The Anger Fallacy Workbook: Practical Exercises for Overcoming Irritation, Frustration and Anger

Based on their ground-breaking book The Anger Fallacy, leading psychologists Ross Menzies and Steven Laurent have put together 35 simple, practical exercises to help rid your life of anger. In this workbook you will learn to:

• find humour or gratitude in annoying situations
• develop a more enlightened attitude to how people ‘should’ behave
• ditch the bad habit of singling out one person to blame
• discover the key to patience
• and much, much more…

Using this workbook, either on your own or with a therapist, you can practice the anger management concepts from The Anger Fallacy, and learn to master anger, the most toxic of emotions.

Table of Contents

About the Authors

Acknowledgements

Preface

Exercise 1: Anger Monitoring

Exercise 2: Identifying ‘Shoulds’

Exercise 3: Finding Alternatives to ‘Shoulds’

Exercise 4: Recognising the Arbitrariness and Silliness of Anger

Exercise 5: Finding Humour

Exercise 6: Mea Culpa — Apologising for Your Anger

Exercise 7: Explaining the Origin of Your ‘Shoulds’

Exercise 8: Explaining the Origin of Someone Else’s ‘Shoulds’

Exercise 9: Cultivating Gratitude

Exercise 10: Overcoming the Need for Fairness

Exercise 11:  What Went Well Today?

Exercise 12: Identifying the Costs of Your Anger

Exercise 13: Identifying How Anger Interferes With Problem-Solving 

in Real Situations

Exercise 14: Nonuniversality of Ethics — Differences in law

Exercise 15: Nonuniversality of Ethics — the Case of Killing

Exercise 16: The Ugliness of Other People’s Anger

Exercise 17: The Ugliness of Your Own Anger

Exercise 18: Anger in Situations Beyond Your Control

Exercise 19: Your Own Anger in Situations Beyond Your Control

Exercise 20: Mindfulness — Living in The Moment

Exercise 21: Does the Scene Really Matter? Using the Memoirs Test

Exercise 22: Using a Responsibility Pie

Exercise 23: Change Your Attempts to Influence Those Around You

Exercise 24: In Other People’s Words

Exercise 25: Getting Into the Skin of the Other Person

Exercise 26: Compassion Visualisation

Exercise 27: Practising Patience

Exercise 28: Understanding Other People’s Interests and Activities

Exercise 29: Identifying With Both Sides

Exercise 30: The Egocentricity of Anger

Exercise 31: Anger as Frustrated Craving

Exercise 32: Being Servile for One Hour

Exercise 33: See Miscreants as Fascinating or Humorous Machines

Exercise 34: Look After the State of Your Organism

Exercise 35: Who Do You Wish To Become?