3 Little Words That Can Instantly Defuse Your Anger

If anger has ever caused you to do something you later regretted, you know how overpowering the emotion can feel. 'Affect labeling' might be a handy solution.

Say "this is rage" - three words, three seconds - either out loud or silently to yourself, and you've already kept the feeling from swallowing you whole. The technique is called affect labeling - an implicit emotional regulation strategy - and it works by softening the intensity of whatever's hitting you.

"It turns down the volume on something that can feel really intense and overwhelming," Lizzie Cleary, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, told Time magazine. “It makes it a little bit quieter and more understandable."

The technique can also be applied to fear, grief, or any other upsetting feeling. It works by wedging a space between you and your emotion. “Before you label an emotion, you are the emotion,” says mental health treatment researcher Shannon Sauer-Zavala. That distance is empowering, allowing you to recognize you aren’t your feelings, and they don’t control you. That’s why the wording is important - “this is rage,” rather than “I’m angry,” or “this is anxiety,” rather than “I’m anxious.”

Strong emotions cause the amygdala (the brain’s emotional processing center and threat detector) to start firing. But naming the feeling activates the prefrontal cortex, which balances emotions with logic and reasoning, says Cleary, pointing to a study that demonstrated this effect. That switch can buy you some time - enough to make a decision you won’t have to regret in the future.

​