Areas › Anger
Anger
Almost nobody wants to be the person who says the thing they cannot take back. The window between the surge and the words is short and it can be widened. That is most of what this area is about, along with the fear or hurt that anger is usually protecting.
What works for this
Anger control, with distress tolerance
Anger has a runway, and the earlier you step onto it the less force you need. The work is in the seconds before, not in the explosion, and it starts with the body rather than the thought.
One move, today
Name the first physical sign you get. Jaw, chest, hands, heat in the face. That sign is your only warning, and noticing it is the whole skill.
What matches
5 practicesPut four dots on a page, one at a time, and by the fourth you will see a square. Now try to point at the square. Your mind supplied it in under a second and never asked you first.
Keep the paper. It is a small undeniable demonstration that you make patterns as much as you find them. The next time you are certain what somebody…
Ask the question twice. What do you see, and what else do you see. What do you think, and what else do you think. The second one does all the work.
The second question takes for granted that another answer exists, so instead of defending the first you go looking. Used on yourself it works just as…
Light behaves like a particle in one experiment and like a wave in another, and physicists live with both. That is a good picture for two accounts of one event, and a picture is all it is.
Reaching for a big idea from physics can settle the room while proving nothing at all. Use it the way you would use a photograph: helpful for seeing,…
Not knowing what to make of something does not have to be an emergency. See if you can find it interesting instead, even for a moment.
Most of us treat confusion as a gap to be closed fast, and anger is one of the quickest ways to close it: decide they meant it, decide what it says…
Try putting a qualifier on the front of your strongest claims. In some ways this is true. In some ways it is not. In some ways I cannot tell from here.
Jain thinkers built a whole grammar out of that, seven careful ways of stating a thing, precisely so assertion stayed honest. Used well, a qualifier…