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Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
That description is more useful than a moral one, because attention is something you can practise and being a good person is not something you can practise directly. If you can shift where you are looking, quite literally, the grip loosens a little. Your hands, the floor, the window, then back to the person.
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people (Quran 7:199). Where attention goes is treated as something you decide, not something that merely happens to you.
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.
In a controlled comparison, children who practised a brief attention training exercise waited longer for a larger reward than children who did progressive muscle relaxation or nothing at all. Practising where attention goes changed what they could hold out for. It was a study in children using a waiting task, so it is suggestive for adults in conflict rather than direct evidence.
Murray J, Scott H, Connolly C, Wells A. (2018). The Attention Training Technique improves Children's ability to delay gratification: A controlled comparison with progressive relaxation.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Attention can be trained, so calling anger an attentional state gives you somewhere to work.
You can be in full control of what you do and still be burning inside. Calm is not the entry requirement.
Awareness runs a step behind the feeling. The work is not to stop anger arriving, it is to widen the gap between noticing it and acting on it.
Try sorting whatever passes through your mind into three: good for me, bad for me, or neither. That third option is real, and most of us forget it is there.