1Four steps you can do in ten seconds in the middle of anything: stop, take one breath, look at what is actually happening, then carry on.
It fits inside an argument, a shopping queue, the second before you send a message you will regret. The value is not the breath itself, it is the gap. You have put a moment between what happened and what you do about it. Practise it a few times when nothing is going wrong, so that it is there when something is.
Islamic evidence
remember your Lord inwardly, in all humility and awe (Quran 7:205). An inward turn nobody else can see is treated as real practice, which is exactly what a ten second pause is.
“[Prophet], remember your Lord inwardly, in all humility and awe, without raising your voice, in the mornings and in the evenings- do not be one of the heedless”
Qur'an 7:205
Psychological evidence
Pooling 306 experiments, a meta-analysis of emotion regulation found that strategies changing what you attend to, or how you read a situation, worked better than trying to suppress a feeling once it had arrived. The looking step is doing the first kind of work rather than the second. That review pooled laboratory tasks, so it supports the principle rather than this particular four step sequence.
Webb TL, Miles E, Sheeran P. (2012). Psychological bulletin · doi
Review detail
Why it works. A short pause is enough to let something other than the first impulse arrive.