Two very different people type this. One lost their temper once, badly, in front of somebody who mattered, and has been going over it since. The other has been told — more than once, by more than one person — and has come to find out whether the people telling them are right.
This is a short answer and not a diagnosis. The first useful fact is that there is no condition called anger issues: anger is not a disorder in its own right, it is an ordinary emotion assessed by what surrounds it. Four things decide whether it has become a problem, and none of them is how intense it feels from the inside.
What the question is actually asking
Frequency, size, recovery and consequence — roughly in that order of usefulness. A monthly flash that clears in four minutes and has never cost anything is a different object from a daily low burn that takes a day to come down. People assessing themselves almost always reach for intensity, which is the least informative of the four, because intensity is the part you can feel and consequence is the part everybody else can.
Capacity sets the threshold, and capacity moves. The same request is absorbed at ten in the morning and intolerable at seven in the evening, and nothing about the request has changed. This is the most common reason a person's anger looks like a character problem and behaves like a resource problem. The long version, with what actually sets the threshold, is in the piece on anger and depletion, and there is no point repeating the argument here.
There is frequently something underneath it. Anger is fast, energising and permitted in places where fear, hurt and humiliation are not, which makes it an efficient cover. Anger as a secondary emotion covers the idea and, usefully, where it has been overstated — not all anger is a mask, and people who are told it always is tend to stop trusting the version that is not.
The feeling is not the part with consequences. The next ten seconds are. Nothing about being angry needs fixing. The whole question lives in what happens between the surge and the sentence, which is also the encouraging part, because ten seconds is a far smaller target than an emotion.
Direction matters, and inward is not milder. Somebody who has never raised their voice and spends four hours a night prosecuting themselves has an anger problem at a different address. It frightens nobody, it is not harmless, and it stays invisible to everybody including the person, who is generally busy being proud of their self-control.
The line that is not about measurement
Part of this stops being a question about self-knowledge, and it is better said plainly than left in a footnote.
If the people around you have changed their behaviour to avoid your reaction — a partner who reads your face before saying something ordinary, a child who goes quiet when you come in, a flatmate who has stopped mentioning things — or if anything has been thrown, broken, blocked, grabbed or threatened, then the measuring stops and the help starts. Now, rather than after a period of trying harder privately. That is not a verdict on what kind of person you are. People arrive at that point by entirely ordinary routes, and the ones who get back out of it almost always do it with a professional and a structure rather than by resolve, because a plan made alone on a calm afternoon is made by somebody who will not be present at the moment it is needed.
The same page has to say the reverse, because a proportion of the people reading it are not the angry one. If what brought you here is fear of somebody else's anger — if you are checking whether your own reaction is the real problem, because that is the explanation you have been offered — that is a different conversation, and there are people whose job it is to have it. In the United States the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, free and around the clock, and you can text START to 88788 instead if a call would not be safe. In the UK the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free, also any hour. Neither asks you to have decided what to call the situation, or to be planning to leave it.
What to do
- Count consequences rather than incidents. Who has mentioned it, how many times, over what period, and whether anything changed afterwards. That list is the real answer to the question in the title and it takes four minutes to write.
- Write the sentence you said, not the feeling you had. The feeling always sounds proportionate in your own account of it. The sentence rarely does, and the distance between the two is the thing worth looking at.
- Ask one person to describe a particular instance, and do not correct them. Not a general question about whether you have a temper — one specific Tuesday, in their words. The urge to amend will be enormous and the entire value of the exercise is in not amending.
- Leave mid-sentence, out loud, and come back. I am going to stop talking and go outside for ten minutes is not avoidance and does not have to be delivered calmly. It has to be delivered before the next sentence.
- And treat it as treatable, because among the things people take to a therapist this one has an unusually good record. The work is typically short and structured rather than open-ended, and most of it goes on those ten seconds rather than on your childhood.
What it depends on
Which of the four dimensions is yours decides what the next month looks like. A low threshold with a fast recovery is an inputs problem: sleep, food, load, and warning the people you live with. A high threshold with a slow recovery is nearly the opposite — rare, large, and followed by two days of changed atmosphere in the house, which is where most of the harm actually sits. And a high consequence reading with everything else low means the arithmetic has answered the question already, whatever the frequency.
The check separates them for that reason, and the result is deliberately a set of readings rather than a label, because do I have anger issues is not a question any instrument can answer while the four numbers under it are. If what you have is the low-grade, weeks-long version with no explosions in it at all, that is a different page with a different list of causes.