While it’s not always pleasant, anger is a normal human emotion. If managed effectively it can even be a healthy and useful force. In this episode, Dr Tim Sharp will leave you with a deeper understanding of what anger really is, and help you to discover how it manifests itself in your life.

Inspired by one of his favourite quotes of all time, Dr Tim Sharp explains the importance of learning how to pause before we act. Becoming familiar with this pause, and learning how to harness it, will become an incredibly important step on your journey to mastering anger.

While we often can’t change the situations or events that happen to us, we can change how we think and feel about them. In this episode, Dr Tim Sharp will teach you simple mindfulness techniques and then walk you through the process of challenging and changing your thought patterns to allow you to move through emotions like anger faster, and with less intensity.

Unfortunately, when we’re very angry, many of us find it hard to think clearly. We hyper-fixate on the negative and tend to oversimplify the situation. Drawing on his knowledge of contemporary positive psychology strategies, Dr Tim Sharp shares a remarkably effective series of tools to help you find your way through complicated, emotional situations that are triggering or causing you to feel anger.

Where does your anger come from? In episode five of Habits for Mastering Anger, Dr Tim Sharp will help you understand the deep, underlying beliefs that shape the way you see the world, so that you can better control the impulses and responses you tend to have, and understand where strong, overwhelming emotions, like anger, originally stem from.

In many ways, empathy is one of the most powerful antidotes to anger. It can powerfully connect us to others, and play an important role in reducing distress and promoting positive emotions, such as happiness and life satisfaction. So, how can you learn to be more empathetic and develop a greater understanding of others?

Should we really care about what others think? How do your expectations play a role in your anger? In this episode, Dr Tim Sharp shares research from positive psychology that shows that we need other people in our lives, and are hard-wired to care about what others think of us. But, how can we do this in a healthy way, and how do we choose who to listen to, and which opinions to value?

Mastering anger, especially when another person is involved, can frequently benefit from better communication. For a variety of reasons, many of us don’t communicate as effectively as we could, so in this step, Dr Tim Sharp breaks down how to communicate assertively, without being passive or aggressive, so you can respect and maintain good relationships with others.