The Value of an Anger Thermometer

Anger is a subjective feeling that causes distress and leads you to behave in certain ways to try and relieve it. An anger thermometer is a visual self-awareness tool designed to help you explore, measure, and understand your angry feelings.

Its goal is to help you become aware of what you are feeling and take steps to develop healthy coping strategies and change your behavior. This can enable you to quantify your subjective feelings, name them, and describe their level and intensity in an objective way that eliminates misunderstandings.

Typically, an anger thermometer consists of a picture of a thermometer with numbers that gauge how angry you are and has labels connected to each number for you to write in your corresponding emotional status.

For instance, on an anger thermometer with ten degrees:

• Write the intensity of what you are feeling on a scale of one to ten, with one representing no anger and ten representing extreme rage
• Add a word for what you associate each level with, such as irritated, frustrated, annoyed, mad, or furious.
• List the accompanying warning signals your body sends you to let you know you are starting to get upset, such as shallow breathing, raised voice, becoming argumentative, clenched teeth, balled-up fists, body tension, or hot face.
• Add helpful coping strategies to shift your mood at each level, such as taking deep breaths, drinking water, counting to ten, grounding yourself using mindfulness, or engaging in intense physical activity.

Uses of an anger thermometer

An anger thermometer has many uses, such as helping you recognize and label what different levels of anger feel like, identify what triggers your anger, and become aware of its associated thoughts and behaviors.

This will help you recognize the connection between physical signals of anger and the intensity of your feelings, devise a coping plan, help guide your coping choices at each level, and enable you to assess the change in your level of anger before and after using a coping strategy. It also enables you to describe what you are feeling objectively so that others can understand and respond to it in a supportive manner.

Consistently using an anger thermometer will help you become conscious of what different levels of anger feel like in your body. Then you can connect thoughts, feelings, and actions; detect patterns of things that make you angry, how angry they make you feel, and what your triggers are. Understanding this will help you determine what you can do to feel better in different scenarios.

Armed with this information, you can better manage your anger by preparing for it in advance and planning what coping strategies you can use next time you are triggered to prevent it from getting too big to manage rather than give it a chance to escalate and elicit a knee-jerk reaction.

Types of anger thermometers

There are several types of anger thermometers to choose from, some designed specifically for children, adults, or teenagers. The following are examples of the most common ones.

3-point anger thermometer

The 3-point anger thermometer is a color-coded version that can include drawings of facial expressions and is tailored for preschool and early elementary-age children to help them visualize and be able to share what they are feeling inside.

One such uses a traffic light, where the color green is calm, yellow represents mild to moderate angry feelings, and red indicates very angry. Another version uses yellow, orange, and red faces to represent small, medium, and big angry feelings.

5-point anger thermometer

The 5-point anger thermometer, recommended for school-age children, has the numbers 1 through 5, colored blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. The child adds word descriptions to each number such as 1 – calm, 2 – annoyed, 3 – angry, 4 – frustrated, and 5 – furious, to help him or her expand his or her emotional vocabulary.

Another way the 5-point scale can be used is to emphasize the intensity of the feeling, such as 1 – not angry, 2 – a little angry, 3 – angry, 4 – very angry, and 5 – extremely angry, and drawing faces representing the expressions associated with each number.

10-point anger thermometer

The 10-point anger thermometer is designed for adults and teenagers. It has the numbers one through ten, with labels for them to add feeling words they find most meaningful to them to describe how each level makes them feel.

If you struggle with anger issues and would like to give this technique a try, please give us a call at Irvine Christian Counseling in California to set up an appointment with one of the faith-based counselors in Irvine.