@ the OP:
It may sound condescending but it's true - You're at the age where you have pretty little control and your emotions will run wild on occasion.
The trick is to positively work on the long, SLOW, TEDIOUS maturation process that everyone goes through. Growing up takes time and effort.
It's not a bad idea to have some values you try to live your life by, to help guide your decision making. Experience will shape how your emotions kick up when presented with a stimulus.
It may sound corny, but seriously, try to have a couple of personal values to aspire to. Help yourself develop into someone worthwhile, and not a jerk. Some good examples:
- Compassion
- Honesty
I will say that the key to anger management, particularly in adults, is not "having control". It's just plain and simple not getting angry in the first place. A mature and stable emotional state doesn't overreact, but instead reacts at a level that is equal to the situation a person is presented with. True anger is reserved for the situations that one (should) rarely experience - the death of a loved one and extreme breaches of society's rules tend to be good examples. There is little that can prepare someone for a proper emotional response to certain events in life, but plenty that can prepare someone for proper emotional responses to the small stuff.
Having emotional control lets you not make poor decisions when faced with extreme (and usually new) experiences. There may be some crazy thing that sparks RATIONAL emotion of some sort, but good emotional control doesn't let your actions get out of hand. Mature and emotional stability on the other hand is essentially not having an irrational emotional feeling to a stimulus.
The best thing you can do is recognize how silly it was to have such an extreme reaction to something that is meaningless in the first place. Learn from that situation, apply it to the future. I sure as heck bet you don't get angry at the color yellow, that's an equally silly thing to get angry at.
It's always worthwhile to, before saying or doing anything, ask yourself:
"Does this make me a jerk?"
If so, don't do it. You'd be surprised how many bad choices we all could avoid with this simple little tool.
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