside you and making you hollow and shallow.

Most of us are living under the misguided impression that our family, friends, relatives, or external situations are responsible for the debacle or failure going on in our lives. All they do is point fingers, play the victim card, and do everything but looking inside their own self. They don’t even change themselves and talk about changing the world. Well, you are a part of the world too, so start with yourself. 

Your mind is like serene waters, and emotions like fear, anger, hate, jealousy are causing havoc and disturbing that peace within. These emotions are eating you up, and you don’t even know-how and in what ways. People are running senselessly from one place to another, from one goal to another, from one desire to another throughout their lives. 

Now, I am not saying that you should stop running. You should run for when it’s required. But you should also take a pause every day and reflect upon yourselves as to what you are doing and why you are doing what you are doing if you want to overcome fear and control your anger and tackle the other ghosts.

 

Knock Knock, Let Yourself IN

If you want to remain happy and peaceful, have good relationships, peace of mind, live life to its fullest, become absolutely fearless, and want to experience the real kind of happiness from within; then you just have to clean up your mess from the inside—there’s no other external temporary solution to this.

One can’t possibly compare the peace of mind with all the materialistic accomplishments one can imagine in their wildest of dreams on the other. All the wealth of this entire world on one hand, and peace of mind on the other; then the former isn’t worth 2 cents in front of the latter.

Even if you are a billionaire but still struggle with ghosts like fear and anger which is making your mind restless, then what good is that money for? Most people may look all shiny and glittery from the outside, but internally they are all struggling to overcome fear, control their anger, and become stronger in life. 

Every spiritual practice in this world has the end goal of making the mind calm and peaceful. Your own mind, not your neighbors’ mind. Once you clean your temple cum body, then the God in you will do the rest. God doesn’t reside outside you in temples, churches, or mosques. It resides in you and you only.

Once you overcome your fear and other ghosts, then God will have no choice but to do what’s in his basic nature: LOVE. He will love you all the way. Call him Ram, Rahim, Jesus; doesn’t matter. Every name is his name because he doesn’t have a  name.

Also, the Love I talked about, isn’t the same as the world thinks. They say “I love YOU”, signifying that there are two entities who are supposedly in love. This kind of love is often impure, fake, and conditional. But the love of GOD is pure, real, and unconditional.

Expectations and conditions only arise when there are two, “I love you”, so I expect you to love me back and so on. When one is free from “I” and “You”, then comes the real love, the kind of love, completely free from expectations and conditions. When there’s no “I”, then the level of ego takes a nosedive, the mind becomes obvious and free from all the negativities and sufferings that were stopping it from experiencing all the real goodies of the world. Fear, anger, and all the other ghosts are keeping you from experiencing the kind of love you were meant to receive.

 

Final Thoughts

All the clutter in the mind is taking you farther away from what’s actually inseparable from you. Start looking inside yourself to overcome your fear, anger, and other ghosts. Just by observing it patiently. The moment you look at the ghost, it will freak the hell out and vanish just like that. But we aren’t looking only.

One simply needs to look at these ghosts in the eye and say, “I am not afraid of you, so go ahead, give it your best shot, let me see what you can do.” or something like “You aren’t real, if you are what you say you are, then come in front of me!” The point is that self-talk works. Create some shit up and say it to yourself convincingly and then witness the magic happening.  

We are either busy denying the existence of such ghosts or fighting these imaginations which is precisely what’s keeping it alive and making it stronger every passing moment. Don’t confuse yourself with your ghosts. The more important thing to understand is that you are not the ghost itself, you are the one who can see the ghost.

Just by looking at it, your intelligence will jump in and does what it’s meant to do, it will bring back your senses and will make you realize your true potential. 

 

 

 

All you have to do is….. take a Pause. Now go scare some Ghosts!