Don't Pop Your Top: 5 Thoughts to Keep You Calm in an Angry Moment Even when anger takes over your brain, your inner Hulk can stay restrained.

There are 10 or so moments in my career that make me wince when I think of them, and all but one involve a flash of anger. (The other one: an autocorrect in an email to my boss that turned an innocuous thought into "I lift you.") There isn't one moment at work in which I let my temper flare up that I don't wish I could take back. Uncontrolled anger is always a mistake. It's always regrettable. And it always reveals you to be weak even as you attempt to seem strong.

But you know this.

The problem is that when anger floods your head, the sticky note on your brain that says don't let your temper show can go up in flames. So, here, with a lot of help from Deanna Geddes of Temple University, whose research focuses on anger and emotion in the workplace, I offer a list of five things to think about in the five to 10 seconds in which your sense of "felt anger" (as the psychologists put it) threatens to become expressed anger.