Brenda Shoshanna - The Anger Diet: Thirty Days to Stress-Free Living

I WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE AND THANK my wonderful editor, Dorothy OBrien, and my ever-loving family and friends who have been there as a source of caring, understanding, and endless support. I thank Adam, Gerry, Melissa, Abram, Joshua, Yana, Jeff Asbell, Haskell Fleishaker, Ed Glassing, Martin Hara, Leslie Malin, Fran Perillo, Richard Schiffman, William Solomon, Carolyn Stark, Bernie Starr, Faye Tabakman, and Jacques Van Engel. I particularly acknowledge the wonderful contribution and inspiration of four beautiful children, Zoe, Remy, Jakey Bohrer, and Maya.

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.

Buddhist prayer

E VERYONE WANTS TO BE BEAUTIFUL, young, healthy, and fit. There is no end to the diets, workouts, and health plans they can turn to in order to achieve these goals. Yet the most important diet of all has been overlooked. This is a diet that releases stress, relaxes muscles, offers sound sleep, diminishes appetite, and makes you look and feel youngera diet that brings you new friends, a happy work environment, good relationships, and adds years to your life. This is the diet from angerone of the worst plagues facing our nation.

Anger is a serious problem for one in every five Americans. Road rage, workplace violence, school shootings, domestic abuse, and addiction are just a few of its many expressions. The reason such a large number of our nations citizens are on antidepressants, suffer from alcohol and drug addiction, are overweight, in broken relationships, and involved in all kinds of destructive behavior can be directly traced back to the effects of anger, particularly the hidden kind.

It is well documented that anger strongly affects physical health and is directly related to heart attacks, high blood pressure, back pain, and many other physical disorders. When a symptom appears that is not the true cause of a problem, it is called symptom substitution.

We also turn our anger against ourselves in other ways. We become depressed or experience mood disorders, hopelessness, passive-aggressive behavior, promiscuity, domestic abuse, and many other forms of general misery. Sometimes anger converts itself into obsessive-compulsive disorders and individuals become unable to make decisions or choices about their lives.

Anger is ruthless in the course it takes, attacking and disrupting our body, mind, and spirit. As school and workplace shootings rise, the divorce rate climbs, and people are increasingly unable to deal with stresses such as those springing from 9/11 and other everyday threats, increasing numbers of people are on antidepressants. It is clear that anger is a societal problem that is only growing worse. It is time we paid attention to the number one terrorist we face: the anger we live with every day.

Society needs to address the problem of anger. We need a simple, clear-cut program that offers concrete psychological and spiritual tools for understanding and combating it. It is one thing to have an intellectual understanding of what is harmful. It is something else to know how to actually get rid of anger in your life. The Anger Diet will show you how.

The Anger Diet is a 30-day program that shows readers, day by day, how to let go of different forms of anger and replace it with healthy and constructive responses. Readers will receive a clear understanding of what anger is, how it works, when it appears, and why it camouflages itself and takes hold. They will also see the disastrous effects it has upon their lives and the lives of otherswhy it is so crucial to become anger-free.

The Anger Diet describes the 24 forms of anger and where they come from. The reader will learn how anger at your boss, anger at your spouse, anger at the government, and anger at yourself are all branches of one tree, growing from the same roots. The program shows how some people use anger as a defense, while others place anger at the core of their identity. The reader soon sees the toxicity of life lived with anger, and the joy of life without it.

The 30-day program offers day-to-day instructions and tips, along with practical techniques such as the Emergency Anger Technique, which teaches readers how to remain calm in the face of a storm.

Just as we work out daily in the gym to strengthen muscles and attain flexibility, readers can work out daily with the exercises in The Anger Diet to break harmful patterns. The exercises are simple and enjoyable, and readers will be able to see the fruits of their efforts immediately. Each day of the diet focuses on one form of anger that is to be given up that day, on what to replace it with, and on how to do it. Over the course of 30 days, the book systematically removes all the different forms of anger and replaces each one with an antidote. As we daily eliminate the toxicity anger places in our systems, the results will be reflected not only in our mental and emotional well-being but also in our environment and physical health. Eventually it will become impossible for anger to maintain the hold it now has on us.

Ultimately, it can be said that this is a book of forgivenessforgiveness of self, of others, of God, and of the universe. Scriptures of all the worlds religions enjoin us to be forgiving, but there is little actual instruction on how to accomplish this. Anger is the great impediment to forgiveness. When anger is rooted out, love and forgiveness arise naturally. Our lives and the lives of those around us then become hallowed and become all they are meant to be.