The 2 Words You Never, Ever Want To Say To An Angry Person

The last thing that most of us want to deal with is an angry person in our face. But chances are, sooner or later, it’s going to happen.

So what do we do? And, maybe more importantly, what shouldn’t we do?

Those are some of the questions that we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, the co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — recently posed to Ryan Martin, better know as the Anger Professor, to find out how to “do anger better.”

“You had a great tweet,” Michelson said during the conversation. “You said something like, ‘Never in the history of “calm downs” has “calm down” calmed down someone.’ So I’m guessing ‘calm down’ is not the thing you want to say.”

“I think ‘relax’ is even worse,” Punjabi added.

“No, ‘relax’ has never relaxed anyone,” agreed Martin, a psychology professor and an associate dean for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

“This is a case where… people are elevated and they’re not necessarily thinking as rationally, and they’re a little defensive. You’re not going to make as much progress with those sort of direct statements that you want to make,” he added. “Telling people to do things like ‘just breathe’ aren’t going to have much of an impact.”

Instead, modeling those actions yourself is going to be more effective.

“One of the things I think is funny is that often when people tell someone to ‘calm down,’ they yell it or they say it in a very loud, stern voice,” said Martin, the author of “How To Deal With Angry People” and “Why We Get Mad: How To Use Your Anger for Positive Change.”

“But if you actually back up a little bit and you start speaking softer than normal, you start to communicate in a little more gentle tone, people will