When Sam Parker was researching his book about one of our most maligned emotions, time and time again, family, friends and colleagues would say the same thing: “I don’t really get angry”. It was, perhaps, an unsurprising response. Of all our emotions, anger has a singularly bad rep. The preserve of ranting politicians, faceless trolls and dustups on public transport that go viral. Little wonder the rest of us might want to distance ourselves from it.

Parker, an editor at GQ, understood this instinct all too well. He didn’t think of himself as an angry person, either. But after years of feeling not quite right and trying all kinds of wellness tricks to rectify things, he landed on anger as the problem. Or rather, his lack of it. What was that all about?

His new book, Good Anger, begins with this question and then, through a quest for anger in himself and among the people pleasers and the bottlers up, he asks if there might be something more that we can do with this feeling than simply deny its existence. Below, he shares the ways we can be better when it comes to anger.

We think we know what anger looks like. It’s closing-time brawls and keyboard warriors. But this, Parker argues, is conflating anger with aggression, and often violence. In doing so we are missing an important point.

“Anger is a healthy, natural emotion,” he says. “Aggression is a behavioural choice we make – usually for the worse. In fact, losing your temper is better understood as a rejection of anger: it’s a sign we can’t tolerate the pain, disrespect or vulnerability it is pointing us towards.”

Once we get it clear in our minds that anger isn’t necessarily a bad thing, then we can consider putting it to good use.

It’s a tricky business, trying to harness anger for good when our instincts are either to resist it or let it all out in a temper tantrum. One thing that helped Parker was boxing. Spending his gym time hitting a punching bag allowed him to observe his anger in action.

“Good anger is when we take the really profound insights and energy anger offers us and act on it in a way that makes our situation better, not worse,” Parker says. “It’s the tricky line between repressing it, which is terrible for us, and losing our temper, which is usually terrible for someone else. Good anger is the third way. In emotional expression terms, sort of black-belt, ninja stuff – very difficult – but if I can get better at it, anyone can.”

You may already release anger in ways you don’t realise. That post-work run. The early morning journalling. You might even call it letting off steam. Parker suggests you dial into this stuff more directly, the way he leant into boxing, to understand the anger within himself.

“Often the body knows stuff your mind isn’t ready to see yet,” Parker says. “I had repressed anger trapped in my body for years: it manifested as teeth-grinding, leg shaking, all sorts of stuff. I tried boxing on a whim – I’ve never been in a fight in my life – and it helped me realise the body could be a tool to tap into anger in a healthy way.”

Whether it’s off-loading about an irritating colleague, or bad mouthing a bad manager in the pub after work, we can get pretty worked up about workplace issues. But this anger is telling us about something other than our teammate’s incompetence, Parker says.

“We lose so much time, energy and peace to unresolved anger at work,” he says. “In my experience, the majority of what our colleagues do to upset us boils down to one thing: we feel like they don’t respect us enough, which triggers all sorts of deep-rooted insecurities around self-worth, imposter syndrome and so on. Anger is the flare sent up by our unconscious to alert us to these problems.”

Instead of taking the anger home with us, we can learn to have direct conversations about it. “No one wants to tell a colleague, ‘You made me angry’,” Parker says. “But that conversation is almost always preferable to letting it ruin your weekend.”

If you’ve watched enough Couples Therapy, you’ll know the point where frustrations over who does the dishes boils over into a full-on row in front of the TV cameras. Tuning into your anger can allow you to understand what pushes your emotional buttons, and what buttons you push in your partner. This is valuable information for anyone in a relationship.

“Good anger in a relationship looks a lot like a calm, adult conversation, which is notoriously tricky when you’ve got the in-laws visiting any minute and one of you forgot to take the bins out,” Parker says. “But one useful way to get there is to have what I call ‘the anger chat’ upfront: a proactive conversation with your partner about your anger triggers and responses, which is like handing each other a map they can draw on the next time you fall out.”

That perhaps is the key takeaway here. You get angry and will again. It’s what you do with it that matters.