Controlling your temper isn’t always easy. But these effective anger management techniques will help give you the upper hand.
If your outbursts, rages or bullying are negatively affecting relationships with family, friends, co-workers and even complete strangers, it’s time to change the way you express your anger. You can take steps on your own to improve your anger management.
Anger management tips
Here are some anger management tips to help get your anger under control:
- Take a “time out.” Although it may seem cliche, counting to 10 before reacting, or leaving the situation altogether, really can defuse your temper.
- Do something physically exerting. Physical activity can provide an outlet for your emotions, especially if you’re about to erupt. Go for a brisk walk or a run, swim, lift weights or shoot baskets.
- Find ways to calm and soothe yourself. Practice deep-breathing exercises, visualize a relaxing scene, or repeat a calming word or phrase to yourself, such as “take it easy.” You can also listen to music, paint, journal or do yoga.
- Once you’re calm, express your anger as soon as possible so that you aren’t left stewing. If you simply can’t express your anger in a controlled manner to the person who angered you, try talking to a family member, friend, counselor or another trusted person.
- Think carefully before you say anything so that you don’t end up saying something you’ll regret. Write a script and rehearse it so that you can stick to the issues.
- Work with the person who angered you to identify solutions to the situation.
- Use “I” statements when describing the problem to avoid criticizing or placing blame. For instance, say “I’m upset you didn’t help with the housework this evening,” instead of, “You should have helped with the housework.” To do otherwise will likely upset the other person and escalate tensions.
- Don’t hold a grudge. Forgive the other person. It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to behave exactly as you want.
- Use humor to release tensions, such as imagining yourself or the other person in silly situations. Don’t use sarcasm, though — it’s just another form of unhealthy expression.
- Keep an anger log to identify the kinds of situations that set you off and to monitor your reactions.
- Practice relaxation skills. Learning skills to relax and de-stress can also help control your temper when it may flare up.
A simple, eye-catching, customizable calendar
Desktop Calendar XP Publisher’s Description
If you’re down in the dumps for disproportionately long periods of time and you find yourself blaming the rest of the world for your misery, then perhaps a change of attitude is in order. These 10 tips for positive thinking may be able to give your outlook in life its much needed overhaul. So increase your chances for a more constructive perspective with these 10 tips for positive thinking:
- Recognize negative thoughts as they take shape and bury them before they take root. If you feel your mood darkening again, put a stop to these dangerous musings before you succumb to them. Rule your emotions, don’t let your emotions rule you.
- Hang out with people who think positive as well. This condition can be quite infectious.
- Just as contagious is a negative mindset. So avoid people who tend to think negatively on a constant basis. After all, who wants to hang around naysayers all the time?
- Work out and eat right. If you look good on the outside, it’ll be easier to feel good on the inside, too.
- De-clutter. Surround yourself only with the things you love and that make you feel good—framed family photos, favorite books, potted plants, works of art, or whatever else that’s meaningful to you.
- If people tell you you can’t do something, take that as a challenge and prove them wrong. Chances are, they themselves can’t do it or are too afraid to try and are simply bitter about it. If you show them it can be done after all, maybe they’ll even be inspired by your success. You can be a living tip for positive thinking to them.
- Just when you’re about to blow your top for all the seeming misfortunes that befall you, remind yourself of all your blessings instead. This practice can be very sobering, indeed.
- Be a volunteer or get involved in charity work. Not only will you realize the sheer number of people who have bigger problems than you do, but there is also such an emotional and even spiritual high to be experienced in helping others.
- De-stress. You’re more likely to be cranky if you’re perpetually stressed out. So get away from it all and recharge.
- Keep it up. Getting started is easy. It’s the maintenance that’s tricky. Make a habit out of thinking positively till it becomes an indelible part of who you are.
Follow these 10 tips for positive thinking and be successful in your search for a happier and healthier frame of mind.
If you aren’t sure, you will soon be able to download a tool from Google that will tell you once and for all if they are. If ISP’s aren’t going to tell their users exactly what is happening with their network connections, Google wants to make sure that these people have the ability to tell for themselves. This announcement is Google’s most recent attempt at raising awareness about net neutrality.
This isn’t the first time someone has made software to monitor your network to figure out if your ISP is doing anything fishy, NNSquad Network Measurement Agent is a tool that does exactly that already. In fact, this might actually be the tool Google is referring to. Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet Evangelist, is part of the NNSquad already.
It’s unclear what kind of effect something like this will have on the network neutrality debate, but it certainly can’t hurt.
Country star Sara Evans married former University of Alabama quarterback Jay Barker Saturday evening in an outdoor ceremony in Franklin, Tenn.
Evans’ eight-year-old son Avery, 8, walked his mother down the aisle.
The couple’s seven children (Sara Evans has three and Jay Barker has four from their previous marriages) were the only attendants.
The ceremony featured Nashville songwriter Marcus Hummon, a close friend of Evans’, singing “God Bless the Broken Road,” the Rascal Flatts hit he wrote - a song the couple says has deep meaning for their relationship.
Sara Evans, 37, wore an ivory silk taffeta Vera Wang gown with a halter neck and Jay Barker, 35, wore a Dolce and Gabbana suit.
The bride and groom had their first dance to Chris Brown’s “With You” and their 130 guests later boogied beneath a canopy of strung lights to a collection of R&B and pop hits spun by a local DJ.
Evans met Barker, the host of a sports radio show in Birmingham, Ala., via their minister, Joe Beam, who went on to officiate their wedding.
Both turned to him for support after their respective divorces.
“He was our own personal matchmaker,” laughs Evans, who says that Beam made both of them promise - before they even met one another - that they would let him officiate their wedding. “I think God told Joe to get us together.”
They were engaged in March.
“It was hard for me to believe he was real and that he loves me the way he loves me,” Evans said. “I thank God many times a day for bringing me Jay.”
Life is thought, and when we cease to think, we are not living. How we think, is the kind of life we live. Since we are able to control our thoughts, we can determine the course of our life and the way we feel during our time here.
“We are what we think.” - Buddha (BC)
It is very important to establish good thinking guidelines and follow them. Placing thoughts of peace and happiness in our minds will help to make our lives peaceful and happy. If we do not set our thoughts properly, we travel through life by way of places where we will wish we had not gone.
“It is the mind that maketh good or ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.” - Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
Our daily life includes thoughts associated with responsibilities concerning work, other people, and handling problems. If possible, try not to think of too many different things during your day, and don’t move or think too quickly. Start your morning with a plan to come through to bedtime relaxed, contented, and ready for a restful night’s sleep.
“Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.” - Arnold Bennett (1867-1932)
Reflect about things that can improve your feelings - learning, completing tasks and duties, pleasant and relaxing experiences, kind words. Think about your happiness, goals, life and its pleasures, your principles and your conduct. Think about enjoying the moment.
“Garner up pleasant thoughts in your mind, for pleasant thoughts make pleasant lives.” - John Wilkins (1614-1672)
What are you thinking about?
The interface is very nice and you could choose between 25 predefined skins or you could create your own. This is a very nice feature because you could use any picture for the background of the clock.
Pluses: It’s easy to customize and looks good on the desktop. It’s free.
Drawbacks / flaws: It was a little unstable during the test.
In conclusion: It’s pretty useful because, if you keep it in top of all other application, is easier to see than the ‘System Tray’ clock.
Clock! Publisher’s Description
Instant-messaging power users, rejoice: a barrier between two previously isolated realms of online chat is coming down.
A minor sidelight in the Yahoo-Google search ad deal announced Thursday is that the two companies “agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant-messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users,” the companies said. They’re not sharing further details at this stage, but it’s safe to bet that means people on Yahoo’s IM network will be able to chat with those on Google’s and vice-versa.
That’s a big step in the right direction.
IM is a useful if sometimes intrusive tool, especially in this day and age when the Internet has tightened ties among co-workers, family, and friends. But people and companies don’t always use the same networks, meaning that power users either must run multiple IM programs or try to bridge the divide with multiprotocol packages such as Trillian, Adium, Digsby, Kopete, or Pidgin.
IM today is similar to the early days of electronic mail, when users couldn’t send messages between incompatible services such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Happily, the Internet’s SMTP standard for e-mail emerged victorious, and now we only need one e-mail address (leaving aside the issue of personal vs. work identities, but that’s a story for another day).
A power user’s plight
I’m one of those heavy IM users tormented by today’s situation. I have to talk to people on Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and Google Talk. It’s a pain having separate usernames for each service, but much worse is looking for software that centralizes IM for me.
I recognize I’m not a representative sample of the population at large. I have 797 buddies, many of them the same people represented on multiple services.
AOL said in a statement, in effect, that I am indeed an anomaly. “We have no evidence that interoperating with other consumer IM services is of great interest to AIM users,” the company said.
But I’ve seen the problem worsen in the years I’ve used IM, and I believe mainstream people will encounter this problem with greater frequency as they change jobs, graduate from schools, meet new friends, and otherwise expand their social horizons.
Walled gardens
There are signs that these days are numbered. As Internet companies race to build rich communities and services on the Web, “walled gardens” have become widely disparaged as a relic.
Yahoo, for example, has pledged to expose formerly closed parts of its business through its Yahoo Open Strategy. And AOL is opening up AIM some, for example, letting Meebo and eBuddy link up.
But it’ll take awhile to convince me that the IM walls are truly coming down.
For one thing, most of the progress to date has been through interoperability agreements that permit one service to link with another. That’s like CompuServe building a custom gateway to translate and route e-mail from AOL–helpful, but symptomatic of the larger problem. The more IM services there are, the more gateways each service needs to work with the others, and more services are cropping up as companies such as MySpace, Skype, and Facebook add chat abilities.
What we really need is an IM communication standard. The obvious candidate is the XMPP protocol on which Google built its service but that none of the other major players use.
Google, unsurprisingly, shares my view. “The Web is based on open standards and protocols so users can use any browser on any operating system to visit any Web site. We think the open Web model ought to apply to IM,” Seth Demsey, senior product manager for Google Talk, said in a statement.
Of course, it’s a lot easier for underdogs to endorse standards, and Google has 1 percent share of IM users worldwide, according to ComScore figures in April.
Interoperability isn’t easy
To be fair, IM interoperability isn’t an easy technical problem to tackle for mammoth services with millions of users and messages. There also are privacy issues when one service is sharing data and buddy lists with another.
More complicated are higher-level features and services that IM companies have added atop basic text chat: status messages, avatars, file transfer, voice and video chat, message forwarding to mobile phones. I think there’s still value to unifying basic text chat even if higher-level features remain fragmented.
Then, of course, there are business reasons to keep things separate. Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft all display ads on their services, and AOL is trying to make its service into a foundation on which programmers will create online applications. Opening up IM connections to other services means, for example, that someone using AIM might not see the ads displayed on the AIM software.
I can’t help but wonder, though, if a unified IM landscape might spur faster growth and more extensive use of IM services–factors that mean those people using popular chat software could spend even more time gazing at ads.
Other interoperability deals
There are some other interoperability deals besides the Yahoo-Google one announced Thursday. Most notably, users of Microsoft and Yahoo instant-messenger services can link up and chat if they’re using recent versions of the software.
And there could be more progress on this front: “Microsoft looks forward to continuing our interoperability reach to customers worldwide,” Brian Hall, Microsoft’s general manager of Windows Live, said in a statement.
Users of Apple iChat can link with AIM and Google.
Google’s situation is complicated, in part because it has multiple IM options. The company offers Google Talk in two incarnations: client software that can be installed on Windows machines and a gadget that runs in a Web browser. Those versions can work with any XMPP-based chat service. (They’re not popular, so you probably haven’t heard of them.)
Google also has Gmail chat, which runs alongside the company’s Web-based e-mail service. It can work with AIM.
So tell me: Am I an anomaly because I use multiple chat networks? And how do you solve your IM needs? Does a single IM client suffice, or do you use two to cover the bases? Send an e-mail to stephen.shankland@cnet.com or share your opinion in the feedback section below.
People often find it difficult to stop worrying. Worry tends to intrude into their mind at all times, interfering with work or other activities. A useful way of dealing with too much worry intruding in one’s mind is to set aside a “worry time”.
1. Set aside a “Worry time”
People often find it difficult to stop worrying. Worry tends to intrude into their mind at all times, interfering with work or other activities. A useful way of dealing with too much worry intruding in one’s mind is to set aside a “worry time”. This can be, for example, half an hour just after work. At any other time, when a worrying issue comes to mind, acknowledge to yourself that you need to think it through, and note that you will do so during your “worry time”. At the appointed time, think the issue through and try to use one of the approaches below. Before then, give yourself permission to put it out of your mind and to get on with the task at hand.
2. Is the problem solvable?
Worrying partly functions as a problem solving process. It alerts us to the possibility of something bad happening, and motivates us to come up with solutions to avoid bad outcomes. However, worriers often find it difficult to stop worrying because they attempt to solve problems that are not immediately solvable. So, during your worry time, the first thing to ask yourself is whether your worry involves a solvable problem or not.
3. If the problem is solvable…
Worriers also find it difficult to stop worrying because they keep trying to solve a problem to perfection. This is rarely possible. So, when you are trying to solve a problem, make sure that you aim to find a reasonable, rather than a perfect, solution. Worriers are very good at thinking of all the reasons why a possible solution would NOT work. They are not very good at thinking of any reason why a possible solution WOULD work. So, when you are trying to problem solve, make sure that you evaluate possible solutions in a more balanced way, not only paying attention to what may go wrong, but also to what may go right.
4. Be aware of unhelpful thoughts
One main reason why problems and solutions seem so bad is that when we worry, we tend to overestimate two things. First, we tend to overestimate how likely it is that bad things will happen. Second, we tend to overestimate how bad they would be, should they happen. Remind yourself of all the previous times when you worried about something that did not eventually happen. Try to become more realistic in your assessment of the likely outcomes. This does NOT mean being unreasonably positive. Just being more realistic.
5. Be your “best friend”
If you find it difficult to look at your negative thoughts objectively and challenge them to be more realistic, imagine that you are your own best friend. Think about all the negative things that you are thinking or saying to yourself: “I’m such a loser. I never get anything right. I might as well give up now…” And so on. If your best friend is saying these things about themselves, what would you say to them? How would you challenge their negativity and self-criticism? Now remind yourself to be your own best friend and challenge your own negative thinking the same way.
6. If the problem is not solvable…
Sometimes problems are not immediate solvable. During those times, it is important to use ‘emotionfocussed’, rather than ‘problem-focussed’ coping techniques. In other words, stop trying to solve something that is not solvable and learn to cope with it.
7. Use relaxation strategies
Because worry tends to be so pervasive, worriers often experience chronic irritability, muscle tension, concentration difficulties, sleep problems, indecision and agitation - as if being ‘on edge’ and unable to relax all the time. It is crucial therefore to make sure that occasionally you make a conscious effort to relax, even if for only a few minutes a day. There are a number of effective relaxation techniques, but physical exercise may be one of the best options.
8. Learn a special ‘relaxation’ technique: Mindfulness
A new technique that has been shown to be very useful to reduce worry and anxiety is ‘mindfulness’. It is of course not new; it comes from very old Eastern meditative traditions. One of the main points of mindfulness is that one tries to pay attention to the present moment. In order to worry, your attention needs to be focussed on the future. If you successfully focus your attention on the present, you will find that your worrying stops. There are a number of good introductory books available on mindfulness that you may like to try.
9. Develop good sleeping habits
Worry tends to interfere with sleep. In fact, most people do most of their worrying at night, while trying to fall asleep. This is of course a very unhelpful habit, and may lead you to lie awake for hours, worrying about not being able to sleep! It is best to remind yourself to worry only during your ‘worry time’, and to use bedtime as your time for relaxation and recuperation.
10. Social support
Having a few friends to have fun with and to help you through difficult times is very important. Make sure you keep in touch and have ‘time out’. However, it is also important to make sure that those times are not spent with you worrying and so not being able to enjoy yourself. Make sure you remind yourself of your ‘worry time’ and enjoy your ‘non-worry time’, paying attention to the present moment as much as possible.
IZArc is the ultimate freeware archive utility supporting many archive formats like: 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO. With a modern easy-to-use interface, IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools. It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more. IZArc has also build-in multilanguage support.
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