Manage Your Anger By Treating It Like Fire

The Stoic philosopher Seneca likened anger to temporary madness. We commonly describe enraged people by saying they aren’t themselves, which implies a loss of personal control. They aren’t behaving rationally.

Anger is something that visits all of us at times for a variety of reasons and in varying intensities, but it is almost always a destructive force, very much like a wildfire. Fire can be a useful tool, but it can also easily burn out of control, consuming everything in its path (much like anger).

The key to mastering anger is to learn to treat it the same way we treat fire.

If done correctly, fire itself can be easily handled. With proper precautions, we can decide how big to make the fire or we can easily snuff it out when it’s small. The goal, then, is to learn about it so that we can be in charge of it. Knowing how fire works provides us with the information we need to put it out. It is much easier to put out a small fire than it is to put out a conflagration.

So what’s there to know about fire that can help us here? Remember that all fires need heat, fuel, and oxygen. With this in mind, we can learn to “manage” our fires to keep them from blazing out of control.

Note: I’m using anger to illustrate this concept, but this can be done with any emotion. I choose…