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Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
The pattern is easy to see once you look for it. Things are fine while everything goes to plan, and the temper arrives the moment the plan does not hold. Trying to manage the anger itself tends to go nowhere. What helps is getting better at not knowing, in small doses, on purpose, starting with things that do not matter much.
Man was truly created anxious (Quran 70:19). Restlessness is described as part of the make of a person, and anger is one of the shapes it takes.
المعارج
۞إِنَّ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ خُلِقَ هَلُوعًا
Man was truly created anxious
Qur’an 70:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review across anxiety, depression, substance, eating and personality difficulties found that improvements in how people handled emotion went along with improvements in symptoms, which is why emotion regulation is treated as a shared target rather than something specific to one diagnosis. That supports working on the anxiety underneath rather than the anger on top. The review could not say which improvement came first.
Sloan E, Hall K, Moulding R, Bryce S, Mildred H, Staiger PK. (2017). Emotion regulation as a transdiagnostic treatment construct across anxiety, depression, substance, eating and borderline personality disorders: A systematic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The anger is doing the job of keeping the world predictable, so it settles as uncertainty becomes more bearable.
If the anxiety underneath is running your days, it is worth treating in its own right rather than managing as an anger problem.
Put a word to it while it is happening. Saying quietly that this is anger and it is climbing gives you something to hold that the bare feeling does not.
If you catch yourself saying you were teaching someone a lesson, ask what the lesson cost. Were you paid for the teaching, or are you the one still paying?
You are built to react before you have thought about it. That is why the intention you held this morning loses so easily to the moment itself.