Every human being and animal on the planet experiences some form of anger. For humans, anger is a basic emotion. It is the type of feeling we let out when we feel hurt, abused, mistreated or feel threatened by something. In science our reaction as anger is related to the fight and flight mechanism built into us since cave man days. It is described as a predominant feeling that occurs behaviorally, cognitively and physiologically when we perceive a threat or something about to hurt us.
Like fight and flight which is our response to danger, physically when we are angry our body responds first. When we feel anger coming on us our hearts start to beat faster, our blood pressure rises and hormones are released from the brain into the blood stream. These are the same reactions that occur when our bodies experience fear from danger. Anger triggers our auto nervous system as it does with fear and danger. Being angry is on automatic response first and then we either control it through our thought processes. If we do not consciously control anger it will controls us.
Anger like happiness is a subjective emotion based on our perceptions of a situation at a given time. Also everyone has a different tolerance level to things that may or may not make them angry. What may anger one person strongly may just mildly annoy another. The actual emotion of anger lasts in varied times depending on the person's intensity of the anger they feel. A person's time span for anger is correlated to their anger threshold. This means based on how fast a person reacts by getting angry also affects how long they may actually remain angry. Those who tend to get angry quicker harbor anger longer than those that don't. Then there are angry people who don't even realize their anger. These are the kind of folks that will behave angrily but don't see it as such. You tell them they are angry because their behavior indicates it. They may deny it because they do not realize it.
Experts on behavior say that the average person gets angry at least once a day; and peeved (very angry) at least two to three times in a course of a day. There are also those anger management specialists who say people actually get angry at least 15 times in a day. In reality it's not the amount of time in a day that really matters in terms of anger. The point is that all humans get angry on a regular basis living in the world. Anger is a normal emotion that everyone experiences at some point. When we get angry its okay to release it, if it's done in a constructive and in positive fashion. Positive anger implies thought is used to defuse the anger as we act on it. This means the person takes time even as little as 10 seconds to process the anger before reacting. It is when the thought process goes out the window when we are angry that there becomes possibility of harming one's self and those around them. The difference of thinking first before acting when angry may mean the difference between yelling at someone or knocking them unconscious.
