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Anger is bad for the body. Studies have long linked this maddening emotion with high blood pressure, increased heart rate, soaring stress hormones, and decreased immune system response. Stress can also lead to lack of sleep and unhealthy habits, like smoking, drinking, and poor eating practices.

The experts at the spa destination Canyon Ranch say the best anger solution is not to express or repress the feeling but to create less of it.

Say you're driving to an appointment, you're short on time, and the driver ahead of you is making slow progress, causing you to get caught behind several red lights. It would be easy to get angry because driving is depersonalized -- we're indifferent to other drivers' needs because we don't know them. Practicing empathy, though, can prevent anger from unfolding. Try to imagine the other driver as someone you know and love. It might just make it easier to understand the reasons for the drivers' actions.

Read on for a calming five-step strategy for defusing anger.

My son is adopted. While he is kind, incredibly smart, athletic, and way too funny for words, there are some traits which don't come naturally for him. He has little to no empathy for others and doesn't have much compassion either. His lack of those traits comes directly from his birth mom's bad choices while pregnant with him and the traumas and inconsistencies he endured during his first 10 years of life. (I adopted him shortly after his 10th birthday). Teaching him to be empathetic and compassionate is a part of my everyday life. I take every example I can to point out others' emotions in an effort to have him start recognizing others' feelings. It's something that will likely take years and years to teach and will probably never be a natural, instinctive reaction for my son. He has a heart of gold, though... I just have to help learn to bring that out more often.

So I was happy to read this article which states that kindness and compassion can be taught through meditation. People who practice meditation with a focus in those areas actually experience changes in the area of the brain which promotes those traits. The study involved 16 monks and practitioners who had meditated for at least 10,000 hours in their lifetime and 16 novices who had only recently been taught meditation. Those who have meditated more had increased brain response to introduced noises (such as a woman crying).

While it's obviously unrealistic for the average Joe to meditate more than 10,000 hours, I think the finding that areas of the brain can be retrained to be more compassionate is very interesting.

Watching another person being touched engages the same part of your brain as actual touch, a new study reveals. This, according to researchers, is how we understand what others are feeling -- which means, essentially, that it's the root of human empathy.

Scientists discovered this connection by studying people who experience a kind of extreme empathy, called mirror-touch synesthesia. When those with this condition see another person being touched, their brain is engaged (like most of us) -- but the difference is that they actually feel a tactile sensation -- just as if they had received physical contact.

While the condition is thought to be very rare, doctors say nearly everyone experiences a watered-down version of it when we witness an injury, and flinch. It's thought that by studying this extreme form of a common gut reaction, doctors will be able to understand what causes the emotional component of empathy.