Anger Managed in Time (Blog)

Talk about a time you lost your temper.


This happened just recently, and I remember it because it hadn't happened in a while. I was doing a baseball draft for this season's fantasy baseball. It was in the middle of the draft and my computer started freezing up. There's only a minute to make picks, so I missed a few picks and they were auto selected for me based on what Yahoo ranked these players.

Obviously, this was no big deal. It's just for fun, I'm not losing any money over it, and it's just a game. But I got mad. I mean I was cursing mad. I felt my blood pressure going up and I was frustrated. It seems funny and silly to think about it now, and the picks that were not made by me were actually pretty good ones, but I definitely lost my temper.

The bad thing about losing your temper is that it can mess up your whole day. I've written about my younger days a little here, and there were times when I was very angry. It usually came from being depressed and not knowing how to deal with it. Again, I'm an expert at it now, dealing with stress, though that's not to say that I don't get depressed or stressed out anymore, because I do. But you carry it with you if you get angry, and it's a lot easier in life if you learn to laugh some things off.

It's quite all right to be down sometimes. I don't think you revel in it, but it's an unrealistic expectation to be up all the time. I think you can shoot for most of the time, and you would be doing okay.

I used to lose my temper with people I cared about. If a friend was doing something that I thought was stupid, I would let her know. I learned that that was the worst thing I could do probably, and that I should just listen sometimes, or at least wait until my opinion was asked for.

I try to be honest about myself. I would never say I don't worry about things that seem stupid or silly to someone observing me from an outside perspective. I over-analyze things a lot, and I sometimes expect everything to mean something. Sometimes a horse is just a horse, though.

I'm going on a tangent a little, but what I'm trying to say is that emotions and temper and control and patience are all things that you constantly work on. Even the most patient and well-balanced people in the world could stand to work on something. I think it's okay to lose control of your emotions from time to time, but making a habit of it is just bad for you. Learn to laugh at yourself.

This post is part of The Scintilla Project.