Earlier this week, Gallup released new results from its Healthways poll that measures the well-being of Americans, in which it had once crowned Longview, Texas as officially the angriest city in America*.

Coping with anger in a happy place — say, Boulder, Colorado — is challenging enough. But what about in a town where almost one of every five people walking around says they're chronically angry?

We decided to call up Kerry Hagan, a marriage and family therapist in Longview (who, it just so happens, is also a longtime lawyer with a degree in theology, making him essentially a one-stop anger shop), to get some advice on how to cope and change:

Talk. My father was raised by a man who was not the best father. Everybody's dead now, so I can kind of talk about that. But I was four years old, and my mother saw the marks of my grandfather starting to appear in me. And she sat down with my dad, and she said, "Listen here. You are not going to raise these boys the way you were raised. So you're going to have to make some changes." So instead of being angry and whooping us and doing that sort of stuff, my father started talking. And my mother said, "When your father started talking, everything changed." When I got older, I asked him how he did that, and he said, "Every time I would look at you boys, I would, like, taste my mother's face on your face, and then I would interact you as if you were my mother" — who he loved very much. And so he would act towards us in a qualitatively more gentle and tender way, and it was magic, it was a magic elixir for our family.

At the same time, get quiet. Enough to ask some questions about your anger. I wonder why it is that, you know, having the underwear in the middle of the floor really causes me to just lose it? Why is that the thing that does it? And begin the process of trying to evaluate why you're having these emotional reactions.

Don't vomit your anger. We get this emotion that comes up, and what our psychological apparatus says is, Well, let's vent it on these particular people. And unfortunately, most of the time it's the people that are the closest to us, the people that we say we love. I'm not really big on the therapeutic idea of venting. Just screaming, expressing rage, or beating a doll, tree, or pillow seems sort of primitive. If we were still cavemen — then maybe so. But it seems to me that we need a better way of looking at anger and using it constructively. Venting misses all the creative, healing, loving ways that anger can be used.

Stay connected to some dirt. I tell people that one of the most fulfilling things I do is cutting and splitting firewood with a real splitting maul. There's something about seeing the axe go through the wood and seeing it split apart that is extremely fulfilling. I think it's because your mind, you brain is focused on a spot, and it's thinking, and then it's coordinating your muscles to hit that spot, so your brain and your muscles are kind of working together. I also do some skeet shooting. There's something about the disintegration of the little bird into clay dust that you say, Oh, man, that's sweet.

Also: Fish. It's hard to stay angry when you're fishing.

Really though, go outside. I worked in a residential treatment center for kids. They had some grounds there, and everyone would want to go for a nature walk. "Come on, Kerry, let's go for a nature walk!" "Take me for a nature walk!" And we'd go out, and you could see it just melt off of 'em. The land had a bridge, and we'd sit down on the bridge, and I wouldn't say a word. And they would say, "Well, you know... blah, blah, blah..." and I'd make some incredibly wise comment like, "Huh." And then they'd go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah..." and then I'd say something like, "Really?" And then they'd say, "Blah, blah, blah, blah..." and I'd go, "Man, that sucks." And they'd say, "Can we go back?" And we'd go back in. It was about them being in a setting that allowed them to get in touch with their own emotions, take their hard shells down, see who they really are, and then they would reorient themselves magically, and then come back into the world. Crazy how we're built.

As told to Nate Hopper.

Also, read a couple other how-tos on anger, from this week:

"How to Pray When You're Pissed at God"

"How to Fight Off a Band of Angry Sherpas on the Top of Mount Everest"

* After this article ran and caught the attention of Longview news outlets, Gallup released new data — data that was not available at the time this story was reported and published — to those outlets from its 2012 polling, which actually found Rockford, Illinois, to be the new angriest city in America. Longview was named the angriest city in 2010, though it is still listed on the Index's site as such. Gallup's 2012 polling did not receive a large enough sample size to find out how angry Longview was last year.

Nate Hopper Associate editor Nate Hopper is an associate editor for Esquire magazine.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io