Someone is angry at you. Maybe it’s a customer leaning over the counter, a partner who’s been simmering since breakfast, or a manager whose email arrived in capital letters. Your heart speeds up, your face gets hot, and two bad options start shouting in your head: fight back or fold.
There’s a third option, and it’s learnable. You can’t control another person’s temper, but you can control your body, your words and your next move. That’s usually enough to change where the conversation goes.
This guide picks up where our earlier piece on how to deal with angry people left off. It’s built around one specific, uncomfortable situation: the anger is pointed at you. The 30 steps run in the order you’ll need them, from staying safe, to calming yourself, to understanding them, to repairing what’s broken, and finally to looking after yourself once it’s over.
1. Check that you’re safe before anything else
Every other tip on this list assumes the situation is a conversation. Sometimes it isn’t.
The British Retail Consortium’s Crime Report, published in February 2026, counted about 1,600 incidents of violence and abuse against UK retail workers every day in 2024/25. That was down from roughly 2,000 a day the year before, yet still the second-highest level the BRC has recorded, and far above the 455 a day seen before the pandemic. Physical violence barely moved at 118 incidents a day, and 36 a day involved a weapon. These are UK retail figures, so they don’t describe every workplace or home. They do show that “angry” can tip into “dangerous” faster than most of us expect.
The logic is simple. If someone is too close, blocking an exit or holding something they could throw, your communication skills are irrelevant until the distance changes. Step back out of arm’s reach. Keep a counter, desk or table between you. At home, move toward a room with a way out rather than a bathroom or a kitchen full of knives.
Your move: before you say a single calming word, glance at the door.
2. Get backup early, and don’t wait until it’s bad
People often hesitate to call a manager, security or a friend because they think the situation “isn’t serious enough yet.” UK safety regulators disagree. The Health and Safety Executive’s guidance for workers says employers’ duties cover violence and aggression at work, and that this includes verbal abuse as well as physical attacks. It tells workers to report incidents to their employer and to raise ongoing worries with a manager, a union rep or a health and safety representative.
In other words, being shouted at is already something your workplace is supposed to deal with. Asking for help doesn’t make you weak or dramatic. It’s the procedure.
Picture this: you’re at a help desk and a customer’s voice keeps rising. You catch a colleague’s eye and say, “Could you stay with me for a minute?” Nothing confrontational has happened. You’ve simply made sure you’re not alone if it does. Learn your workplace’s code word or call button now, while you’re calm, so you’re not hunting for it mid-shout.
3. Slow your exhale before you speak
Your body reacts to anger aimed at you as if it were a threat, because in a way it is. That stress response makes your first words fast, sharp and defensive.
A small randomized study from Clemson University offers a quick counterweight. June Pilcher and colleagues, writing in Anxiety, Stress & Coping in May 2025, assigned 139 undergraduates to one brief session of slow-paced breathing with a longer exhale, or to a mind-wandering control task. The breathing group’s stress dropped and their mood improved, and they did better on a working-memory test afterward. The authors called the mood and stress benefit temporary: stress climbed again in both groups after the demanding task. So treat this as a quick reset, not a cure.
That’s exactly what you need, though. A longer exhale is one of the few things you can do invisibly while someone is talking at you.
Start small: breathe in through your nose for a count of four and out for a count of six, two or three times, before you answer. Nobody will notice. You will.
4. Be the thermostat, not the thermometer
A thermometer reflects the temperature of the room. A thermostat sets it. When someone raises their voice and you raise yours, you’re acting like a thermometer, and the room gets hotter.
This isn’t only a nice image. The National Policing Institute, summarising current de-escalation practice in November 2025, lists keeping calm body language and tone among the core techniques officers are trained to use, alongside active listening and creating distance. If professionals who face the angriest people in society are taught to lower their voice on purpose, it’s probably worth doing in your kitchen.
Where the analogy breaks down: you can’t actually set the other person’s temperature. A thermostat controls the whole house; you only control your half. Some people will stay loud no matter what you do. Your calm still matters, because it stops you from adding fuel.
Speak a little slower and a little lower than feels natural. Relax your hands. Stand slightly side-on instead of squared up.
5. Don’t “blow off steam” back at them
When someone yells at you, there’s a strong pull to give it back. It feels honest. It feels fair. And folk wisdom says letting your anger out is healthy.
The evidence says otherwise. In a 2024 meta-analysis in Clinical Psychology Review, Sophie Kjærvik and Brad Bushman of Ohio State University pooled 154 studies with 10,189 participants. Activities that raise arousal, such as venting, did not reliably reduce anger and sometimes increased it. Activities that bring arousal down, like slow breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, mindfulness and taking a time-out, did reduce it. Bushman summed it up bluntly: there’s no good evidence behind the idea that venting works.
Most of those studies looked at people managing their own anger, not at arguments between two people. Still, the mechanism transfers neatly. Snapping back is venting with an audience, and it raises the arousal of both of you.
A quick experiment: the next time you feel the urge to fire back, clench and release your fists slowly three times instead. It’s a tiny version of muscle relaxation, and it buys you a few seconds of thinking time.
6. Remember that most anger walks in before you do
It’s natural to assume you caused the anger in front of you. Often you’re just where it landed.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the World’s Emotional Health report found that in 2025, 23% of adults surveyed in 140 countries and areas said they had felt anger during a lot of the previous day. That figure has risen four points since 2006. In the same data, 36% reported a lot of stress and 38% a lot of worry.
| Emotion felt “a lot of the previous day” (2025, adults worldwide) | Share |
|---|---|
| Worry | 38% |
| Stress | 36% |
| Anger | 23% |
Source: Gallup, State of the World’s Emotional Health, 2026 report.
Roughly one in four adults is walking around with a lot of anger on any given day. Some of it will spill onto whoever is nearest: the cashier, the call-centre agent, the partner who forgot the milk.
This doesn’t mean you’re never at fault. It means the size of the reaction may have little to do with the size of your mistake. Try saying to yourself, “This is big for them today, and I’m only part of why.” It keeps your sense of proportion intact.
7. Talk to yourself by name
Self-talk usually runs in the first person: “Why am I being treated like this?” A small switch, using your own name or “you,” can make it easier to step back.
In a study published in Scientific Reports in late 2025, Kathryn Schertz, Ethan Kross and colleagues tracked 208 adults with phone surveys five times a day for two weeks, close to 13,000 check-ins in all. People used this “distanced” self-talk in only about 15% of situations, compared with about 43% for the usual “I” version. When people were preparing what to do or say, distanced self-talk predicted a small lift in positive emotion at the next check-in. It didn’t help in every situation; for self-criticism or simply trying to feel better, the two styles came out about even.
That’s correlational and modest, so don’t expect miracles. But “preparing what to say” describes the moment before you answer an angry person almost perfectly.
The mechanism is easy to picture. Using your name makes you think about yourself a bit the way you’d think about a friend, and you’re usually wiser about a friend’s problems than your own. Silently: “Okay, Anna. You don’t need to win this. What does Anna need to say next?”
8. Call a time-out the right way
Sometimes the only sensible move is to stop. Couples researchers John and Julie Gottman call the state that makes talking pointless “flooding”: your body shifts into fight-or-flight, and you can no longer hear or speak accurately. In an interview with Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine in January 2024, Julie Gottman offered a rough gauge: a heart rate above 100 beats per minute, or around 85 if you’re very athletic.
The Gottmans are specific about how to pause. Say “I’m flooded and I need a break,” or “I think we’re getting flooded.” Never tell the other person they are flooded, because that lands as an accusation. Then say when you’ll come back, so the break doesn’t feel like abandonment. They suggest roughly 20 to 30 minutes, and no more than 24 hours. During the break, do something that genuinely takes your mind off the fight, rather than rehearsing your rebuttal.
Say you’re arguing with your sister about who looks after your dad this weekend. “I’m getting too worked up to be fair to you. Can we pick this up at eight?” is a time-out. Walking out mid-sentence is not.
Next time, do this: agree on your time-out phrase with the people you’re closest to before you need it.
9. Name the anger out loud
It sounds backwards. Someone is furious, and you point out that they’re furious? Yet putting a name to it often lowers the temperature, because it shows you’ve noticed.
Ohio State researchers Cinthia Benitez, Kristen Howard and Jennifer Cheavens tested this in 2020 across three experiments with 307 undergraduates. Each participant described a real event that had made them angry. Listeners responded either with validation, using lines such as “Of course you’d be angry about that,” or with invalidation. Validated participants kept their positive emotions, and their mood recovered to where it started. Invalidated participants’ positive emotions dropped. Interestingly, the two groups didn’t differ on negative emotions, so validation seems to protect the good feelings more than it erases the bad ones.
Acknowledging anger is not the same as agreeing with it. You can say “You’re clearly really frustrated about this” and still disagree with every point that follows. If you’d like more practice reading emotions like this, our guide to improving your emotional intelligence covers the basics.
10. Never say “calm down”
“Calm down” is perhaps the most reliable way to make an angry person angrier. Here’s why it backfires, step by step.
First, it tells the other person that their reaction is the problem, not whatever caused it. Second, it implies you’re judging their feelings as illegitimate. Third, a person who feels dismissed has to prove the feeling was justified, so they escalate. You’ve turned a complaint about the issue into a fight about whether they’re allowed to be upset.
The validation research in the previous step points the same way: when listeners dismissed the anger people described, positive emotions fell and mood didn’t recover. “Relax,” “you’re overreacting,” “it’s not a big deal” and a raised palm all do the same job as “calm down,” just more politely.
Your move: swap the instruction for an observation. “This has really got to you” invites them to explain. “Calm down” invites them to argue.
11. Listen like you’re trying to learn, not win
While someone is angry at you, it’s tempting to listen just long enough to find the flaw in what they’re saying. They can usually tell.
High-quality listening, meaning attentive, understanding and non-judgmental, changes how the speaker responds to you. In a June 2025 paper in Media and Communication, Guy Itzchakov and colleagues ran three studies with 1,389 participants about conversations with someone from the opposing political party. High-quality listening consistently made speakers more open toward the person they disagreed with, though it didn’t change their political views. Two of the three studies used recalled or imagined conversations rather than live ones, so the effect in a heated real-life row may be smaller.
That limitation is actually reassuring. Listening doesn’t require you to change anyone’s mind. It lowers their guard, which is all you need at this stage.
Give it a go: keep your eyes on them, put your phone face down, and stop planning your reply. If you need help with the basics, our guide on how to have a good conversation with anyone is a good starting point.
12. Loop back what you heard
Listening well is invisible unless you prove it. Journalist Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict, describes a technique she learned from mediator Gary Friedman called “looping for understanding.” In a 2021 Greater Good interview, she broke it into three moves: boil down what matters most to the other person into plain words, say it back, and ask, with real curiosity, whether you got it right. Then accept the correction if you didn’t.
Ripley’s observation is that people who feel heard tend to soften. They speak with more nuance and become more willing to hear things they didn’t want to hear. Even a wrong guess helps, because it prompts them to explain further.
Picture this: your flatmate is angry about the bills. Looping sounds like, “So the problem isn’t really the money, it’s that you feel you’re always the one chasing it. Is that right?” If they say, “No, it’s that you promised and didn’t,” you’ve learned something useful, and they’ve watched you try.
Keep your loop shorter than what they said, and don’t sneak a rebuttal into it.
13. Ask one calm, specific question
Anger tends to come out in sweeping statements: “You always do this.” “Nobody here cares.” Arguing with a generalisation is hopeless, because there’s always another example.
A specific question changes the shape of the conversation. It invites the other person to move from feeling to describing. Describing takes a slower kind of thinking, and that slower thinking tends to cool things down. It also gives you something concrete you can actually fix. “Always” can’t be repaired. “The last three deliveries arrived late” can.
Say you’re a team lead and a colleague snaps, “This project is a disaster.” You could defend the project. Or you could ask, “Which part is causing you the most trouble right now?” One opens a debate. The other opens a to-do list.
Test it this week: pick one question you can use in almost any heated moment, such as “What would have to happen for this to feel fixed?” Our article on how to argue without fighting has more phrases like this.
14. Do the perspective-taking for both of you
Expecting an angry person to see your side right now is usually a waste of breath. They may genuinely not be able to.
In a set of six experiments published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2019, Jeremy Yip and Maurice Schweitzer found that anger reduced people’s ability to take another person’s perspective, making them more self-focused. Even anger from an unrelated source had this effect. In one task, angry participants scheduling a call with a client in California wrote the times in their own time zone. The authors linked this to anger’s high arousal, which crowds out the slower thinking that perspective-taking needs.
That’s an older study, but its practical point is useful: if their perspective-taking is temporarily switched off, someone has to do it, and that someone is you. Ask yourself what they’re afraid of, what they’ve lost, or what they expected that didn’t happen. Schweitzer also suggests naming where anger comes from before making decisions, which is worth applying to your own anger too.
People who never seem able to see another view are a separate challenge; our piece on dealing with people who always think they’re right covers that.
15. When it’s your boss, remember they’re under pressure too
Anger from a manager hits harder because they hold power over your pay, your schedule and your reputation.
It may help to know how common angry days are at that level. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, published in April 2026, found that 22% of employees worldwide said they felt anger during a lot of the previous day in 2025. Among managers, that rose to 25%, compared with 21% for individual contributors.
None of that excuses a boss who yells. But it changes how you respond. A manager who’s angry is often under pressure from above and is pushing it down to you. If you treat the outburst as information about their pressure, you can address the real problem: “It sounds like the deadline moved. What does the client need first?”
Keep your tone level and your answers short and factual while they’re heated. Follow up in writing afterward with what you agreed. If the anger is constant, personal or humiliating, that’s no longer a bad day; it’s a pattern worth documenting and taking to HR. For the other side of this relationship, see our guide on how to be a good boss.
16. Talk about impact, not your intentions
When someone is angry at you, your first instinct is to explain what you meant. “I didn’t mean to ignore you, I was just busy.” It feels like clarifying. To them, it sounds like changing the subject.
Here’s the chain of cause and effect. The other person is dealing with the consequences of what happened. When you lead with your intentions, you move the focus from their experience to your character. They now have to either accept your excuse or argue that you’re a worse person than you think, and that’s a harder, more personal fight than the original one.
Leading with impact does the opposite. It shows you understand what it cost them.
Say you forgot to send a colleague the figures they needed for a presentation. “I meant to send them, but my inbox was chaos” is about you. “You walked into that meeting without the numbers, and that put you in an awful spot” is about them. Your intentions can come later, briefly, once they feel understood. Many people never need to hear them at all.
17. Drop the “but” from your apology
“I’m sorry, but…” is not an apology. It’s a defence that starts politely.
New York University professors David Glasgow and Kenji Yoshino made this point in a 2023 piece for CNBC Make It, later quoted in a June 2025 CNBC article on apologies. Opening with “I’m sorry, but” lets you avoid taking responsibility and hints that the same harm could happen again. They also warn against the conditional “if,” as in “I’m sorry if you were upset,” which quietly suggests the problem is the other person’s feelings.
Everything after “but” tends to erase what came before it. The listener hears the excuse and forgets the apology.
A quick experiment: write down the apology you’d normally give, then cross out “but” and everything after it. Read what’s left. If it sounds thin, add what you’ll do differently rather than why it happened. If you need to explain, put it in a separate sentence, after the apology has landed, and only if they ask.
18. Own your part in one clear sentence
If you did contribute to the problem, the single most important thing you can say is that it was your fault.
Roy Lewicki, Beth Polin and Robert Lount tested this with 755 people across two studies, published in 2016 in Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. They looked at six elements of an apology: regret, explanation, acknowledgment of responsibility, repentance, an offer of repair and a request for forgiveness. Acknowledging responsibility came out as the most effective, an offer of repair came second, and asking for forgiveness was the least useful. Participants were reading written apologies in a hypothetical workplace scenario, so tone of voice and sincerity weren’t tested.
Polin repeated the point in a June 2025 CNBC interview, using the example of someone late to work who blames the traffic. The stronger version, she said, admits they should have checked the roads before setting off.
Give it a go: find the one sentence that starts with “I” and names what you did. “I booked the wrong date.” “I spoke to you sharply in front of everyone.” Say it first, plainly, and then stop talking for a moment.
19. Offer a fix they can say yes or no to
An apology tells someone you understand. A fix shows them. That’s why an offer of repair ranked second in the Lewicki study from the previous step.
The cause-and-effect here is practical. Anger is often a response to feeling stuck: something is broken, and the other person can’t see how it gets fixed. A concrete offer gives them back some control, because now they have a choice to make instead of a grievance to carry.
Make your offer specific enough to accept or reject. “I’ll make it up to you” is vague and easy to dismiss. “I’ll redo the report tonight and have it on your desk by nine” can actually happen.
Say your child’s ball went through a neighbour’s window. “I can have someone replace it on Thursday, or you can use your own glazier and send me the bill” gives them two real options. If they want something different, you’ve at least started negotiating about solutions instead of feelings.
20. Ask what would make it right for them
Sometimes your fix isn’t the fix they need. Asking openly can feel risky, but it’s often the quickest route to an ending.
Think of it like a restaurant that keeps sending the same dish back to a customer who didn’t want it. Remaking it with more care won’t help. At some point the waiter has to ask what they’d actually like. The analogy holds in that people often want something smaller or different than you’d guess: an acknowledgment, a deadline, a promise about next time. It breaks down because a conversation isn’t a menu. You don’t have to accept every request, and some will be unreasonable.
It also links back to what researchers like Polin call repair: doing the work that restores trust, which is hard to do if you’re guessing what that work is.
Here’s a simple way in: “If my suggestion doesn’t work for you, what would you like to see happen?” If their answer is more than you can give, make a counteroffer rather than a refusal. “I can’t cover the whole carpet, but I’ll pay for the living room.”
21. Thank them as well as apologise
When an angry customer finally accepts a solution, most people end with another apology. A thank-you can work better.
In a series of experiments published in the Journal of Marketing in 2020, Yanfen You, Xiaojing Yang, Lili Wang and Xiaoyan Deng compared service providers who said “sorry” after a failure with those who said “thank you,” as in “thank you for your patience” rather than “sorry for the wait.” Appreciation generally led to higher satisfaction. The researchers traced this to self-esteem: thanking people highlights their patience instead of your failure, which makes them feel better about themselves. The effect had limits. For serious failures, appreciation only worked when paired with practical compensation, and the advantage disappeared when the message came before the failure.
That’s a marketing study about customers, and it’s several years old, so apply it with judgment. It’s probably wrong for a deep personal hurt. For everyday friction, though, the shift is easy.
At the end of a tense exchange that’s been resolved, try “Thanks for bearing with me while we sorted that out.” It closes the conversation on their good behaviour, not your mistake.
22. Draw a hard line at threats and insults
Being on the receiving end of someone’s anger is one thing. Being abused is another. You’re allowed to tell the difference out loud.
Customer-facing workers deal with this a lot. A survey of more than 1,000 workers by the UK’s Institute of Customer Service, reported in August 2025, found that 43% had experienced customer hostility in the previous six months. Of those who faced verbal hostility, 21% had also been threatened with physical violence, the highest share the Institute had recorded. And 37% of customer service workers said they were considering leaving their jobs because of aggressive behaviour. The HSE guidance mentioned earlier treats verbal abuse as part of workplace violence too.
A boundary isn’t a counterattack. It describes what you’ll do, not what they must do. Keep it calm and brief: “I want to help, and I can’t do that while I’m being sworn at. If it continues, I’ll end this call.” Then follow through. Boundaries that aren’t enforced teach people they’re optional.
It takes nerve the first few times. Our guide on how to be more courageous can help you practise acting despite the fear.
23. Practise de-escalation like a skill, because it is one
Most people assume staying calm under fire is a personality trait. Training programmes in policing suggest it’s at least partly learnable.
In Tempe, Arizona, researchers led by Michael White evaluated a de-escalation course for police officers. An earlier evaluation found trained officers were more likely to use de-escalation and procedural justice techniques, and a 2025 follow-up found they were 58% less likely to injure community members, according to a November 2025 summary by the National Policing Institute. The picture isn’t uniformly positive. A randomized trial of a different programme in Virginia Beach, released as a working paper by Kyle McLean and colleagues in 2025, found officers’ interpersonal skills improved, but the overall frequency of force didn’t change.
The fair conclusion is that training reliably changes how people talk in tense moments, even if it doesn’t fix everything else. That’s the part you need.
You don’t need a police academy. Pick two or three phrases from this list, such as your time-out line, your loop and your boundary, and say them aloud until they feel natural. Under stress you fall back on what you’ve rehearsed, not what you’ve read.
24. Don’t pass the anger on to the next person
Anger is contagious. Someone snaps at you, you snap at a colleague, they’re short with a customer, and by lunchtime half the building is in a mood.
The scale of everyday rudeness is striking. The Society for Human Resource Management’s Civility Index for the first quarter of 2025, based on a survey of 1,587 US workers in January 2025, estimated that American workers collectively experienced or witnessed about 208 million acts of incivility a day. And 71% agreed their manager could have done more to prevent incivility at work.
Here’s how the chain works. Being treated badly leaves you aroused and on edge. You look for somewhere to put that energy, and the safest-feeling target is usually someone with less power than the person who upset you. So the anger rolls downhill. Each person who absorbs it without passing it on breaks the chain.
Next time, do this: after a hostile interaction, take five minutes before your next conversation. Walk, breathe, drink some water. Then go and be nice to someone on purpose.
25. Pick a better time for round two
If the first conversation didn’t resolve things, when you have the second one matters. Tiredness is one of the worst times to try.
A large 2024 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, led by Cara Palmer and Joanne Bower, pooled 154 experimental studies with more than 5,000 participants spanning five decades. Every form of sleep loss they examined (staying up all night, getting less sleep, or having broken sleep) reduced positive mood and increased anxiety. Results for negative emotions such as anger were more mixed and depended on the type of sleep loss, so it’s fair to say exhaustion makes people less resilient, not that it reliably makes them angrier. The studies used healthy volunteers in controlled settings.
The Gottmans’ rule of returning within 24 hours from step 8 still applies. Just aim for the good part of that window.
Test it this week: before restarting a difficult conversation, check the old H.A.L.T. list. Is either of you hungry, angry, lonely or tired? If so, eat, rest or wait. If the fight is keeping you up at night, our guide on how to stop overthinking at night may help.
26. Bring in a neutral third party when you’re stuck
Some conflicts don’t resolve between two people, however skilled they are. Bringing someone else in isn’t failure. At work in Britain, talking it through with a manager is already the most common way people handle conflict.
A study by the National Centre for Social Research for Acas, Britain’s workplace conciliation service, surveyed 4,558 people of working age in August and September 2025. It found that 44% had experienced conflict at work in the previous 12 months, the highest level ever recorded in a survey of British workers. Of those, 57% said it had caused them stress, anxiety or depression. Here’s how people tried to resolve it (they could pick more than one):
| How workers dealt with conflict (Acas, 2025) | Share of those in conflict |
|---|---|
| Discussion with their line manager | 45% |
| Informal talk with the other person | 30% |
| Discussion with HR | 13% |
| Formal grievance or complaint | 9% |
| Workplace mediation with a trained mediator | 2% |
| Took no action | 19% |
Source: Acas, “How prevalent is individual conflict at work in Great Britain in 2025?”, November 2025.
Notice how rarely people used trained mediation, and how many did nothing at all. A neutral person changes the dynamic because neither side has to back down to the other directly. At home, that might be a family therapist or a trusted mutual friend. At work, start with your manager or HR.
27. Let their anger cool without chasing it
Even after a good conversation, the other person may still be upset. That’s not a sign you failed. Bodies take time to come down from anger.
The Gottmans’ advice on breaks reflects this. They suggest at least 20 minutes, and Julie Gottman explained in the same Greater Good interview that if you don’t genuinely soothe yourself, your body keeps processing the stress hormones instead of clearing them. The same logic applies to the other person after your conversation ends. If you keep checking in, asking “Are we okay now?”, you keep reminding them of the conflict and restart the process.
The cause and effect runs like this: chasing reassurance keeps the topic alive; leaving space lets it fade; a calm, low-key normal interaction later (“Want a coffee?”) shows the relationship is still intact without forcing a verdict.
Deep hurts, such as feeling betrayed, can take days or weeks. You can’t hurry that. What you can do is accept that their timeline isn’t yours, which is the core of radical acceptance.
28. Know when it isn’t anger, it’s abuse
Everything above assumes you’re dealing with ordinary anger: unpleasant, but not dangerous or controlling. Sometimes anger is part of something much more serious.
The World Health Organization’s November 2025 report, covering data from 168 countries collected between 2000 and 2023, estimated that nearly one in three women worldwide, about 840 million, have experienced partner or sexual violence in their lifetime. In the previous 12 months alone, 316 million women, or 11% of those aged 15 and over, had experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner. Men experience abuse too, although this report focused on women.
If you’re often afraid of someone’s anger, change how you behave to avoid setting them off, or they threaten, monitor or isolate you, none of the communication tips here are your job to perfect. Calm listening doesn’t fix abuse. The NHS lists specialist services, including Refuge, Women’s Aid and Respect’s Men’s Advice Line, for people dealing with violence or threats in a relationship. Outside the UK, local domestic abuse hotlines offer the same kind of help. In immediate danger, call emergency services.
Our article on how to know it’s time to end a relationship covers some of the warning signs.
29. Look after yourself afterwards
When the confrontation ends, your body doesn’t immediately get the message. You might feel shaky, wired or oddly exhausted hours later.
Think of it as an emotional hangover. A sprinter doesn’t finish a race and sit straight down at a desk; they walk it off, drink water and let their heart rate settle. The analogy holds because a confrontation triggers a real physical stress response that takes time to clear. It breaks down in one important way: a race is over when you cross the line, but a confrontation can replay in your head for days, which keeps the stress going.
The toll isn’t trivial. In the Institute of Customer Service’s 2025 survey, 26% of workers who had experienced abuse had taken time off work because of it, an average of eight days of sick leave.
Give yourself a proper wind-down. Tell someone you trust what happened, briefly, instead of rehearsing it alone. Do something physical and gentle. If the evening is hard, our evening wind-down routine and our guide on how to turn a bad day around have ideas you can use straight away.
30. Get professional support when it’s a pattern
If the same person is angry at you again and again, or you keep ending up in the same argument, the problem may be bigger than any single conversation.
The NHS guidance on anger, last reviewed in August 2026, says that if anger is affecting your life and self-help isn’t working, a GP can refer you to an anger management programme or counselling. These programmes usually combine one-to-one counselling with group work, most include cognitive behavioural therapy, and they can last from a single day to a couple of months. In England you can also refer yourself directly to NHS talking therapies without seeing a GP first. If you go private, the NHS suggests checking the therapist is registered with a professional body such as the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
This applies both ways. The angry person may benefit from help managing their temper. You may benefit from help with how you respond, or with deciding whether the relationship is worth the cost. Couples and family therapists exist precisely for situations where two people can’t break a loop on their own. If it’s a family relationship you want to protect, our guide to keeping family relationships strong is a good companion.
What to do when you slip
You will get this wrong sometimes. You’ll snap back, say “calm down,” or defend your intentions when you meant to talk about impact. Everyone does.
How you treat yourself afterward makes a real difference to what happens next. In a 2012 series of experiments in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen of the University of California, Berkeley, found that people who were encouraged to respond to their own mistakes with self-compassion became more motivated to improve. In one experiment, participants who recalled a recent moral lapse and responded with self-compassion were more motivated to make amends and avoid repeating it than those in a self-esteem or control condition. It’s an older, lab-based study with students, so treat it as a strong hint rather than a guarantee.
Beating yourself up feels responsible. It mostly makes you defensive, and defensiveness is exactly what you were trying to avoid.
So when you slip:
- Notice it without a verdict. “I raised my voice there” is enough. “I’m terrible at this” isn’t useful.
- Go back and repair. A short “I got heated earlier, and I’m sorry. Can we try again?” often achieves more than a perfect first attempt would have.
- Pick one step from this list to practise next time, not all 30.
If the harsh inner voice is loud, our guide on how to stop hating yourself goes deeper.
Conclusion
Dealing with someone who’s angry at you comes down to a few moves done in the right order. Make sure you’re safe. Calm your own body. Listen until they feel heard. Own what’s yours and offer something concrete. Hold a line when anger turns into abuse. Then look after yourself.
You won’t use all 30 steps in one conversation. Choose the two or three that would have helped most in your last difficult moment and practise them before the next one. They’ll be there when you need them.
For more practical, research-based guides to handling hard situations and growing through them, explore our Self Improvement section.
