Why think about the consequences fails

It is the most common advice given and it is not stupid advice. It just arrives at the wrong address.

Thinking about consequences needs the slow, comparing part of you, and that is exactly the part that goes offline as arousal climbs. So the advice is available at eleven in the morning when you are calm, and it is gone at the moment it is needed. People conclude from this that they lack self control. What they lack is a cue early enough to use anything at all.

This is not a modern finding. Al-Ghazali says it in one line in the Ihya, and Ibn Qudamah repeats it in Mukhtasar Minhaj al-Qasidin.

فإن الغضب إذا هاج لم يكف مجرد العلم والورع في قمعه ما لم يكن في الطبع قبوله بحسن الخلق

Our rendering: for when anger surges, mere knowledge and scrupulousness do not suffice to suppress it, unless the nature has received it through good character.

Ibn Qudamah then says why the advice cannot even be heard.

واعلم: أنه متى قويت نار الغضب والتهبت، أعمت صاحبها، وأصمته عن كل موعظة، لأن الغضب يرتفع إلى الدماغ، فيغطى على معادن الفكر، وربما تعدى إلى معادن الحس، فتظلم عينه حتى لا يرى بعينه، وتسود الدنيا في وجهه

Our rendering: know that when the fire of anger becomes strong and blazes, it blinds its possessor and deafens him to every admonition, because anger rises to the brain and covers over the sources of thought, and it may pass on to the sources of sense, so that his eye darkens until he cannot see with it, and the world blackens before his face.

Deafens him to every admonition is the exact thing. The advice about consequences is not wrong. It is inaudible. And the narrowing of vision that the last two steps described is in there too, in a book about the diseases of the heart.

That is why five of the six lessons here are about what happens before, and only one is about the moment itself.