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I mean exactly this.

Writing needs focus, to some extent. Even if you may fall into a state were words flow naturally on the keyboard almost without effort, you still have to reach that condition.

Being a very unstable, stressed out, and prone to anger person, I often find myself too upset, distracted or demotivated to write. I'd like to focus on anger in particular, since the demotivated side has been treated a lot on other questions.

How do you manage (if you do) to write when your mind is fuming about what happened during the day? Or what, maybe, is still happening? How do you manage to detatch from the things unnerving you, to find the necessary "private space" to write?

Honestly, if it's outright impossible to write due to overwhelming emotion, don't write. Wait until after the upset has passed. However, if you're upset, but yearning for creative expression, use that misery. I can't remember how many times I've harnessed depression and melancholy to evoke genuine pathos in my writing. Perhaps I'm approaching it from an overly artsy-fartsy perspective, but to me, emotions are the paintbrush of writing.

Writing is where I run to, from everything that upsets me. I read the last scene I've been writing, from the beginning, and by the end - I'm in that moment, I've found my focus, I can proceed from there.

Sometimes I channel frustration, anger, pain, disappointment into my writing: the story demands them all. But it is actually easier for me to write those emotions when I'm separated from them - when I can poke them and observe them, not when they threaten to overwhelm me. When they are not mine, even while being mine. I guess, in this way, writing helps me deal with stuff, though that is not a primary goal.

And if all else fails, I go and read a bit of a good book I've already read. Something to help me calm down, something to inspire me, but not something that would hook me. The Master and Margarita is a particularly good choice: it's about a writer, it serves as a great motivator to write.

I find that if I get myself to a private space and open a document, sometimes (and only sometimes) I can focus enough on the writing to forget to think about what I'm upset about. So it's really (for me) not about writing while I'm upset, but that writing becomes a distraction from being upset.