If anger is not restrained it is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury which provokes it.   Seneca.

"Anger feels likea green light. When you feel angry, your body's chemical plant is going into high speed, producing chemicals to charge you up. Epinephrin, norepinephrine, cortisol, and, for men, testosterone, course rapidly through your bloodstream, giving you a sensation of power and readying you to accelerate forward in an attack. Speech speeds up; voice volume increases. Attention concentrates on what someone is doing that bothers you.

"Given the energizing force of anger, how could the title of this chapter suggest that anger is not a green light but rather needs to be regarded as a stop sign? To keep your marriage safe, strong, and loving, you can learn that when either of you feels angry, that anger is a sign of some kind of difficulty. The best strategy when there is a difficulty in front of you is to stop. Stopping enables you to figure out what the difficulty is and what you might do to take care of it. Anger gives you a feeling of urgency. Maturity is the ability to delay acting to give yourself time first to think.

Anger springs up via a more rapid neurological route than the mental processing of more thoughtfully reasoned responses . For example, if you feel the sting of criticism implied in a comment from your spouse, your immediate angry retort would signify that your emotional superhighway has conducted an "Ouch!" message more rapidly than your thinking brain has been able to evaluate the comment. By contrast, if you are able to inhibit the impulse to strike back immediately, after another moment you might react quite a bit more calmly. You might chalk the insensitive remark up to your spouse being hungry before dinner, or overwhelmed by the noise of the children playing. Instead of angrily barking back, with this fuller understanding you might respond with a more tactful plan of action, e.g., "After dinner when we take a quiet walk together I'll ask what that comment was about."

In sum, angry feelings, like stop signs, are essential for alerting you to problems. Putting on the breaks enables your thinking to catch up with your feelings. Looking about you and dealing with whatever problem you see before you drive forward is the safest way to proceed.