Uncontrolled anger can lead to wanton aggression, heated conflict, and a host of negative consequences. But doesn’t anger serve a useful purpose, motivating us to right a wrong, address a grievance, or correct an injustice? Not really.
Whatever useful signal anger may provide in alerting us to a wrong we may have suffered, acting in anger often makes matters worse. Anger doesn’t extinguish fires but only adds fuel to them, clouding our judgment and inciting us to act on impulse regardless of consequences. We don’t need to feel anger to rectify unfairness or respond to an insult. We can act assertively, not aggressively, to remedy situations we perceive as unfair or undeserved, while also keeping our cool.
The Stoic philosophers of ancient times had much to say about anger that still rings true today.
Anger Is a Choice, Not a Reflex
As the Stoic sage Epictetus advised, “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.” It may seem that anger is something that happens to us, not something we make happen. We may say we are overcome by anger, as though it acts on its own accord. But anger is a choice, not a reflex, although it may not be a rational choice.
The human brain is preprogrammed to respond quickly to provocations, all the better in preparing us to either flee or fight off a perceived threat or hostile encounter. We can quickly become “hot under the collar,” but we can also give the thinking brain time to kick in, giving us a chance to analyze and evaluate the situation, to step back and think through our actions before blurting something out—or acting out aggressively.
Let’s say someone bumps into you when getting off a bus and instead of offering an apology, they say, “Hey, get out of the way, jerk.” Outraged, you feel anger rising in the pit of your stomach, which could lead to unfortunate consequences if things get out of hand. Your gut reaction might be to respond with an expletive or perhaps an aggressive gesture involving your middle finger. But you can choose to go in a different direction, letting cooler heads prevail. The buds of anger can be held back from blooming if we exercise our rational brain. It is a choice we make in provocative situations, not an instinctive reaction we are compelled to follow.
Scale Back Your Expectations of Others
They are annoying. They are unfair, even unprincipled. They care only about themselves. They are selfish. They are nasty and inconsiderate. They disappoint you, even when you expect so little from them. They are. . . other people. Yet despite their many flaws, you still interact with them, depend on them, and care about them. As Marcus Aurelius, the 2nd-century Stoic philosopher who also happened to be Emperor of Rome, put it, “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly… And so none of them can hurt me.” If the Emperor of Rome couldn’t get people to treat him better, who are we to expect anything different from the people we encounter in our daily life?
No One Can Make You Angry Without Your Permission
We open our pores to people when we let their words or actions affect how we feel or invest our self-esteem in their opinions of us. Closing our pores means taking ownership of our own emotions and ways we respond to provocations. You cannot control what others do, but you can control how you respond to them. Anger, like other emotions such as fear, guilt, worry, or disgust, is a private mental experience that no one else can tamper with without our permission.
Don’t let others push your buttons. Suppose someone cheats you in a business deal. You have every right to redress a grievance, to right a wrong, but how you feel about it and what you do about it is up to you. People get under our skin because we open our pores to them. People may treat us badly, but if they succeed in provoking us to anger, it is because we allow them. Marcus advised that when we let go of the belief that we have been injured, we also let go of the feeling of injury. So goes the popular expression, “Don’t get mad; get even.”
The Stoics believed that things that happen to us don’t determine how we feel; what matters to our emotional well-being is how we interpret them and react to them. Shakespeare voiced this Stoic sentiment when he penned in Hamlet, “… nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” When someone treats us badly, we may react in anger if we take it personally and let our emotions boil over. But we can curb a hostile impulse by saying to ourselves that the person did what they thought was right, no matter how misguided they may have been. The bottom line is that while we can’t control what others do, we can control how we react to them. This understanding empowers us to manage our emotional reactions.
Pause to Reflect
Elsewhere on my blog, I focused on suggestions for controlling anger passed down from one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, who famously advised us that when angry, we should count to 10 before we speak, and if very angry, count to 100.
When you feel yourself becoming angry, delay your response. Delaying techniques are grounded in ancient wisdom, especially that expressed by the Roman Stoic Seneca, who advised pausing because anger loses its momentum when time interrupts it. As Seneca noted, “The greatest remedy for anger is delay.”
Here are some suggestions for putting the delay principle into practice when facing angering situations:
- Take five slow breaths.
- Count backwards, slowly, from 10.
- Say nothing until the emotion subsides.
Tell the other person that you need a moment and walk away before things get out of hand. A simple delay can interrupt impulsive anger. Then, come back with a thoughtful response that takes the other person’s perspective into account, while also expressing your own. You may not reach an agreement, but the other person will likely feel they are being heard.
Laugh It Off
The contemporary Stoic philosopher William Irvine suggests that if you laugh off an insult, it loses its power to make you angry. The situation at hand becomes a problem to be solved, a challenge to face, not a cause for a heated response. Keeping your cool when others get bent out of shape puts you in control—and that makes you stronger.
© 2026 Jeffrey S. Nevid. All rights reserved.
