This page follows the anger control plan in SAMHSA's cognitive-behavioral anger management manual, written by Patrick Reilly and Michael Shopshire for a 12-week group program. It also mirrors the anger control plan in the VA's online Anger and Irritability Management Skills course, which sorts warning signs the same way. The worksheet here is an independent one built on their ideas; neither SAMHSA nor the VA made it, checked it or vouches for it.

A plan made at a two, for use at a seven

Anger rarely arrives at full volume. The manual describes an episode in three phases, a buildup, an explosion and an aftermath, and tracks the climb on an anger meter from 1, calm, to 10, the point where you lose control and pay for it later. Everything that helps happens below 10. The catch is that clear thinking gets harder as the meter climbs, so the moment to decide what you will do at a seven is a quiet Tuesday when you are at a two. That is all an anger management plan is: choices made early and written down where you will see them.

The window: four kinds of warning

The manual sorts the warning signs of anger, which it calls cues, into four groups, and each group gets a pane of glass here.

• Body: what your body does. A tight jaw, heat rising in your face, a heart that thumps.
• Actions: what you start doing. A voice that climbs, pacing, cutting someone off mid-sentence.
• Feelings: what sits under the anger, which the manual calls the primary feelings: fear, jealousy, feeling disrespected.
• Thoughts: what you tell yourself. “Here we go again.” “They did that on purpose.”

Put the signs you really notice into each pane, four at most, so the window reads at a glance in a hot moment. The sign that matters most is the one that shows up first, because it leaves you the most room to act. A warning that only appears at nine is one you rarely get to use.

The sign: a time-out with a way back

The manual calls the time-out the basic strategy that belongs in everyone's plan, and it describes a formal version. Everyone involved agrees on the rules ahead of time, anyone can call it, the person who calls it may leave, and that person comes back either to finish the discussion or to set it for later. The return is what makes it a time-out. Without one, the person you left is waiting with no idea when, or whether, the talk will pick up again.

So the sign on the knob asks for six things: your signal, where you go, how you cool down, when you'll be back, how you come back and your first words. The small print rules out driving, drinking and replaying the fight while you are out. The manual reports that people who express anger aggressively simply get better at being angry, and rehearsing your best comeback on the walk keeps the fight going in your head.

How this page works

Tap a suggestion or write your own into each pane, then fill the sign one line at a time. After a hard moment, mark it the same day: what set it off, how high it got on the meter, which sign came first, whether you stepped out and whether you came back. A mark made during a time-out stays open until you record how it ended.

Two readings grow from the marks. The window lights the pane that most often warns you first and names your earliest usable warning, along with how often you acted on it. The frame by the door draws a ring for every time-out, closed when you came back and broken when you didn't, and counts how many ended in a return.

What the evidence says, and what it doesn't

Structured anger treatment has a respectable record. A 2018 review of meta-analyses found that treatments for anger, most of them cognitive behavioral, have consistently shown at least moderate effects in both clinical and non-clinical groups, while results for reducing aggression are less consistent. Those findings describe whole programs. This page borrows two tools from one of them and has not been tested on its own. Filling it in is practice, not treatment.

When to use it, and when it isn't enough

Build the plan on a calm day, then walk the people you live with through the sign so the signal means the same thing to everyone. For the minutes you are out, Steady the Flame paces a slower breath. If the feelings pane keeps filling with hurt, The Anger Iceberg goes further into what sits underneath. Couples can agree on time-out rules together with Our Fair Fighting Rules.

If anger keeps costing you relationships, work or sleep, a licensed therapist or an anger management group can take this plan further with you. If it has turned into hitting, threats or someone at home being afraid of you, a time-out alone won't fix it. The National Domestic Violence Hotline takes calls from people on either side of that, including people worried about their own behavior: call 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788. When someone is in danger at this moment, call 911 first.