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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
Say the mismatch out loud when things are calm, so that it is understood before the next row rather than argued about during it. If you are the fast one, try not to treat the other person's slower settling as dragging it out. Going back an hour later to check they are all right repairs more than your own speed of recovery ever suggested was needed.
'Be tolerant and command what is right' (Quran 7:199). Tolerance includes giving someone the time they need to come down, which may be a good deal longer than yours.
الأعراف
خُذِ ٱلۡعَفۡوَ وَأۡمُرۡ بِٱلۡعُرۡفِ وَأَعۡرِضۡ عَنِ ٱلۡجَٰهِلِينَ
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people
Qur’an 7:199read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A quantitative meta-analysis of 23 imaging studies mapped the network involved in regulating emotion by thinking about it, an area where individual studies had not converged. It supports the idea that coming down from a feeling is an active process rather than a measure of how much someone cared. Nothing here compares recovery speeds between two partners, so that part is clinical observation.
Kohn N, Eickhoff SB, Scheller M, Laird AR, Fox PT, Habel U. (2014). Neural network of cognitive emotion regulation--an ALE meta-analysis and MACM analysis.. NeuroImage doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Two people can come down from the same argument at different speeds without either of them caring less.
Whatever the correction is, teach it before you need it. A routine the child already knows can be started with two words instead of a negotiation in front of everybody.
You may not get to be a calmer person any time soon. What can change quickly is what you do in the twenty minutes after you lose your temper, and that is the part people remember.
Sometimes the answer is not a better system. It is doing less, including giving up something you love, because what it costs you has stopped being affordable.