I pay attention to the secondary stuff. When I get road rage, I imediately stop and look to see what's making me anxious, what I feel "powerless" about. I don't get road rage "normally" so I'm keyed to see that particular "different" behavior in me. Sometimes it takes awhile but, over time, I can now sometimes get it with just a single thought instead of a really really obnoxious action (cutting someone off, "racing" against someone, not letting someone merge or trying to get in front of them to get off the highway before they can go by, etc.).

But extreme anger with action is usually not my way of being so when I called a grocery store manager, for example, and cussed him out and then was thinking about it and realized there wasn't a whole lot he could have done to prevent the problem and some of the problem was my fault and my whole reaction was "extreme" for the degree of the problem, etc. I then get interested in seeing what's "really" going on, what happened somewhere else usually, to set me off.

But I think that's one of the things emotions are "for" is to clue us in? Out-of-place emotions or those stronger than usual serve me as flags that there's something going on somewhere else I need to attend to.