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Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Smaller amygdala volume has been linked with aggression in some samples, and eight weeks of mindfulness practice has also been linked with volume change. Set side by side they settle nothing about a single life. What actually shapes your next fortnight is what you practise, who is around you, and how much sleep you are getting.
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty (Quran 17:11). Haste applies to the conclusions we reach about ourselves, not only to what we say when provoked.
الإسراء
وَيَدۡعُ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ بِٱلشَّرِّ دُعَآءَهُۥ بِٱلۡخَيۡرِۖ وَكَانَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ عَجُولࣰ ا
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty
Qur’an 17:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The best known meta analysis of self control pooled 83 studies and found that exerting self control on one task left people worse at controlling themselves on the next, and later work has questioned how large and how robust that effect really is. Even a famous, much repeated finding can shrink when it is looked at again. That is reason enough to hold any single result about your brain lightly.
Hagger MS, Wood C, Stiff C, Chatzisarantis NL. (2010). Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: a meta-analysis.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Group averages describe crowds, and you are not a crowd.
Say the difficult sentence out loud, on your feet, in something like the real conditions. Thinking it through in your head is a different skill from getting it out of your mouth when your pulse is up.
Learn a new practice in that order: the picture of what it is, then the plain steps, then actually doing it. Knowing what is coming settles most of the resistance before it starts.
If a river on a summer afternoon does nothing for you, use something plainer. Counting the traffic from a porch, or standing outside a shop counting how many people walk past, does the same job.