Identify and Manage Anger Triggers Today

(gentle music) Headspace Studios. (relaxing music) Hi, my name is Nika and welcome to Radio Headspace, and to Wednesday. As you know, I'm a coach here at Headspace, and one of my specialties just happens to be anger. And this week is about guess what? Anger. So last week I'm on this email list and I sent an email to the whole group and I made a mistake. I'm human. And someone on the list replied all and let everyone know that I made a mistake. Really? You could have just sent it to me, or a Slack, or just something private. In that moment though, I had to check myself, because this sort of thing is a real trigger for me. I know this, I think about it, I work on it. So today I'm gonna talk about how the small acts of identifying your anger triggers can have a transformational effect on your life. So many years ago, I worked with a CPA, who came to see me because it was actually mandated by his job to come because he would have all these angry outbursts with coworkers. When he first got there, which for most people who've been mandated, he was not happy to be there, which I understand. But as we began to peel back the layers, his anger was not just happening at work, it was happening at home too with his wife. So not from an abusive standpoint, but just getting upset over really little things. And what he began to learn, and I also learned, was that he had an inability to communicate. He just didn't know how to talk about his feelings. He didn't even know what his feelings actually were. So some of what we worked on included his anger-inducing thoughts, right? Because I believe that any situation that happens is neutral. So what do I mean when I say any situation is neutral? What I mean is that you and I can be in the same situation, see the same thing, be it the same job, be on the same interstate, experience the same exact thing, and we're gonna respond and think differently about it. So it's neutral. You get to decide how you want to think about that, and if this is the situation that goes on and on and on and on, right? It happens all the time, then if you know it's coming, like I know that I'm going to go to work and someone is going to say or do something that I don't like, let me practice a new thought about this situation or event. Let me practice this before it happens. And so he started doing that. And so the same things that would get him angry, upset, bothered, whatever, now he had a new thought about it. So if it was every time Shirley came in and asked me about an accounting report, and let's say every time she did that, I felt...