Looking for a Test for Anger Disorder?

“Curious if you might suffer from anger disorder? Should you go see a doctor?”

Stress is the body and mind’s response to change.

More specifically, stress results from an inability to effectively manage the change experienced in your environment.

Over time, chronic or extreme stress tends to express itself either in increased susceptibility to physical illnesses or in a stress-related psychological injury like anger disorder.

Different people respond to stress in different ways. Given the same set of stressful events some people will be able to successfully manage the stress and some will not, depending upon the nature the stress and the particular person’s skill in stress management.

If your stress threshold is not high enough you might respond to chronic or extreme stress by falling into depression. Others might become afflicted with anxiety, and still others could develop anger disorder.

These sorts of psychological conditions are more closely related than simply sharing a root cause. Many people understand that anxiety and depression are two sides of the same coin.

But not everyone is familiar with the truth expressed in the axiom …

“Depression is simply anger turned inwards.”

Developing a test for anger disorder is a bit different than a test for anxiety disorder or a test for depression.

I have written at length in the above articles about how the most important test for anxiety or depression is the test you give yourself.

This is because anxiety and depression are both essentially introverted conditions. What I mean by “introverted” is that their symptoms primarily affect the person suffering from the stress.

However, anger disorder is both an introverted and an extroverted condition.

Think about it … when you’re sad or nervous, those are emotions or mental states that you experience primarily as an individual. Sure, being depressed can also “bring down” the people around you, but you primarily experience anxiety and depression on your own.

The kind of anger and rage expressed by someone suffering from anger disorder is by definition something experienced in a direct way not only by the person suffering from the condition but by the people around them.

When you explode in a fit of anger and rage, it’s not just you but the people around you who suffer the effect of a lack of stress management.

On the other hand, the answer is not to simply bottle up or repress your anger – that’s often the cause of anger disorder itself!

Obviously there are good and bad ways to deal with anger as an emotion. But a discussion of all the different healthy and unhealthy ways to express your anger is really beyond the scope of this article.

For the purposes of outlining a test for anxiety disorder you have to trust your own judgment, but you also have to trust the judgment of the people around you.

It really all boils down to control. How often do you lose control over your own words and actions as a result of your anger?

This is where you have to trust the opinions of the people close to you. Often you are not even aware of your own losses of control – if you were, you would be much less likely to lose control in the first place.

If even one person in your life has experienced you genuinely losing control of yourself as a result of anger, you need to be honest with yourself about the stress in your life and take measures to bring it back under control.

You may even decide that you need to go see a therapist or a shrink – and only you can make that decision.

In the mean time, take a look at my HARDCORE Stress Management™ program which works very well for people suffering from anger disorder because it deals with the root cause, the stress.

Looking for a Test for Anxiety?
Looking for a Test for Depression?