It is faster than you are

Ask anyone what happened and they will tell you about the other person. He said this. She did that again. The kettle. The tone.

Ask them what happened in their own body in the two seconds before they spoke, and almost nobody can answer. That is the part that got skipped, and it is the only part you have any say over.

Anger is quick. The appraisal, the surge and the words are close enough together that they feel like one event. They are not one event. There is a gap in there, and this whole course is about making that gap wide enough to stand in.

Ibn Qudamah al-Maqdisi set the same thing out in stages, eight centuries before anyone could measure any of it, in Mukhtasar Minhaj al-Qasidin.

وحقيقة الغضب: غليان دم القلب لطلب الانتقام، فمتى غضب الإنسان ثارت نار الغضب ثورانا يغلى به دم القلب، وينتشر بى العروق، ويرتفع إلى أعالي البدن، كما يرتفع الماء الذي يغلى في القدر، ولذلك يحمر الوجه والعين والبشرة

Our rendering, and it is a rendering rather than a published translation: the reality of anger is the boiling of the blood of the heart in search of revenge; when a person becomes angry the fire of anger surges so that the blood of the heart boils with it, and spreads through the veins, and rises to the upper parts of the body, as water rises when it boils in a pot, and that is why the face and the eyes and the skin redden.

Read it for the order rather than for the physiology. The reddening arrives at the end of a chain that has parts. What you experience as one instant was being described as a sequence a very long time ago.